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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

#711

Post by zmmmmm »

kbar13 wrote: post #621
awllau wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah and the gap between "use open source" and "use open source as their primary model" is probably p large

yes... I think for startups there's a strong desire to demonstrate technical independence - there's a strong smell with looking like a wrapper on Anthropic or OpenAI. With an open model you can weave a story where you are exercising differentiating knowhow by deploying or tuning models yourself.

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

#712

Post by geophile »

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.

I don’t agree. In the mainframe/PC battle, MS and Apple were basically on the same side. Once the dinosaurs went extinct, different mammals fought for dominance.

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

#713

Post by zmmmmm »

postalcoder wrote: post #47

This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open. They care about zero data retention (and sticking with whatever vendor they're already using). This blog post is suspiciously close to being a restatement of what Alex Karp recently said on CNBC[0]. It's important to remember he's…

> considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta.

To me, Llama was the ONLY successful thing they did it. it was when they stopped that they fell off the radar as an interesting AI company. They had a genuine chance to be the "substrate" that Ben talks about here. I can't actually figure out why they threw it away.

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

#714

Post by criddell »

Gareth321 wrote: post #399
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. At current pace, we'll have open weight LLMs with frontier intelligence in 6-12 months. The constraint is RAM - both for the model and the context. It's likely that distillation and quantisation and TurboQuant will signifi…

> god-like

So would you say we are months away from full self-driving cars that can out-drive a human being in any situation?

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

#715

Post by davnicwil »

nightpool wrote: post #644
geophile wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But different huge companies have different incentives. It is very much in Nvidia’s interest to have me running a powerful open source model on a $4k machine that they sell me.

Is it? When they could be having you running an even more powerful model on a $50k machine they sell by the pallet-load to enterprise consumers? We already see RAM manufacturers abandoning the low-end market in favor of server support. It's not clear to me that Nvidia sees personal GPUs as their best long term investment compared to selling millions of server-farm class machines

Selling to individuals can be a hugely more robust predictable business, the problem with selling by the pallet load is spiky revenue that can also quickly fall off a cliff if larger customers stop buying. The other problem is sales negotiations driving down margins for bulk buyers etc. Consumer hardware is a very attractive market in lots of ways, just look at Apple.

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

#716

Post by rvba »

zer00eyz wrote: post #557
subarctic wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe what they're actually worried about is liability, not safety?

https://tornyol.com - A ycombinator company just killed its first bug: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/drones/autonomous... Ukraine admits to making autonomous kills on people 2 years ago: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou... Slaughterbots Sci Fi short was 6 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU Today this is buildable, many models will happily help you glue ever…

If you talk about movies that tell about dangers of AI, you can start with Terminator 1 - from 1984.

And you probably could find some earlier sci-fi too.

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

#717

Post by well_ackshually »

cheriot wrote: post #372

What's the incentive for the Chinese labs to continue releasing weights 5 years from now? In the short term it attracts talent and builds brand, but they make little money on inference to support research and training costs. Tin foil hat thinking: it also pulls inference revenue away from Antropic/OpenAI and a financial crises at those organizations improves the relative position of Chinese labs. Is there a reason to…

> What's the incentive for the Chinese labs to continue releasing weights 5 years from now?

The ongoing money from their government. The absolute collapse of OpenAI/Anthropic. US economy getting fucked because their bright financiers decided that going all in on the funny text generation machine was a good idea. Continuing to take a dump on US imposed copyright. The gigantic amount of soft power being the ones releasing "open" models grants. The fact that the ongoing AI war has made China LESS reliant on the US and are now producing their own GPUs, RAM and have massively caught up to nvidia. The lists is endless, and half the points more or less boil down to "taking a dump on the US is morally right", and the other half that massive government programs lead to giant leaps that benefit your society more than a dozen VCs on coke ever could.

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

#718

Post by DrewADesign »

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…

Personally, I don’t think the general-purpose LLM as a standalone tool is long for this world, at least not in consumer-facing applications. I think when the economics make more sense, product designers will make things that people actually want to use that will pretty transparently handle whatever model interactions are necessary, when it makes sense. As a consumer, the last things I want in an interface are to a) be sycophantic enough to lessen my judgment, and b) be obstinate, obtuse, or argumentative, or generally just be something that I have to explain things to. I think a lot of tech folks are far more biased than they realize by the “ooh, neato” factor when imagining how nontechnical people might want to use things. And the weight of these tools just feels wrong for what a lot of people use them for: the thing that plays whatever music I feel like hearing absolutely does not need to be able to generate a volumes of fanfic about the movie that song was in. It’s abstractly impressive that something could do that, but it’s just not useful.

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

#719

Post by bg24 »

There is no coming back. After all, open-weight is NOT open-source. It is basically free model. And you pay to host it.

The value proposition is that 100's of providers and host and sell it. 1000s of businesses (eg. Microsoft, Databricks, Palantir to small startups) can run it, finetune it and own the IP and pay only for hosting.

On the other hand, you have OpenAI and Anthropic, who need to charge at 90%+ inference margin. It is because of 1) sunk cost, 2) sky-high salaries that they paid to keep the talent. Companies like Meta screwed things up badly by paying billions of $ for chief engineers.

Chinese labs are doing a favor to the world. But I can also say with 100% certainty that if US labs were to close shops next year, Chinese labs would immediately start charging $$. In fact, I think it might happen with open weights model soon. But still these fees will be one-fifth or one-tenth per token. Also it does not come with all the guardrails.

Solution: US labs need to reduce their costs, cut the salaries across the board and compete. AI and robotics are the last hope of US to get back to industrialization and continue being the superpower.

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

#720

Post by geophile »

timmytokyo wrote: post #690
ymolodtsov wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cheap PCs enabled the creation of Linux. Linux runs on the descendants of PCs, not mainframes.
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