781–790 of 978 posts
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?
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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…
I am also confused by this point. The American government could force OpenAI and Anthropic to open their models, but then they would instantly evaporate, right? It doesn't seem like a choice that they can make, so framing it as a "winning" strategy doesn't make any sense to me. In what world could those companies have existed and opened their models?
What is the author suggesting the US or US companies do exactly? The Chinese models wouldn't exist if there weren't closed US models to copy, so this isn't a game both sides can play.
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. Phones are constrained by battery power and memory does not shrink as fast as CPU/GPU, so unless there's a battery breakthrough and/or memory breakthrough, you're not fitting 100Gb of RAM on your phone in 10 years. Absolut…
I'm not saying we are at peak memory but future gains are going to come increasingly slower.
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> 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.
Yes, and then they would be reinventing the company owned data center that most big companies have just spent over a decade moving away from. I don't think companies will do that when there are multiple vendors competing to provide that service at what are quite reasonable prices when you consider what paying a human for similar output would cost.
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Kodak was definitely mismanaged in many ways but you are correct in your analysis. If they had pivoted hard to digital they could have been what today? Nikon? Fujifilm? These are known brands that are bigger than Kodak is today but they are nothing compared to what Kodak was. At its peak Kodak was one of the (the?) most well known brands on the entire planet. Anywhere in the world if someone snapped a photo Kodak was…
Kodak, like Xerox had it all under one roof their management at the time turned their back on the future… IBM was the same way, ironically, the fourth Yankee clipper company had to be dragged into using two types of glasses sitting on the shelf that were patented/created in the early 1960s, both of which later became known as gorilla glass. Steve Jobs had to call them (Corning) multiple times to get them to finally l…
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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.
Extremely subsidized agentic search is very superior to Google at the moment, and of course it is. Google is a public company. The AI summary model has to work instantly, is likely as dumb as a 8T param model, and gives you incorrect details constantly. This sucks so much for Google. If you click on "AI Mode," suddenly the facts become more accurate.
Of course, if I want a real answer I happen to go to claude.ai, set it to a the best model, wait for a minute, and use many watts of energy. Slow agentic search that takes many seconds, and is greatly subsidized, is certainly better. This should not be a surprise, should it?
I think it was on a sub like r/singularity that I saw a post along the lines of "of course most people think that 'AI' sucks, as normies are interacting with 8T param models."
tone: genuinely confused about the world, not criticizing
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> 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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I think it's as simple as looking at the incentive structure. The Chinese gov't has incentive to kneecap US monopoly on frontier models. It makes sense for them to continue down this course if it strengthens their position.
The Chinese gov't and also the rest of humanity... I'm not sure how everyone in the US forgot that monopolies are bad
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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.