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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

#611

Post by Danox »

davkan wrote: post #481
elictronic wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They resisted the idea because it did kill their legacy business. Kodaks peak was 16 billion in revenue in 1996. The digital camera market will be approaching that level of value inflation adjusted around 2030. 35 years to get back to status quo. Putting a bullet in a golden goose is often considered a bad idea. Everyone is happy they are dead, but if you can't understand why they might try to keep the corpse alive y…

Kodak was definitely mismanaged in many ways but you are correct in your analysis. If they had pivoted hard to digital they could have been what today? Nikon? Fujifilm? These are known brands that are bigger than Kodak is today but they are nothing compared to what Kodak was. At its peak Kodak was one of the (the?) most well known brands on the entire planet. Anywhere in the world if someone snapped a photo Kodak was…

Kodak, like Xerox had it all under one roof their management at the time turned their back on the future…

IBM was the same way, ironically, the fourth Yankee clipper company had to be dragged into using two types of glasses sitting on the shelf that were patented/created in the early 1960s, both of which later became known as gorilla glass. Steve Jobs had to call them (Corning) multiple times to get them to finally let him use it on the iPhone. Imagine if Steve had contracted out to some other glass company in the far east?

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

#612

Post by derangedHorse »

ericmay wrote: post #404
gpt5 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. With open source projects, the benefit was that each individual could improve the complex system (e.g. Linux Kernel) interpedently, and over time the benefit…

> The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. Right... and there are two problems with this: 1. Eventually the capabilities of closed-weight models will just vastly outstrip open-weight models if the u…

Imagine there’s a school where all the kids there are being tutored by the best. Also imagine a bunch of neighboring schools drastically falling behind that would need insane amounts of money to keep up.

This becomes a problem because all the kids from the rich school will dominate the order schools. They’ll get even more money as time goes on from their kids paying it forward to the point where all other kids are bound to work for them.

Now let’s say one other school does have the money for best tutors, BUT they know they’ll run out pretty quickly. Instead of trying to compete in a losing game, they decide to give every school in the world access to their elite lesson plan. Now, for a time, everyone will be on close to a level playing field. If the other schools improve upon their own lesson plans and keep sharing them with others, one day the elite school will wake up to find they are no longer on top. The parents have started to move their kids to other schools because the rich school is no longer attractive at the high cost they charge students

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

#613

Post by _aavaa_ »

xandrius wrote: post #363
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…

What's interesting/funny is that the American LLM companies took from the public domain and copyrighted work to close all that content into a box they charge for. Then the Chinese took the distilled stuff out from that box and released it into the world for everyone.

Doctorow keeps saying it of all the tech companies: every pirate wants to be an admiral.

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

#614

Post by aenis »

Their pace makes me wonder how effectively do frontier labs protect their weights against motivated, capable adversaries. By now the value of something like Mythos is well in double digit billions, and more so in strategic advantage.

Considering the hosting happens across many providers, and many geographies, as does training, I wonder how airtight the CC tech really is to prevent, I don't know, key extraction from the secure enclave of the GPUs. This requires physical access and cutting edge techniques, but this is also the absolute cutting edge of secrets-worth-stealing.

I'd not be surprised if the distillation attacks via API were a smokescreen to theft of actual weights. Long shot, but given the motivations, and the general weird state of US AI labs. I'd not surprise me.

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

#615

Post by orangecat »

kmaitreys wrote: post #427
raincole wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except cloud services won over local-first apps. > Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) doing I'm not even sure in 10-15 years whether we're still going to have consumer PCs, or PCs at all.

I have similar thoughts. To those who feel on the contrary, I would genuinely like to understand why average consumer won't be priced out of hardware? The silicon industry is already quite centralised. Everywhere we already see the concept of ownership disappearing. It's quite difficult for me to visualise a non-dystopian future where our PCs are just mere screens and every compute happens on a remote cloud, owned by…

It's quite difficult for me to visualise a non-dystopian future where our PCs are just mere screens and every compute happens on a remote cloud, owned by some corporation, charging you subscription fees to even add and multiply numbers.

I'm actually kind of surprised that hasn't happened by now even ignoring AI. Governments and marketers would love to be able to spy on literally everything you do, the copyright cartels would finally achieve their fantasy of full control over all hardware, and there really are benefits that it could offer to users (zero-effort backups, transparent access from anywhere, cost savings from dynamically switching from a single core for emails to many cores and a fast GPU for gaming).

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

#616

Post by VeninVidiaVicii »

jbm wrote: post #451
hyperbovine wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try instructing Codex to (say) fine-tune a language model based on a collection of books you've got saved. You will find yourself admonished, repeatedly and at length, not to utilize copyrighted materials to train language models, by an AI who owes its entire existence to that very act. These models might be smart but they're not close to being able to savor irony.

I was a little radicalized when ChatGPT literally refused to translate parts of 1000+ year old religious texts and told me it was due to copyright concerns.

Yep. I was trying to put together some literature from authors who were imprisoned in the Bastille, and had a similar experience, which was absolutely infuriating.

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

#617

Post by spunker540 »

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 explain what you mean by this? I thought all of their insane profitability and returns are from crazy margins on their GPUs. I know they started/partnered/invested in some data center businesses, but I thought they were fledgling

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

#620

Post by asadotzler »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #34

AI models cost tens of millions to train. Offering them for free won’t justify the upfront costs. The Chinese model of model training/open sourcing only makes sense in the context of the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins.

The upfront costs are actually a lot higher, but still absolutely trivial in the big picture. OpenAI pulled in $120,000,000,000 in one round of fundraising and they're closing in on $200,000,000,000 total. Even at 1 billion dollars, new frontier model training is only 0.5% of what they've raised.
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