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China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

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Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#561

Post by muldvarp »

Glyptodon wrote: post #424
geophile wrote: post #352

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge mar…

I think this is all true, but that unlike with Moore's law and improved PC tooling and capabilities, we also have essentially existing biological evidence that there should be a way to create much better intelligent systems in terms of training, memory, and efficiency. With classic PC evolution we didn't even have that evidence but still could make a relatively strong inference (Moore's law). But here we basically ha…

The existing biological evidence took billions of years of evolution to get to the state it's at. So it may not just take research and discovery but also enormous computing power.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#562

Post by SwellJoe »

geophile wrote: post #352

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge mar…

"I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) running models doing pretty much anything that frontier models can do right now."

I don't think it'll take 10-15 years. Gemma 4 31B in the 4-bit QAT is competitive with the frontier of less than three years ago and runs on any high-end 32GB gaming PC GPU or a large-ish Mac.

The question is whether the frontier will continue to get better at a rate that allows it to stay ahead of the two curves of availability of consumer hardware big enough to run somewhat larger models and the capability of small models to compete with large ones. When the bottom falls out and GPUs/RAM becomes affordable again, the size of what normal people have on their desk will trend quite a bit larger than today.

I think there's a future not too far from now, where a 120B model with really good reasoning and a large context, but limited knowledge (necessitated by being small, you can't fit the world's knowledge in 100 gigabytes), can substitute for a frontier model on almost any task, just by giving it access to web search and documentation for the thing you're trying to do. A 256GB unified memory machine with sufficient memory bandwidth would comfortably run that 120B model.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#563

Post by chatmasta »

geophile wrote: post #352

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge mar…

Training cost is actually not that high — it’s fixed and amortizable across the lifetime of the model. Inference is expensive, and open weights don’t solve that problem — in fact, they might even encourage it, since a high cost of entry means consumers will pay for inference directly from the labs anyway.

Unfortunately it seems likely the winner will be the cloud providers. If anyone can run inference on open models, then profit will flow to the vendors who can afford the capital to run them. That’s the CSPs.

(It’s basically the same business model as pharmaceutical R&D, but the major difference is that nobody has even talked about patenting the models like a pharmaceutical company patents each new drug. I’m surprised about that, tbh — why give all the leverage to the cloud platforms? They aren’t training frontier models…)

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#564

Post by sidereal1 »

realusername wrote: post #467
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, OpenAI and Anthropic say the Chinese models are only as good because they distill their models. How true is that. I am sure it adds something. But is it more like a marginal 1% improvement or something really significant?

I also don't believe it, if it was as easy as that, we would have hundreds of competitors. The truth that Anthropic and OpenAI will not say, is that these Chinese labs have a lot of talented people.

I think this also maps cleanly on the American blueprint of enshitification. Facebook took off by cleanly integrating and siphoning from Myspace so users could get the best of both on Facebook. Once Facebook took over the market they locked it up tight so no competitor could do the same.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#565

Post by dalenw »

rlt wrote: post #558
geophile wrote: post #352

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge mar…

> free and low-end eventually wins Apple, the world's second most valuable company, seems like a counterexample.

Apple is free and low end given the context of what was being produced and sold to businesses decades ago.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#566

Post by SecretDreams »

overgard wrote: post #237

I do think open-weights models are going to "win" in the sense that they're probably going to be dominant when the hardware to run them becomes affordable. (which might be a while). Although I guess you could probably rent the GPU's yourself to hypothetically save on costs. (I'm a little skeptical -- I've heard of companies doing this and the inference bills are surprisingly high -- assuming the sources are correct.…

> Is it just a direct play to undercut the US providers because they view them as a threat?

It's China putting pressure on a financing strategy in the US that was always a house of cards. It could also be China democratizing something that should have ALWAYS been democratized. Maybe both when the history books on this get written and absorbed by the winners of the LLM wars.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#567

Post by simianwords »

geophile wrote: post #352

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge mar…

umm do Mac vs pc and Iphone vs android

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#568

Post by hungryhobbit »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #416
geophile wrote: post #352

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge mar…

Another important thing that made software usage and education available for most of the world was piracy. I remember as a kid growing up in a developing country, any software (windows, office, Visual Basic, flash, dreamweaver, etc.) was less than 1$. That allowed me to try out and learn so many things on my own without paying a huge amount of money for the license. And I think this is true for most of the software d…

Piracy created AI.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#569

Post by foo12bar »

geophile wrote: post #352

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge mar…

A counterpoint would be all are chip fabs are in Taiwan right now due to huge investment. And there are lower end chip fabs around the world, but they have not cracked the major market.

Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

#570

Post by SecretDreams »

bee_rider wrote: post #314
elictronic wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia selling more GPU's at the cost of it's datacenter business is pretty close to Kodak selling digital cameras at the cost of film. The data center side is so bloated anything that eats into it is a huge negative. Their data center business brings in 20x the gpu market. Local open weight models will be what pops the bubble and China will do anything in it's power to enable that pop.

I wonder what the thinking inside NVIDIA is at the moment. They have countless examples to learn from here, about the danger of not being willing to cannibalize your high end products. But, of course, there’s a reason that there are lots of examples of this sort of failure. There’s plenty of competition that would be happy to attack them from below, though…

Make money while there's money to be made then pivot to the next scheme?

Gaming > Bitcoin > LLMs > Robotics

Jensen's job is to just be one step ahead of the market dynamics to keep the investor dollars flowing.

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