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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

#641

Post by zeroonetwothree »

dinfinity wrote: post #459
345f506fdc718 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 15 months ago, the top model on the Artificial Analysis index was GPT-o3. It scores 30 on the Artificial Analysis index. There must be something really of with those benchmarks. Yes, hallucinations gotten better, but I don't see that the big frontier models got so much better in the last 12-18 Months. They just put out bigger wall of texts and feel smarter. But they still make way too many stupid errors

12 months ago "way too many stupid errors" was constant news. Today, you rarely hear about those anymore. Sure, the novelty of the errors has worn off a bit and thus the reporting. Nevertheless the quality has improved immensely in this regard. Also, AI video generation is now so good and accessible that it is very, very regularly used for memes, disinformation and proper (short) movie projects. AI image generation e…

Ah yes, memes are clearly the sign of massive progress.

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

#642

Post by geophile »

tomtheelder wrote: post #591
SwellJoe wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I think the question is even a bit more nuanced than that. Even if frontier models can maintain a big gap that gap has to actually _matter_. If a local model satisfies my everyday use cases adequately then I may not really care that a frontier model is 5, 10, 100x better at ultra high order reasoning tasks. I think that reality is probably not all that far off for a huge swath of use cases.

This is exactly the mainframe vs PC dynamic.

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

#643

Post by culi »

ilc wrote: post #183
culi wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese models are usually not only open weight AND open-source but they also often publish their methodology in detailed scholarly publications that are themselves open-access. DeepSeek most famously

Training data, training methodology. All NOT OPEN. Until we know what a model is trained on, and how it is trained in high detail, I hesitate to call them "Open Source" in any way. They are free. But, we don't know what their priorities are etc. Witness the censorship we see in all models in one form or another. I'm not absolving any side of this. Just saying: Don't be blind.

Did you even read my comment? They explicitly DO share their training methodology in depth in Technical Reports on arXiv.

DeepSeek completely revolutionized LLMs and every western LLM today uses or is inspired by the their innovations including Group Relative Policy Optimization and Multi-head Latent Attention.

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

#644

Post by nightpool »

geophile wrote: post #460
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…

But different huge companies have different incentives. It is very much in Nvidia’s interest to have me running a powerful open source model on a $4k machine that they sell me.

Is it? When they could be having you running an even more powerful model on a $50k machine they sell by the pallet-load to enterprise consumers? We already see RAM manufacturers abandoning the low-end market in favor of server support. It's not clear to me that Nvidia sees personal GPUs as their best long term investment compared to selling millions of server-farm class machines

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

#645

Post by ak_111 »

elictronic wrote: post #425
ak_111 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm this sounds like an incumbent missing a paradigm shift because they didn't want it to disrupt their core (usually enterprise) business, although riding the shift would have ultimately delivered an order magnitude larger business. Classical example is Microsoft actively undermining mobile because it threatened selling Windows or enterprise licenses. Or Yahoo fighting Google's model because the latter model's didn'…

Thanks generic LLM model response. Please upgrade to a higher tier model if you are going to waste our time.

lol honest this wasn’t AI, I guess I need to work on my style

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

#646

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#647

Post by solumunus »

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.

It’s poetic.

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

#648

Post by kqr2 »

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.

How do Chinese companies distill the models?

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

#649

Post by russli1993 »

chatmasta wrote: post #563
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,…

Winners are hardware companies, GPUs,XPUs, HBM, memory, connectivity. Even CSPs are just compute renters, they charge a margin to make sure their hardware purchases can be made back. But given there are more and more AI CSPs, traditional, and neocloud, pricing competition is inevitable, and given the huge expense of hardware, CSPs are squeeze by the hardware companies and users seeking to lower their own costs.

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

#650

Post by tomtheelder »

geophile wrote: post #642
tomtheelder wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question is even a bit more nuanced than that. Even if frontier models can maintain a big gap that gap has to actually _matter_. If a local model satisfies my everyday use cases adequately then I may not really care that a frontier model is 5, 10, 100x better at ultra high order reasoning tasks. I think that reality is probably not all that far off for a huge swath of use cases.

This is exactly the mainframe vs PC dynamic.

100%, I thought about writing that out explicitly. I really feel like we are extremely close to reaching that kind of breaking point for most folks LLM use cases.
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