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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

#631

Post by asadotzler »

elictronic wrote: post #374
hintymad wrote: post #325

I wonder how Chinese companies can make their models so much cheaper than the US companies. I'm not sure government subsidies are the answer. Subsidizing a single company with a few billion dollars, maybe. Subsidizing at least three companies with 10s of billions of dollars annually? Do we have proof of that? I assume we can't pin it on the lower cost of engineers in China, either. The top engineers are not that chea…

Why wouldn't they? They subsidized their EV industry with 230 billion dollars over the last 14 years. Solar was before that with about 17 billion. The US puts about 0.4% of GDP towards various subsidies, China is around 4%. This isn't about cost of engineering, it's money thrown at industries directly to boost them. The us provides tax incentives. China just gives you subsidized loans to the businesses they choose to…

The US subsidized its EV industry with about $120B over the last 15 years, and that's what they gave out despite congress expecting $300B in their reporting just a few years ago. So, it's not like China threw hundreds of billions at EVs while the US left it all to GM and Ford to solve.

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

#632

Post by mrdevlar »

ethagnawl wrote: post #356
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…

Oh, come on, don't be a decelerationist. We're supposed to just ignore that aspect of our Brave New World. Don't think too hard about the unparalleled resource consumption, either. AGI will alleviate any and all of these concerns ... soon. In the very near future, we'll all be getting UBI, Gemini will know how many Rs there are in "strawberry" and we can spend our days creating the next generation of art to feed the…

Hey guys I found one, this guy thinks Machine Jesus is going to save him.

I'm trying to figure out if my advice to you should be to do more drugs or less. I am uncertain, perhaps I'll ask an AI.

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

#633

Post by spwa4 »

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.

Legal in the US too, obviously, just as long as you're the richest person in the courtroom. ChatGPT knows the full text of Harry Potter, word for word. Hence, ChatGPT is a reproduction of that book and many others (it even knows the chapters of my book, and only got 2 words wrong in the introduction if you can still get it to repro it)

This was illegal when they did it, that didn't matter.

Then it was made legal specifically for these companies.

Unless you're a sucker ("consumer") IP theft is perfectly legal in the US.

It's even worse. Steamboat willie, plus all the stolen Disney characters (Peter Pan, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Elsa and Anna, it's essentially all of them, including some of the music even) are all in the public domain[1]. Go ahead, ask ChatGPT to make a picture of them. Publish your own version, because obviously making a version of Sleeping Beauty/Cinderella/Rapunzel based on the same source material will be pretty damn close to the Disney versions, and see if you get away with it in court. You know, with the law obviously on your side but the money not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_animated_films_...

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

#634

Post by [deleted] »

spicymaki wrote: post #546
jbm wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I asked Gemini to generate a picture of Peter Pan and Wendy (for a workbook I am putting together for youth summer reading) and it preceded to refuse due to copyright. Not everything about that work is owned by Disney. Thankfully the JM Barrie original artwork is public domain and available (and fantastic btw), so I used that instead.

[deleted]

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

#635

Post by greenmilk »

nazgulsenpai wrote: post #238
paxys wrote: post #223

This entire piece boils down to “I like open source therefore it is winning”. Everyone here has already raised good counterpoints, but one more is that all the companies publishing open weights models are heavily VC funded. What is their exit strategy? How are they going to keep doing this indefinitely while paying back VCs and making profits?

I think it's as simple as looking at the incentive structure. The Chinese gov't has incentive to kneecap US monopoly on frontier models. It makes sense for them to continue down this course if it strengthens their position.

The Chinese gov't and also the rest of humanity...

I'm not sure how everyone in the US forgot that monopolies are bad

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

#636

Post by starfallg »

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…

You forgot smartphones, where low-cost did not win out. It led to low margins for the Chinese firms and eventually left them unable to invest properly in key markets. They may still hold marketshare, but in terms of profits, falls well short of Apple and Samsung.

I can see a lot of parallels here. Model performance doesn't matter if you can't make the system commercially sustainable.

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

#637

Post by up2isomorphism »

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…

This is not really true considering Apple and nvidia are two most successful hardware companies, and they are notoriously closed. Not to mention microsoft, oracle they are all pretty closed.

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

#638

Post by 627467 »

gulmothrowaway wrote: post #623
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 Andr…

You dont flash an llm model on the street as status symbol.

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

#639

Post by geophile »

hintymad wrote: post #625
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…

No, I don’t think so. PC + MS Office killed Wang custom hardware/software, for example. LibreOffice is much later, and can’t displace MS Office due to network effects. Cheaper won, cheapest can’t because of those effects.

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

#640

Post by shimman »

andsoitis wrote: post #392
dreambuffer wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, because the US government has staked the future of the country's GDP on AI. They're even divesting from science as a whole and putting it into data centers.

Saying that AI will drive the future GDP is a very different thing from saying an economy relies on the stock price of a few AI companies.

Okay but political leadership of the US are literally are staking the future of GDP on exactly those few AI companies... $1.4trillion so far while universal childcare would only cost $40 billion a year.

It's a sick joke.

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