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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

#791

Post by venusenvy47 »

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…

I'm not clear what you mean with "PC office productivity software" but it seems like Microsoft Office is the winner there. Isn't that professional?

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

#792

Post by davkan »

BoorishBears wrote: post #520
davkan wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If they had pivoted hard to digital they could have been what today? Having the first portable-ish digital camera they could have seen the true value of Fairchild's CCD business, got a stake/bought it/replicated done whatever it took to push the frontier of digital imaging and became the Kodak (old, film-era Kodak) of electronic imaging? There's no comparable business today because all the things they could have in…

They could have been category defining, sure. It would still be a fall though is my point. A fall from being a household name across the entire world to a company making components and niche hobbyist and professional equipment.

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

#793

Post by ericmay »

Isamu wrote: post #707
ericmay wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prove it

I’ll take a swing at it. Open Source is a form of sharing with the wider community. Closed Source is not sharing. Moral good is based on doing good outside of your own benefit (the opposite of selfishness.) Ergo it’s a kind of moral good. And I’m not even an advocate for open source.

This argument boils down to X is good, therefore more of X is good. But you can see how that breaks down with even trivial examples. Not a great argument.

The second piece of this "a moral good is based on doing good outside of your own benefit" - says who? Why? This logic is also faulty. You're also cargo-cutting self-interest in here as a moral failure when many good things depend on humans acting in their own self interest. For example I completely and selfishly installed a new tree at my house. But the community benefits from carbon capture, shade, &c.

I understand the sentiment you have here and I think for everyday use and having some guiding principles it is probably fine, but don't confuse this for a principle that is actually examined. You can find contradictions rather easily, never mind solid arguments which expose cases where what you think is true is not really true and so forth.

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

#794

Post by frollogaston »

paxys wrote: post #223

This entire piece boils down to “I like open source therefore it is winning”. Everyone here has already raised good counterpoints, but one more is that all the companies publishing open weights models are heavily VC funded. What is their exit strategy? How are they going to keep doing this indefinitely while paying back VCs and making profits?

Basically. The article doesn't say in what way they're winning or what the US should do.

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

#795

Post by andsoitis »

shimman wrote: post #640
andsoitis wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that AI will drive the future GDP is a very different thing from saying an economy relies on the stock price of a few AI companies.

Okay but political leadership of the US are literally are staking the future of GDP on exactly those few AI companies... $1.4trillion so far while universal childcare would only cost $40 billion a year. It's a sick joke.

> political leadership of the US are literally are staking the future of GDP on exactly those few AI companies... $1.4trillion so far

Can you explain where you get that number from?

The information I have:

a) The government took a nearly $9 billion stake in Intel to support its chip-making efforts.

b) The Pentagon took a $400 million equity stake in MP Materials, a rare-earth miner.

c) Sam Altman has advocated that the US government take equity stakes in AI companies. Sen Bernie Sanders wants the US government to take 50% stake in AI companies! Nothing has come of it though.

d) Defense department AI contract value rose to $90.7B in 2026.

So I'm super curious where you pulled that $1.4T number from.

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

#796

Post by gitgud »

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…

> Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to.

I would argue mainframes rebranded to "cloud" which is ubiquitous and more people interact with this computer than any other type of device... only difference is that it's a browser instead of a terminal

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

#798

Post by leoc »

SideQuark wrote: post #656
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…

> 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. Not likely. The last 50 years had Moore’s law growth in compute. That’s over. Frontier models are roughly compressed all written text and a large part of images. Those don’t compress forever, and likely not a ton more than…

It's probably not so bad. (I am not an expert on anything.) The big blocker is probably a roughly single-order-of-magnitude decrease in the cost per MiB of VRAM. (That obviously goes out the window if the LLM frontier people find, in the nearish future, new ways to do more with more: to significantly push up the threshold of diminishing returns from more VRAM or other resources. But that doesn't seem to be waiting to happen.) That's not clearly unachievable, especially given that ASML has apparently already made significant efficiency gains recently while there's no shortage of demand to justify R&D right now. Many customers are also likely to increase their hardware budgets: the kind of organisation that used to pay big money for Sun workstations is likely to consider spending that kind of money again if it saves them several hundred dollars a month in LLM plans.

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

#799

Post by mvkel »

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…

Define "winning."

Open source is cheap, yet its operating systems are the least-popular. But their existence is critical to a healthy market.

It's not zero sum.

What you're describing is how things become commoditized, but many companies are excellent at ensuring they aren't seen as commodities

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

#800

Post by zhoBEENG »

Balgair wrote: post #515

"Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to lar…

Thanks for sharing the quote, it's really great. I believe he is correct, but I am not sure I yet agree with your assertion that we know that LLMs are more like alarm clocks than battleships.

I think they are more like watercraft in general. Some are small, and they have their uses. Some are big, and they have their uses. But it is the nation with the most aircraft carriers that is truly sovereign.

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