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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

#601

Post by tomtheelder »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #479
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 Not in SaaS which is what LLMs are. You can get VMs for much cheaper than AWS, Microsoft, and Google offer them but large companies (and startups) are happy to pay a premium for the support, reputation, and reliability that they perceive those companies as offering. Same thing for some of the managed database providers who are effectively selling a very heavily marked up version of…

> Fable is probably at least as good as the average software engineer and costs $50/wk on the max plan vs a software engineer who would cost closer to $4000 a week.

That's because the max plans are _massively_ subsidized. At API pricing the kind of usage to replace the value of a SWE is going to be way, WAY more than $50/wk. Orders of magnitude more. And to remain a frontier model org that kind of pricing has to continue in perpetuity.

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

#602

Post by idontwantthis »

Danox wrote: post #528
idontwantthis wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also confused by this point. The American government could force OpenAI and Anthropic to open their models, but then they would instantly evaporate, right? It doesn't seem like a choice that they can make, so framing it as a "winning" strategy doesn't make any sense to me. In what world could those companies have existed and opened their models?

They could, but they don’t have to. The Chinese have beaten them to it, and the rest of the world will benefit from it and the circle will be complete once the models get a little bit faster/smaller and the localized hardware does the same and it will, it is inevitable. The one thing that is sort of ironic or bad is that between Russia and the Ukraine there’s a large number of mathematically inclined people that if i…

But I still don't get it. Like China could be come the world's leading producer of chocolate...if they started giving away chocolate for free. Would we be having this conversation saying that Switzerland lost because they were greedy and protectionist and didn't decide to give away their chocolate for free first (I realize Switzerland probably isn't actually the world's top producer of chocolate).

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

#603

Post by nradov »

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…

More efficient AI is possible in principle but when the next breakthrough arrives there's no guarantee that it can be implemented on current hardware architectures. Something fundamentally different may be needed, as different from current GPU/TPU chips as they are from regular CPU/FPU chips.

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

#604

Post by dolebirchwood »

zer00eyz wrote: post #494
bijowo1676 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in case of chatgpt/anthropic, the LLM model simply represents the hypocrisy of their owners

You miss spelled the word stupidity. Anthropic is, in particular, bent about safety. The problem is they are concerned about yesterday's threats. The models that are out, and can be run locally, already open a pandoras box of concerns that we will never be able to put back.

> miss spelled

Good one.

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

#605

Post by muldvarp »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #259
chermi wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dario's PR strategy is one of the most confusing things I've ever witnessed.

Most of the AI hate largely springs from Dario popping up everywhere with threats of mass unemployment Like what am I supposed to do if AI is going to take my job?

You're not the target audience of his attempts at advertising. Your employer is. So, to answer your question: Dario does not care.

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

#606

Post by reddit_clone »

pixl97 wrote: post #402
api wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of why I can't feel bad for them. The training data is mostly pirated. Whining about Chinese labs training off American frontier models is "waaah you pirated my pirated stuff!" The tech itself is amazing and fascinating and cool, but the industry is a mass piracy operation.

"Stop pilfering what I rightfully stole!"

Legitimate Salvage !

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

#607

Post by taftster »

elictronic wrote: post #285
seanc wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're NVIDIA then open-weight models are a classic example of commoditizing your complements; cheaper models mean more people buying GPU's to run them. [1] Your guess is as good as mine for China though. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

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.

Could you put that in units of HP Printers and Toner please?

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

#609

Post by infamouscow »

Varelion wrote: post #200

I do not understand the logic going into these companies. Flagrantly violate all IP in Human history, essentially claiming domain over the heritage of Humanity... And... Try to privatize it? When the technology -- and data -- are both public domain to begin with? It is ming-boggling stupidity. If there is talk of bailouts as the dust settles, there it would just be further evidence the system is ethically, financiall…

I don't think there will be any bailouts for these AI companies. There's no political will to do so in both parties. The grizzly alternative is a DeFlock movement, but instead of cutting down poles, it will be people's heads.

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

#610

Post by TehCorwiz »

js2 wrote: post #586
TehCorwiz wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Claude to build a complete data extraction pipeline for a popular current best seller book series: audiobook -> text (via whisper) -> local LLM (qwen) -> database. Not once did it seem to acknowledge or care about copyright. It even used knowledge it already had about the books to exclude certain ones before beginning since the character I was interested in did not appear in those. It definitely had context of…

Why would you go from audiobook to text? Is there no epub available?

Not without DRM. It was easier to buy the audiobooks and use the analog loophole to get text. It's probably less accurate, but for what I'm doing it was fine. Names were the worst, but whisper at least made the same mistake each time so a simple search+replace handled most of the obvious edge cases.
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