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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

#771

Post by TehCorwiz »

awakeasleep wrote: post #651
4gotunameagain wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are going to be illegal, you might as well use library genesis and get DRM free ebooks :)

On the other hand, it’s a beautiful example of the abilities LLMs have bestowed upon us, where it’s easier for a guy to transcribe audiobooks then to use a website to quickly download an epub

To your point about time, from beginning of the project to transcripts in markdown tagged with extra metadata was about 3 hours. That's LLM planning, building whisper.cpp twice and running ROCm vs Vulkan benchmarks, testing whisper and adjusting prompts to handle edge cases, then processing the books.

Most of the books weren't available on lib gen or Anna's Archive. The few I did find were themselves obviously transcripts. Easy tell was they were missing distinctive formatting that I knew existed from reading the dead tree edition. At that point it was easier to make my own. I probably spent an hour searching for eBooks without DRM that weren't transcripts. Do they exist somewhere? Probably, but with a search of unknown length it was a better use of my time to make my own transcripts with what I had on hand.

I was really wanting to make commentary on how chaotic LLMs are even under constrained circumstances. No doubt both system prompts includes language about considering copyrights and trademarks. Probably pretty strong language at that. For whatever reason one LLM didn't "feel" like translating a 1000 year old document but another did not care in the slightest that we were ripping text from new audiobooks.

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

#772

Post by SchemaLoad »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #516
chermi wrote: post #211

It's basically American VCs vs the China the state. I'm not optimistic for the US at this point, given how much China cares about it and how much talent they have. And how much they're putting into hardware and the whole ecosystem. Meanwhile we have pro basketball players with no understanding of reality being celebrities for decrying data centers because...land?

The datacenter antipathy is odd, but then again so are the AI corps' marketing strategy of making everyone afraid for their jobs and the future of the species.

Whatever Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel are calling for, the public instinctually wants the opposite.

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

#773

Post by bmitc »

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 lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins.

Is that actually true? There are very large markets that make a lot of money from paid software. And I would honestly prefer actually paying for software rather than constantly dealing with "not a bug" or "PRs are welcome".

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

#774

Post by bmitc »

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…

Why do people always bring up state support when it comes to China? As if the U.S. doesn't provide massive tax breaks and explicit funding to industry?

It's on every tech post about China, as if it gives them some sort of "unfair" advantage.

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

#775

Post by UncleOxidant »

deadbabe wrote: post #748
engineer_22 wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Google search is basically Gemini now. You get a Gemini summation including several links.

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

#777

Post by kbelder »

azinman2 wrote: post #534
Danox wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, no leg to stand on and relatively speaking no sympathy for the model makers or the data-center builders…

I assume you don’t use any LLMs then

I use them and I'm fine with them training on our information and knowledge. It's what it's for. No one takes it or steals knowledge; they just copy it.

But because of that, I'm also ok with the Chinese doing it. The worst they might be guilty of is breaking a terms of service.

The only incoherent position is that it's good for one and not the other. You can consistently think it's bad in both cases, or good in both cases.

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

#778

Post by slashdave »

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…

Libreoffice

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

#779

Post by ColdStream »

geophile wrote: post #768
kcexn wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will open-source and open-weight models continue to thrive after financial incentives die off? Surely open models will suffer from outdated knowledge cutoffs if noone will pay for model training?

Nvidia will pay for training models that they can give away to consumers who will then buy their GPUs.

Pretty much. Nvidia has always been pretty decent at giving away software that is deeply dependent on their hardware.

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

#780

Post by slashdave »

alexhans wrote: post #221

Every Linux user or FOSS enthusiast knows the acronym FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, which were a set of techniques commonly used to disparage efforts of open source communities. Linux was evil and anticapitalist and we needed to use "CorporateTool" and ban/restrict Linux. The same companies later would be running their entire infrastructures on it and on open source. With AI, open weights and local models, we wil…

Huh? So it was some grand conspiracy that keeps Windows in use in the vast majority of businesses?

Delusional

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