the "safety" freaks are going to ruin the US industry, & with it a host of dominoes will fall.
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
671–680 of 978 posts
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#672The 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…
That would sound very reasonable except this is the same what people said first about Windows and then Android crushing Apple.
And yet it's Apple that controls the top of the market and has the best margins in the business.
This is the same position OpenAI and Anthropic have right now.
Could this market be different? Maybe. But the status quo could be preserved as well.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#673Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chinese companies are cut out of the market by the US gov restrictions, so making the models open is a survival tactic.
It also has the benefit of crashing the US economy.
China does not want to crash US economy. US economy strong means more purchases for our goods. But US want to crash Chinese economy by: 2018 trade war, 2019 Huawei sanctions, sanctioning at least 1000 large influential Chinese companies, 2020 Tiktok theft, 2022 total ban on GPUs, semiconductor equipment going to China regardless of end use, banning all sorts of Chinese goods such as EVs, cars, batteries, drones, even DJI cameras, 2020 fake lie about Xinjiang to implement full ban of anything made by Xinjiang, 2025 50%+ tariff on Chinese goods. I don't think building LLM was thought has important until Anthropic went on full China hating, banning anyone on a Chinese IP using the service, even companies headquartered in China's oversea offices. Did you know that a regular person in China trying to use Claude to ask some innocent question gets banned? Talk about everyone created equal and democratic world.
You leave us with no choice but to build technologies ourselves. If its bad for Anthropic, well, you could owned the market in China, oh well, you reap what you sow.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#674What is ‘China’ going to do when it ‘wins’? The framing of this duscourse is all meaningless
Careful integration with robotics that will not be open, and will not get off the ground in the West because their AI industry will have long been wrecked (along with their economies.) China will already be too far ahead, and the West will have been their biggest customer for years.
On robotics, China will have export controls, and the US will be whining about them. Western kids interested in working in the technology will be going to Chinese universities, with the goal of completely immigrating and getting Chinese security clearances if they want access to the good stuff.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#675AI 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.
> AI models cost tens of millions to train.
A pittance frankly. Something that could easily be covered by oh I dunno, let's call it a National Science Foundation who's in charge of subsidizing important basic research for a nation's interests.
Anywho, when the market is trillions (and of potential nation state concern), it is pretty inconsequential and very much worthwhile.
Aside, I think your scale is a bit off, I think Moonshot has raised $5B and potentially they get other breaks from China, not sure. So to produce something like SOTA takes billions, not tens of millions. I'd still argue it is worthwhile to subsidize and invest in open versions, imagine spending $5B to unlocking a few percentage point increases in your country's productivity.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 offerin…
CSPs making own hardware still needs hardware companies, they reduce the Nvidia tax but still need the likes of TSMC, Broadcom, micron/sk hynix, Marvell, the truth semi-companies. CSPs will not have the patents, IPs and talent to replace any of them.
Also, not sure how well CSPs inference stack is compared with vllm + nvidia. A lot of open weight models uses MoE, making the inference stack more complex.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also don't believe it, if it was as easy as that, we would have hundreds of competitors. The truth that Anthropic and OpenAI will not say, is that these Chinese labs have a lot of talented people.
And this is exactly what many Americans cannot admit to themselves. China is not stealing American research they are inventing stuff. They can invent it. They can build it. And it is only a matter of them before they can scale that last barrier of American hegemony- market it.
> They can invent it. They can build it. And it is only a matter of them before they can scale that last barrier of American hegemony- market it.
And at some point we'll see very capable chips coming out of China: Huawei, Baidu and Alibaba already have some stuff. I think it's only a matter of time before they come up with some AI accelerator doing 80% of the job at 20% of the price.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#678The 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…
That’s not what this is. It’s industrial dumping applied to software. China has successfully applied this strategy to become the manufacturing workshop of the world.
If china is subsidizing training they diminish their off-shore competitors expectations of a viable return on investment. It’s trade-war behavior.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#679I 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.…
Would anyone besides those within China themselves use a completely closed and hidden model from China for their critical business needs?
If the outputs are independently verifiable at low cost, and the US models refuse to even try because somebody sneezed nearby and it sounded like "antigen" and not "achoo"... yeah sure. Whatever works to get the job done.
The hope is that AI will open up whole new sectors of economic activity. If you have to chose between exploring that space while potentially being exposed to Chinese tampering, versus just sitting on your hands and doing nothing... well then you take that risk.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> The US subsidized its EV industry with about $120B over the last 15 years
Not with loans to scrappy startups, but with subsidies to buyers that were just pocketed as margin by oligarchs.