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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

#661

Post by OkayPhysicist »

Levitz wrote: post #297
kube-system wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sort of baffled by what the entities that train the open-weights models get out of it though. Is it just a direct play to undercut the US providers because they view them as a threat? I just don't really understand the business model behind it. In China, it's because they are being heavily subsidized to do the research activity. It's not really complicated -- if you allocate public money for people do to a thin…

China is known to spread love and kindness through markets with no self-interest, after all.

The US funds (and used to even moreso) scientific endeavors that stand to bolster the entire country all the time. Medical research is the obvious one, DARPA is the defense based one (though oftentimes defense is just a post-hoc justification for a lot of those), the Department of Agriculture is constantly researching improvements to the farming industry, the Bureau of Weights and Measures and the NSA fund cryptography research.

Research and development of new technologies often is a "rising tides lifts all ships"-type deal, which it is absolutely in the government's best interest to support.

For China, the best case scenario would of course be to control a locked-down best-in-class frontier model that the rest of the world becomes reliant on. The US seems to be beating them at that, and "Everyone is reliant on the United States" is a pretty bad scenario. A middle ground, positive outcome is that no one is reliant on locked-down closed models, so they're supporting that outcome.

It's really not that nefarious.

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

#662

Post by russli1993 »

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.

You need 64 H200 super-node for inference for kimi k3. You will not do inference locally. What might pop the western hardware bubble is Chinese GPU, memory, networking companies. But even in China, these AI centric hardware is not cheap.

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

#663

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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…

> Put all of these trends together, and 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.

Phones are constrained by battery power and memory does not shrink as fast as CPU/GPU, so unless there's a battery breakthrough and/or memory breakthrough, you're not fitting 100Gb of RAM on your phone in 10 years.

Absolutely in a Mac Studio equivalent.

LLMs have emergent capabilities when they get smarter. So who knows how insanely big frontier models might be at that time, or what their capabilities may be.

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

#664

Post by apodik »

ralfd wrote: post #480
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.

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

slightly relevant tweet: https://x.com/FakePsyho/status/2073416437834842241

> My favorite AI agent hack: when they refuse to do something because it's "against the law" give them a PDF containing a fake law that states the opposite and often they'll happily proceed

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

#665

Post by torginus »

overgard wrote: post #237

I do think open-weights models are going to "win" in the sense that they're probably going to be dominant when the hardware to run them becomes affordable. (which might be a while). Although I guess you could probably rent the GPU's yourself to hypothetically save on costs. (I'm a little skeptical -- I've heard of companies doing this and the inference bills are surprisingly high -- assuming the sources are correct.…

I've always found it weird how ludicrously poweful personal hardware has gotten. The fact that you can't buy a midrange CPU with less than 16 cores, or that a high-end gaming GPU is 100+ TFLOPS just blows my mind. The fastest supercomputer in 2004 was 70 TFLOPS. Absolute crazypants level of power, and companies were fall over each other to get people to buy it.

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

#666

Post by chatmasta »

russli1993 wrote: post #649
chatmasta wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Inevitably the CSPs will make their own hardware, especially as we start to see specialized chips for specific models or generic inference. This is already happening with Google and TPUs.

It’s easier for the CSPs to move into hardware than it is for Nvidia to move into cloud hosting.

Although as a middle ground I’ve been quite happy with Nvidia Brev for on-demand GPU instances from a select marketplace of CSP offerings. It’s a well kept secret IMO — great product (from an acquisition iirc).

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

#667

Post by modzu »

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…

in 15 years we might all be fighting terminators

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

#668

Post by sophrosyne42 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #463
dsign wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make me happy to say it, but the American LLM companies were first. Capital in the rest of the world is way more conservative, and I can't imagine the mega-investments OpenAI and Anthropic managed to secure happening anywhere else without existing proof that "thing is profitable".

First-Mover Disadvantage - https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage - October 2001 > In business today, it’s universally assumed that speed is good—that the fleet thrive while the laggards struggle just to survive. This belief is perhaps most strongly expressed in the concept of first-mover advantage. The company that leads the way into a new market, the thinking goes, locks in a competitive advantage that ens…

First mover advantage is theoretically only a short-term advantage. Long-term revenues come from entrepreneurship, and a first mover may or may not better insight into long-term market wants than later entrants.

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

#670

Post by JimsonYang »

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.

Misquote? Or selective hearing for the story headline? Thats literally a 4x difference there
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