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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

#731

Post by jongjong »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #479
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…

> free and low-end eventually wins Not in SaaS which is what LLMs are. You can get VMs for much cheaper than AWS, Microsoft, and Google offer them but large companies (and startups) are happy to pay a premium for the support, reputation, and reliability that they perceive those companies as offering. Same thing for some of the managed database providers who are effectively selling a very heavily marked up version of…

LLMs are not SaaS. Some LLM are delivered as SaaS. Anyone who has a machine big enough to run a frontier model can launch their own LLM SaaS tomorrow and it would be functionality indistinguishable from any other which is running a similar model...

Also, big companies can choose to run their own models on their own hardware and get better security and privacy as the data doesn't need to leave their own premises.

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

#732

Post by calf »

muldvarp wrote: post #561
Glyptodon wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is all true, but that unlike with Moore's law and improved PC tooling and capabilities, we also have essentially existing biological evidence that there should be a way to create much better intelligent systems in terms of training, memory, and efficiency. With classic PC evolution we didn't even have that evidence but still could make a relatively strong inference (Moore's law). But here we basically ha…

The existing biological evidence took billions of years of evolution to get to the state it's at. So it may not just take research and discovery but also enormous computing power.

Yes, one might call these… evolutionary algorithms…

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

#733

Post by api »

azinman2 wrote: post #447
lelanthran wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s in the same neighborhood but isn’t really apples to apples. Distilling LLMs is to take a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation, while the other is scraping what already exists as is. Hang on, why is scraping the public pool of knowledge not taking "a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation"? You think that that all those github repos…

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

... and they're at least releasing the results.

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

#734

Post by softwaredoug »

It's hard to ignore the overall environment

US has made itself visibly unaffordable, anti-science, and hostile to immigration.

For top scientists at these companies, there should be clear upside for the immigration to the US. That just doesn't exist anymore. Especially as quality of life increases in China

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

#735

Post by andy_ppp »

overfeed wrote: post #728
bg24 wrote: post #719

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 m…

> 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 $$. How would do you explain the pricing of Chinese solar panels, after managing to destroy other countries' solar industries? The prices are still dropping per watt. Could it be China's internal demand for solar is big enough, and its long-…

China may well save the world with green energy but I’m skeptical to assume we should just trust them to share their best intelligence with us freely, it’s a totally different think to sharing their best intelligence.

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

#736

Post by leoc »

davnicwil wrote: post #715
nightpool wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right. It's probably important to distinguish what the hardware manufacturers' incentives are when their supply is constrained and when it isn't. (I am not an expert on anything.) As long as supply is strongly constrained they're naturally going to sell to the highest bidders, which are the big LLM SaaS players. If and when supply is no longer constrained, though, things will look very different:

1) The LLM SaaS companies are a form of vertical disintegration for the hardware providers, a middleman covering costs and taking profits out of the money that comes from customers to the hardware providers. That changes somewhat if there are no longer good models available for local use at no cost to the hardware guys, but only somewhat

2) The LLM SaaS companies are efficient users of their hardware resources. While supply is constrained this helps to make them top bidders and so attractive customers for the hardware manufacturers. When supply is not constrained this should reverse. Which is the more attractive class of customer to a hardware maker: the company full of people with higher degrees who spend their whole working day fighting to pare back resource usage, or the guy who leaves his laptop idle about 18 hours per day on average?

It's notable that nVidia, for instance, has continued to put significant emphasis on AI compact desktops and laptops. And while no doubt that's partly in the service of better developer relations and good PR in general, it's probably also nVidia eyeing the exit, and preparing for a future transition from selling shovels to the army to selling shovels at Walmart. But of course the future isn't clear and obvious. If the hardware makers, maybe the RAM guys in particular, turn out to have underbuilt future capacity starting in the present then we could be stuck in constrained supply for quite a long time. (Futher) government action could affect things etc. etc. And if the frontier labs soon find new ways to use still larger amounts of memory, GPU capacity etc. that isn't butting up against diminishing returns then they'll likely remain kings for some time, though that does not seem probable now.

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

#737

Post by anigbrowl »

azinman2 wrote: post #447
lelanthran wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s in the same neighborhood but isn’t really apples to apples. Distilling LLMs is to take a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation, while the other is scraping what already exists as is. Hang on, why is scraping the public pool of knowledge not taking "a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation"? You think that that all those github repos…

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

And you can download the Chinese model weights and run them yourself - admittedly not too practical for Kimi K3 unless you're a big corporation, but eminently doable for others. The hardware to run Deepseek r4 uncompressed is about about $30k no=ew, well within the power of a small company or financially secure individual. Compressing and/or getting creative with hardware could bring that down quite a bit.

The difference is that the Chinese are sharing the models with everyone.

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

#738

Post by overfeed »

russli1993 wrote: post #662
elictronic wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia selling more GPU's at the cost of it's datacenter business is pretty close to Kodak selling digital cameras at the cost of film. The data center side is so bloated anything that eats into it is a huge negative. Their data center business brings in 20x the gpu market. Local open weight models will be what pops the bubble and China will do anything in it's power to enable that pop.

You need 64 H200 super-node for inference for kimi k3. You will not do inference locally. What might pop the western hardware bubble is Chinese GPU, memory, networking companies. But even in China, these AI centric hardware is not cheap.

> But even in China, these AI centric hardware is not cheap

Definitely not cheap for individuals, but well within SME territory. There are countless small-town, family-owned businesses that had higher startup costs than a hypothetical Kimi-R-Us, Inc.

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

#739

Post by aussieguy1234 »

geophile wrote: post #460
gpt5 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. With open source projects, the benefit was that each individual could improve the complex system (e.g. Linux Kernel) interpedently, and over time the benefit…

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.

They might not release such a thing, lest it puts all of their customers out of business.

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

#740

Post by bg24 »

overfeed wrote: post #728
bg24 wrote: post #719

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 m…

> 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 $$. How would do you explain the pricing of Chinese solar panels, after managing to destroy other countries' solar industries? The prices are still dropping per watt. Could it be China's internal demand for solar is big enough, and its long-…

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