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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

#741

Post by chasd00 »

overgard wrote: post #441
chasd00 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sort of baffled by what the entities that train the open-weights models get out of it though if you do the training then you're in control of the output. For example, recommending your products/services or failing to mention your competitors. You could also automatically introduce backdoors into code deemed interesting, i'm sure all governments are very interested in having that influence.

That seems hypothetically possible, but kind of hard to do? I don't know a lot about training, but it seems like they wouldn't have exact control of the data that goes in at that scale (scraping the internet) so it seems like it would be kind of hard to do that in a way that's subtle. I'm kind of reminded of Elon Musk trying to put his political views into Grok and it seemed like it created huge technical problems wi…

It’s totally doable and is done right now in the form of “ai safety” guardrails. No reason you can’t have guardrails to reform responses about your competitors as negative. Or, when asked about current events, only give a one sided opinion.

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

#742

Post by _aavaa_ »

chermi wrote: post #702
_aavaa_ wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was, and to a large degree Tesla had to do a lot by themselves since the US government picks winners and saves losers rather. The Chinese government prioritized EV and battery productions through onshoring, industrial policy, and blanket incentives (bypassing license plate lottery for EVs), rather than favoring a specific company.

Why does the US have 1 successful EV company while China has a dozen? Because on government cares about it and the other doesn’t. And now that they’re losing a race they couldn’t be bother to compete it they complain.

Same complaining about AI, now that the two chosen champions are facing actual competition, there’s complaints that it’s unfair. we were supposed to win, it’s unfair that they’re beating us at our own crooked game.

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

#743

Post by rootusrootus »

znnajdla wrote: post #576
applicative wrote: post #196

What is ‘China’ going to do when it ‘wins’? The framing of this duscourse is all meaningless

What was the point of the Space Race between the US and the USSR? Proving who had more powerful capabilities. There doesn’t need to be any near-term profit at all. China has a lot to gain by beating US AI even if it makes no money from it. Money is such a small concern compared to the prestige and strategic benefits of being the global center of intelligence research. To answer your question, what can China do if it…

> what can China do if it wins? Become a global talent/education magnet, replacing the US, for example

I'd have given them relative low odds of success were it not for the coincidentally perfect timing of a US administration that seems hell bent on doing whatever it takes to knock the US out of its position as the sole superpower.

I still think it is a somewhat tall order, a lot depends on what happens over the next few years.

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

#744

Post by engineer_22 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #718
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) b…

> 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 use AI chat every day, I find it endlessly useful. It’s replaced google search.

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

#745

Post by msdz »

chasd00 wrote: post #543
ericmay wrote: post #404

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. Right... and there are two problems with this: 1. Eventually the capabilities of closed-weight models will just vastly outstrip open-weight models if the u…

It's important also that open-weight isn't open source. If you can't download the training data (fully labeled), source code of the NN, and follow the README to build and train it yourself assuming oyu had the hardware then it's not open source. tldr there's no "source" in open weight models therefore they are not open source.

Exactly. AFAIK none of the popular "open Chinese" models have published the full pre- and post-training pipeline, so the models are only partially open, if at all (plus the openly shared final weights, of course).

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

#746

Post by rootusrootus »

andix wrote: post #708

As 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)

It would be grand if both the EU and the US could pop their heads out of their ass on this issue.

Maybe we can get some people in charge that won't make us all embarrassed to be friends and we can focus on getting our house in order.

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

#747

Post by senordevnyc »

elictronic wrote: post #398
TeMPOraL wrote: post #371

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. You mean they resisted the idea trying to protect their legacy business, and it ended up all but killing them?

They resisted the idea because it did kill their legacy business. Kodaks peak was 16 billion in revenue in 1996. The digital camera market will be approaching that level of value inflation adjusted around 2030. 35 years to get back to status quo. Putting a bullet in a golden goose is often considered a bad idea. Everyone is happy they are dead, but if you can't understand why they might try to keep the corpse alive y…

The digital camera market will be approaching that level of value inflation adjusted around 2030.

Only if you ignore the digital camera sector responsible for probably 99% of all digital photos taken…

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

#748

Post by deadbabe »

engineer_22 wrote: post #744
DrewADesign wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) b…

> 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 use AI chat every day, I find it endlessly useful. It’s replaced google search.

Google search still happens, it’s just your agent doing it.

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

#749

Post by [deleted] »

dmoy wrote: post #709
Grombobulous wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#750

Post by trhway »

gpt5 wrote: post #386
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…

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…

In Russian opposition's mostly liberal discussions their school of thought connects several things together (sorry for not going directly to Marx's "General Intellect" and "Fragment on Machines" and using AI summaries instead ) - general idea of communism in China vs. techno-libertarianism of Thiel, Musk and the likes, and the Marx's thinking like:

"Fragment on Machines":

"he explores how human knowledge and collective intellect become embedded into machines, divorcing the worker from their own creativity."

"General Intellect":

"These texts are widely discussed for his concept of the General Intellect—the idea that society's shared, collective knowledge increasingly drives production rather than raw manual labor, and that this knowledge is alienated from workers and used as an instrument of capital."

(note: my point isn't to pass any political judgement here, like what real communism in China or not real, is it good or bad, i just find it interesting that pure political discussions by people with no technical credentials bring AI as a major factor today)

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