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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

#681

Post by mtrovo »

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…

Which on itself is wild. The main issue with the discussion isn't a rift in capabilities, but a rift in the valuation model itself.

If China can match the pace and produce frontier models at a fraction of the cost of US alternatives, even without access to SOTA hardware, what is the competitive advantage for the current valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI?

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

#682

Post by adventured »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #491
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, OpenAI and Anthropic say the Chinese models are only as good because they distill their models. How true is that. I am sure it adds something. But is it more like a marginal 1% improvement or something really significant?

if distilling was so easy and could give you frontier LLM on openai/anthropic output, then how come there are no hundreds of frontier labs in the US market, all distilling and competing for the TRILLION dollar market valuation ???? its all bs spread by oai/anthropic in order to ban open weight models and monopolize the market for two US companies and protect their trillion dollar valuations

Because no VC will give you $5-$10 billion in cash to attempt a catch-up run with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini at this point. Untold billions have been pushed into Grok and it can't keep up. X has had the GPUs, the engineers (reasonably), the cash and the datacenters necessary - it's a very, very, very hard task. Microsoft could afford spend $100 billion on trying to catch up and they might fail at it.

It's a critical national imperative for China. If they were to lose the AI race, it would be economically devastating over the coming decades. Their demonstrated capabilities in the open-weight space are making it fairly clear they are not going to fall behind at this juncture.

As a nation, if you don't have your own GPT equivalent, you will be beholden to a master (right now it's mainly either the US or China, pick one). The EU for example is putting their group of nations at risk in a big way by not going all in on having at least two cutting edge independent competing models (Mistal is not enough). Economically the EU is plenty large enough to accomplish that, nobody is driving the bus the right way.

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

#683

Post by xlbuttplug2 »

I'm guessing the next generation of US frontier models will be heavily anti-distillation at the cost of user experience (significant rate limiting, more flat out refusals, hidden thinking, etc).

And as long as they maintain a significant advantage in capability, we will continue to kiss the ring.

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

#684

Post by _aavaa_ »

chermi wrote: post #222
_aavaa_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumping is such a loaded term. This is investor-backed scaling to capture market share, standard VC playbook.

There's a difference between state sponsored and private dumping.

Give me a break.

Yeah, in this case it's the USA side that's on the losing end. Just because the US government wants small government and no intervention (expect when it comes to the donor class, or their voting base, or their own financial interests) doesn't make it a universal truth.

We're happy to prop up companies that should have failed after they get big an dominant, but having an industrial policy to invest in a field as a whole is somehow a big problem.

You see this crying and threatening to take their toys and go home on every issue as soon as someone else is in the lead. Just look at TVs and solar panels; China invested in growing that sector since they saw it was important for the future; the USA does their best to deny climate change and demonize anything not running on fossil fuel. And now that nobody wants to buy American's overpriced and uncompetitive cars, it's the fault of other companies for planning ahead. But the same politicians complaining about it are very happy to set up their own protectionist tariffs and eventually bail out the laggards, again; all while touting the "free market"

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

#685

Post by conk »

jbm wrote: post #451
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 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 Claude to give me the US national anthem and it said it couldn’t because it’s copyrighted. It’s not, and even if it was a more recent work, how can a copyright be enforced for a National Anthem.

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

#686

Post by ludston »

SideQuark wrote: post #656
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. Not likely. The last 50 years had Moore’s law growth in compute. That’s over. Frontier models are roughly compressed all written text and a large part of images. Those don’t compress forever, and likely not a ton more than…

I need a !remind me 15 years.

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

#687

Post by randbyte »

idontwantthis wrote: post #602
Danox wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could, but they don’t have to. The Chinese have beaten them to it, and the rest of the world will benefit from it and the circle will be complete once the models get a little bit faster/smaller and the localized hardware does the same and it will, it is inevitable. The one thing that is sort of ironic or bad is that between Russia and the Ukraine there’s a large number of mathematically inclined people that if i…

But I still don't get it. Like China could be come the world's leading producer of chocolate...if they started giving away chocolate for free. Would we be having this conversation saying that Switzerland lost because they were greedy and protectionist and didn't decide to give away their chocolate for free first (I realize Switzerland probably isn't actually the world's top producer of chocolate).

Long history of open source projects already have answers on how to monetize a free and complex open source product.

- Low development cost: collaborative efforts from open source contributors, innovative model training and serving for llm (Chinese models costs a fraction to train and their local chip design and manufacturing are catching up, plus cheap electricity)

- monetizing by selling hosted services, while leaving the core product free to tinker with / self host. China’s gdp is 2/3 of the US and it’s already a huge market for AI - which OAI and A\ don’t enter.

- for (the US) market that they can’t enter, let the US cloud providers to do free marketing / advocacy for them. Gaining share of mind. It costs them nothing.

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

#689

Post by adventured »

lelanthran wrote: post #474
azinman2 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese models are the result of just as many papers, GitHub repos, etc… AND the synthesized results of those.

> The Chinese models are the result of just as many papers, GitHub repos, etc… AND the synthesized results of those. Right, but they aren't the ones whining that other people are getting "the synthesised results" for free.

I'm pretty sure the Chinese cloning isn't being arrived at for free regardless. Fable is quite expensive for example.

If Anthropic has a real problem with API use, they can always raise the price.

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

#690

Post by timmytokyo »

ymolodtsov wrote: post #672
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…

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.

Counterpoint: linux owns the server space.
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