I don't understand the premise in the beginning
how is running servers supposed to be 0 cost, while running ai inferrence isn't?
Who's afraid of Chinese models?
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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#12The article makes a point about agent harnesses being sticky (the supposed moat). I have been building my own agent harness for a while, and I can tell with confidence that the harness almost does not matter, the entirety of the AI magic is the model itself. The harness can be almost barebones (like, for example, mini-swe-agent used for benchmarks), and yet the model still does the task just fine. So from my perspect…
The harnesses will tend towards commoditization, but for now the harness quality matters a lot. Especially for non terminal harnesses.
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#13> distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here? ... The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service th…
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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#14> It’s striking the extent to which Claude Code and Codex are proving to be quite sticky; whichever harness you start working with is likely to be the one you stick with, and that figures to be even more the case with non-technical users.
My experience has been quite the opposite. I was using Claude Code almost exclusively this winter/spring and swapped to Codex earlier this summer. It took no time whatsoever to switch. And before Claude Code, I was using Cursor. Same story.
[edit: Oh and there was also a brief interlude with Conductor, though I think they're more or less just serving the underlying Claude/Codex harness]
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#15> distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here? ... The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service th…
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No, but the students that learn and distill what the professor teaches are not obligated to use that information only how the professor wants them to.
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#16The U.S. "executive" class is so obsessed with the "exploit" part of the explore/exploit cycle that it's very clear they are prematurely closing advancement. Better a little money and power for them now than a lot of money and power for their country/humanity.
This has an element of stochastic improvement so it's hard to predict but the chance of the U.S. "winning" this "race" is pretty bleak.
You see this all the time in communities that have internalized hierarchy as a "good", little kings of shit mountain vying for less and less at a higher and higher cost.
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#17> distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here? ... The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service th…
Don’t know much about how distillation works so please enlighten me here. > what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models If it’s as easy as that why do they choose to distill another model and not distill the knowledge on the open Internet from scratch?
known-good prompt-response pairs are more useful than random semi-coherent texts presumably
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#18Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#19One thing I have not seen mentioned between Chinese AI vs US, population.
China has a billion+ people that their AI can "study". Plus due to China's political structure, their AI has access to everyone's chats, comments and sites, scraping everyting.
Here in the US, with 1/3 the population, the AI race was lost before it even began. Plus in the US, all companies and people are doing all they can to restrict AI from scraping sites and peoples chats.
So I believe, China will end up owing AI.
Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but the students that learn and distill what the professor teaches are not obligated to use that information only how the professor wants them to.
Can the professor refuse to teach some students, or must he teach all comers?
glhf under the circumstances