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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#101

Post by bluegatty »

scotty79 wrote: post #89
bluegatty wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making an LLM from raw data is value-add. Distillation is just value extract. It's soft, and I'm not sure what the answer should be ... but I think that there is a difference. I think we start by recognizing that ... and then try to figure it out from there. 'The Internet' may be a public good, maybe we make them pay a tax for that, but that's different than distillation.

> Making an LLM from raw data is value-add. > Distillation is just value extract. There is a value-add in selecting the valuable parts out of the garbage. And let's face it. Largest models contain a lot of garbage.

I think that's kind of fair, but it still fits within the context of 'some things are value add' and 'more or less than others'.

We ought to identify that and integrate that into our thinking.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#102

Post by cyanydeez »

tristanj wrote: post #29

The people who are most afraid of Chinese models are the VCs who poured into Anthropic and OpenAI at astronomically high valuations. Anthropic is valued at $1.2T and OpenAI is targeting $850B. These astronomical valuations were built on the premise that these labs would generate massive profits from premium API pricing, but the Chinese labs are completely undercutting this strategy by releasing excellent open models…

mmm, the chinese models are also working on local GPUs at consumer grades. so theyre not just drainig cloud moats.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#103

Post by sjreese »

Kellogg School of Business -- he said -- token as a commodity and therefore Open AI is constrained .. ha ha ha hee hee ha .. Well... you build a better mousetrap, and DeepSeek, K3, and ByteDance are just that -- just as good and fit to purpose -- What is needed is to build on top of -- not paniteir (invade privacy and kill people with the information) -- not USMC AI -- use PI's as overwatch killer drones -- but how can I make harder steel, longer-lasting, seawater-resistant concrete, faster time to build housing, better enforcement of USDA rules and FDA adverse enforcement, and better EPA water cleanup, a better FTC for consumer goods -- that is, if I buy an item, that item is safe and built to purpose -- ANYONE not talking about public protection of consumer rights usng AI, is wasting your time

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#104

Post by happypappy123 »

lorecore wrote: post #67
tristanj wrote: post #29

The people who are most afraid of Chinese models are the VCs who poured into Anthropic and OpenAI at astronomically high valuations. Anthropic is valued at $1.2T and OpenAI is targeting $850B. These astronomical valuations were built on the premise that these labs would generate massive profits from premium API pricing, but the Chinese labs are completely undercutting this strategy by releasing excellent open models…

Good. Over the past few years, VCs have proven that they’re warmongering psychopaths. Hopefully China puts every last one of the Palantir/Flock/Anduril class out of business.

[flagged]

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#105

Post by nemomarx »

bluegatty wrote: post #84
_aavaa_ wrote: post #2

> distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here? ... The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service th…

Making an LLM from raw data is value-add. Distillation is just value extract. It's soft, and I'm not sure what the answer should be ... but I think that there is a difference. I think we start by recognizing that ... and then try to figure it out from there. 'The Internet' may be a public good, maybe we make them pay a tax for that, but that's different than distillation.

What makes the Internet raw data in a different way? wasn't it mostly worked on by people first?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#106

Post by andersonpico »

Aurornis wrote: post #92
wxw wrote: post #14

> It’s striking the extent to which Claude Code and Codex are proving to be quite sticky; whichever harness you start working with is likely to be the one you stick with, and that figures to be even more the case with non-technical users. My experience has been quite the opposite. I was using Claude Code almost exclusively this winter/spring and swapped to Codex earlier this summer. It took no time whatsoever to swit…

For personal use I agree. For companies, these decisions are very sticky. Companies go through a lot of red tape to get anything purchased and approved, then they discourage change because it's a lot of work. So the product that gets a foothold in a company sticks for a long time. Then a couple years later a sales person convinces an exec that they can save some money by switching, so the switching game begins. Not n…

Every company that I've worked with that provided models internally did so through LiteLLM and offered both Anthropic and OpenAI models so it was trivial to switch between them.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#107

Post by nl »

> because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn’t it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source?

Is this an assertion that is backed by evidence?

From the Elon/OpenAI trial:

> On the stand in a California federal court on Thursday, Elon Musk was asked if xAI has used distillation techniques on OpenAI models to train Grok, and he asserted it was a general practice among AI companies. Asked if that meant “yes,” he said, “Partly.”

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/30/elon-musk-testifies-that-x...

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#108

Post by chrsw »

nl wrote: post #95
chrsw wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. We need open weights, open code and open data. If nobody else can reproduce what someone did there will always be security questions. Even if we can reproduce it there could still be security concerns but it's more realistic to investigate yourself.

I'm all for open models, but people seem to misunderstand what they are. They aren't the same thing as open source code! > open weights, open code and open data Even if you have all these things you still can't replicate a model because of randomness. You can backdoor a model with less than 1000 examples and it is impossible to detect.

You don't want to replicate the exact model, you want to build a system of similar capabilities.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#110

Post by vrm »

cyanydeez wrote: post #102
tristanj wrote: post #29

The people who are most afraid of Chinese models are the VCs who poured into Anthropic and OpenAI at astronomically high valuations. Anthropic is valued at $1.2T and OpenAI is targeting $850B. These astronomical valuations were built on the premise that these labs would generate massive profits from premium API pricing, but the Chinese labs are completely undercutting this strategy by releasing excellent open models…

mmm, the chinese models are also working on local GPUs at consumer grades. so theyre not just drainig cloud moats.

good luck running a 2.4T model on any local hardware. it’s not gonna happen. the arrow is to specialized hardware at least for the smartest models
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