Winning what, exactly? The race to the bottom?
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
701–710 of 978 posts
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#702Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
weird, I'm pretty sure there was some american that made electric cars a thing. I'm not a fan of state sponsorship or bailouts. but if you're trying to equivocate, it's just not really true. also anti-tarriff. I guess I don't know who you're arguing with.
edit-- and re industrial policy, I'm ok with demand side stuff like government contracts in the early chip days. Less so but kind of ok with some supply stuff like EV credit, but of course in that case would've preferred the politically impossible carbon tax.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#703I thought we all knew infrastructure was going to be the product, not the models.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#704I 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'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…
> it's because they are being heavily subsidized to do the research activity
Is it actually true? This seems pivotal because currently most theories rest on the idea that individual Chinese companies are acting in China's overall economic or strategic interest. It's a tough sell to believe they all just do that through implicit desire to align with the CCP's direction. I would believe it much more easily if there were concrete incentives involved.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#705The 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…
I do agree that Chinese open-source models are going to play a bigger and bigger role in the entire ecosystem moving forward, but I don't agree with you in the sense that they are going to eventually "win." Just because they are cheapp doesn't mean they automatically win. You've picked a lot of great examples, but there is still a little bit of cherry-picking. One clear outlier is the iPhone, which coexists with Andr…
Yeah, iPhones are just fashion statements in the US. Different than LLMs
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#706Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, come on, don't be a decelerationist. We're supposed to just ignore that aspect of our Brave New World. Don't think too hard about the unparalleled resource consumption, either. AGI will alleviate any and all of these concerns ... soon. In the very near future, we'll all be getting UBI, Gemini will know how many Rs there are in "strawberry" and we can spend our days creating the next generation of art to feed the…
Hey guys I found one, this guy thinks Machine Jesus is going to save him. I'm trying to figure out if my advice to you should be to do more drugs or less. I am uncertain, perhaps I'll ask an AI.
Poe's Law. Look it up.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#707Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Open-source software isn't a moral good Yes it is.
Prove it
I’ll take a swing at it. Open Source is a form of sharing with the wider community. Closed Source is not sharing. Moral good is based on doing good outside of your own benefit (the opposite of selfishness.)
Ergo it’s a kind of moral good.
And I’m not even an advocate for open source.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#708As an European I would laugh so hard, if China out-competes US based AI companies before the European car manufacturers.
(it would be a very cynical laugh, no happiness, don't worry)
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#709Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Moore's law is over in the literal sense but silicon continues to advance relatively quickly. This claim isn't really outlandish in any way. It's not hard to imagine: - Future models being able to handle current frontier models' workflows with much higher efficiency. - Future consumer devices like phones having 2-4x the RAM onboard along with GPU/NPU performance greatly increased in 10-15 years.
Moore's law for 10-15 years was more like 20-100x ram sizes, not 2-4x.
Performance, storage, etc is definitely getting better, but it's a different scale of improvement
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#710>and it could take the US economy down with it.
I just want 1 thing for christmas Premier Xi.