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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

#621

Post by kbar13 »

awllau wrote: post #552
apparent wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full quote: > When entrepreneurs walk into the offices of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a big American venture-capital firm, the odds these days are that their startups are using AI models made in China. “I’d say 80% chance [they are] using a Chinese open-source model,” says Martin Casado, a partner at a16z. This is very different from what the author portrays. It may be the case that many pre-funded startups are u…

Casado says he was misquoted and walked this back: https://x.com/martin_casado/status/1990462245541982546 "Well, not quite. I'd say 20-30% use open source. Of those I'd say 80% use Chinese based models. So closer to 16-24%." Reads pretty differently.

yeah and the gap between "use open source" and "use open source as their primary model" is probably p large

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

#622

Post by 4gotunameagain »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #610
js2 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are going to be illegal, you might as well use library genesis and get DRM free ebooks :)

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

#623

Post by gulmothrowaway »

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 do agree that Chinese open-source models are going to play a bigger and bigger role in the entire ecosystem moving forward, but I don't agree with you in the sense that they are going to eventually "win."

Just because they are cheapp doesn't mean they automatically win. You've picked a lot of great examples, but there is still a little bit of cherry-picking.

One clear outlier is the iPhone, which coexists with Android globally. Even though the iPhone is the leader in the US, and globally Android has the majority of the smartphone market share, they still cater to different price points and different ecosystems, and generally the iPhone has better margins.

i believe American frontier models like from Anthropic and OpenAI are still going to thrive, and coexist with Chinese models. They are just going to cater to different customers and different use cases.

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

#624

Post by [deleted] »

brap wrote: post #410
jrflo wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, this is the classic VC playbook and people should really know better. They use capital to undercut competitors on cost to gain market share, then slowly crank up the costs until they are (hopefully) profitable. It makes 0 sense long-term to spend tens of millions on training a frontier model and releasing it for free for someone else to host on their GPUs. It is naive to believe that when the capital starts to…

> I'd expect them to shift to a model where Chinese models are hosted on Chinese infra. You assume these Chinese companies need to make a profit. Nothing is really private in China, nothing that truly grants power, anyway. CCP can just write off these loses as defense budget, which they basically are. I bet that, all things considered, training 10 new Chinese frontier models costs _significantly_ less than a single m…

[deleted]

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

#625

Post by hintymad »

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…

> - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products.

I agree with the lesson too. Just to be precise, wouldn't the current model war be more akin to open-source office suite versus MS office suite? If so, then the cheaper option didn't really win. That said, the open-source alternatives didn't really feel the same as MS Office, and it took them a long time to reach the feature parity (or did they ever?). In contrast, the open-weights models are getting close enough to the SOTA models, and users can easily switch from one to another without feeling any difference for mojority of the tasks.

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

#626

Post by porksoda »

muldvarp wrote: post #561
Glyptodon wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Evolution is really slow as you say. It even stops moving at all without selecting pressure.

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

#627

Post by ericmay »

derangedHorse wrote: post #612
ericmay wrote: post #404

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. 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 bo…

Sure and to complete your analogy here, the rich schools realize that the curriculum they develop and put a lot of time and money into creating is just used by the cheap schools, so they stop developing it because nobody loses money for long and so neither the rich or cheap schools develop any new curriculum.

Now what?

The fundamental problem here is incentives and tactics. Either the models are actually better (which I think the iPhone to cheap Android phone really speaks to, i.e. they do the same thing but one is 50x better at 5x-10x the cost) and thus they can be gate kept and like the iPhone the vast majority of profits go to a select few with high end implementations. OR the models aren't actually that much better, companies lose a fortune and then nobody can create any better commercial models or build out scale needed for open source models because it's not profitable.

We could wind up with only open-source models or something along those lines, but if the compute and scale is needed to train the models, nobody will be able to do that profitably and so AI research is either gate kept and silo'd for something like military applications or it just doesn't really happen because there's no funding for this scale of build out.

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

#628

Post by jaggederest »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #553
ralfd wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cant you in this case point out that obviously it is an old twxt and there is no copyright?

I once tried to ask it for an example of a particular twisty situation in Latin grammar, and try what I might it kept hallucinating false citations while ignoring my instructions for longer quotes that would likely have prevented the problem. But I guess avoiding lawsuits from the estates of Cicero and Livy is more important.

Really puts Disney in perspective. Imagine if there were a holding company running around suing people for referencing Catullus.

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

#629

Post by htlemur_bobby »

citizenpaul wrote: post #509
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 live in SV. When I was at the grocery store last year I overheard a group of lawyers talking about their progress on litigation against AI companies and how they need more SWE help to progress. I'd say that they have valid concerns about being cagey on the copyright stuff despite the obvious hypocrisy of it. Stealing IP is effectively legal in China so they don't really have the same concerns.

To us Americans we have been trained to view it that way but honestly it is simply copying, and because intellectual property is literally a make believe concept, it’s actually a competitive advantage for china that they don’t have invented IP.

I respect IP laws and don’t violate them but the law of unintended consequences applies. I think IP is ultimately a net loss for a society because it incentivizes addictive behaviors instead of actual value for society.

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

#630

Post by mrdevlar »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #263
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…

At least China is being consistent: they do not give a single f*ck about intellectual property or copyright…but they also give away all this distilled knowledge away for free. I’m not an American so I don’t particularly like the idea of giving an American cartel of AI companies having so much power over this technology. I don’t necessarily buy into the “China bad”, “they are communists” and all that BS either. I will…

This is proof that America has forgot it's own history.

America was founded by men who hated intellectual property, who stole and smuggled the plans and expertise for textile machinery out of the United Kingdom. A gross intellectual property violation. Why? Because they were being exploited by that system. The UK was using the American colonies for raw material and keeping the machinery in the UK for finished goods.

That's the rub, intellectual property is only valuable if you're winning, if you're the exploiter. China never gave a fuck because they, much like the American forefathers, saw a system of exploitation and went "no, thanks".

AI is the culmination of all human knowledge, the idea that anyone could own that is obscene. American AI companies that are trying to horde this are getting exactly what they deserve by being undercut by China on this.

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