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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

#801

Post by caycep »

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…

paranoid me feels like the artificial gpu/ram/ssd shortages are a plot by the VCs to forcefully reclaim central control via new age mainframes

one certainly cannot buy a PC for cheap anymore

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

#802

Post by soerxpso »

apparent wrote: post #163
tyleo wrote: post #6

I’m suspicious of some quotes here, “80% of startups using Chinese models,” doesn’t seem quite right to me. I just interviewed at several startups and they were all using the US models. Maybe they have some minor use of Chinese models but the bread-and-butter of most of these businesses model use is the Claude and Codex subscriptions.

The full quote: > When entrepreneurs walk into the offices of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a big American venture-capital firm, the odds these days are that their startups are using AI models made in China. “I’d say 80% chance [they are] using a Chinese open-source model,” says Martin Casado, a partner at a16z. This is very different from what the author portrays. It may be the case that many pre-funded startups are u…

There's probably some selection bias in that stat, too. Based purely on vibes, I wouldn't be surprised if startups pitching to a16z are using open Chinese models slightly more often than startups pitching to other VCs.

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

#803

Post by derangedHorse »

ericmay wrote: post #627
derangedHorse wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine there’s a school where all the kids there are being tutored by the best. Also imagine a bunch of neighboring schools drastically falling behind that would need insane amounts of money to keep up. This becomes a problem because all the kids from the rich school will dominate the order schools. They’ll get even more money as time goes on from their kids paying it forward to the point where all other kids are bo…

Sure and to complete your analogy here, the rich schools realize that the curriculum they develop and put a lot of time and money into creating is just used by the cheap schools, so they stop developing it because nobody loses money for long and so neither the rich or cheap schools develop any new curriculum. Now what? The fundamental problem here is incentives and tactics. Either the models are actually better (whic…

> so they stop developing it because nobody loses money for long and so neither the rich or cheap schools develop any new curriculum

Why do you assume the poor schools wouldn't be smart enough to keep it going? It's very likely the can collectively beat the rich school now that the one other rich school opened access to their materials and led the charge.

> but if the compute and scale is needed to train the models, nobody will be able to do that profitably

But they would. Efficiently hosting models will be the real business and early access to models with incremental improvements will not be the moat once thought. The reason other companies don't feel they can compete is the same reason OAI and Anthropic will lose their lead. They banked too heavily on another player NOT leading the charge on open research and poured disgusting amounts of money at closed source models.

China has proved they can take the limited resources available to them and build something better than what the US is offering consumers [1]. I'm just waiting for other countries to start pitching in.

Reminds me of the NSA and their early battles with cryptographers who believed in open research.

[1] https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078984980588531855

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

#804

Post by chermi »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #742
chermi wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How did they pick winners and losers early days of Tesla? It demand side subsidy. No one else could meet it. It worked.

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

#805

Post by idontwantthis »

twobitshifter wrote: post #782
idontwantthis wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why did Google give Android away for free?

But they could do that because it didn’t cost them hundreds of billions of dollars to create Android and they could retain 99% of control over end users.

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

#806

Post by bigyabai »

fridder wrote: post #395
bee_rider wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the thinking inside NVIDIA is at the moment. They have countless examples to learn from here, about the danger of not being willing to cannibalize your high end products. But, of course, there’s a reason that there are lots of examples of this sort of failure. There’s plenty of competition that would be happy to attack them from below, though…

I also wonder what this moment will mean for chip design going forward. The fact that we are so constrained on the GPU side along with the success of unified memory with apple silicon does make me wonder what chips in 3-5 years will look like.

Unified Memory simply isn't viable at the scale that a full Nvidia cluster operates at, and it would hamstring the parallelism that gives these clusters an edge. The current solution of Mellanox-style interconnect is probably still going to be the status quo in 5 or 10 years.

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

#808

Post by 8note »

ericmay wrote: post #627
derangedHorse wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine there’s a school where all the kids there are being tutored by the best. Also imagine a bunch of neighboring schools drastically falling behind that would need insane amounts of money to keep up. This becomes a problem because all the kids from the rich school will dominate the order schools. They’ll get even more money as time goes on from their kids paying it forward to the point where all other kids are bo…

Sure and to complete your analogy here, the rich schools realize that the curriculum they develop and put a lot of time and money into creating is just used by the cheap schools, so they stop developing it because nobody loses money for long and so neither the rich or cheap schools develop any new curriculum. Now what? The fundamental problem here is incentives and tactics. Either the models are actually better (whic…

iphone is 50x better? because you get a blue box around your text rather than green?

androids and iphones are approximately the same thing

the kinda obvious direction LLM training can go is into the direction of particle physics, and the training is set up democratically and through universities and via multi-state funding

then the resulting weights end up open, the same as the particle detection data

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

#809

Post by Paradigm2020 »

applicative wrote: post #150
TheArcane wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

masking the active genocide & war crimes in Palestine

Isn’t Gaza like 10% more populous than on the day its leadership decided to do a final solution on the Jews?

I would really like to know where you found that number and that idea...

Gaza is depending on the source 4.5 to 5.8% less populous currently and >10% less populous than had been projected.

And no Hamas didn't declare final solution. They were actively surprised how long they could kill people, makes sense given that the distance to the nearest military base was less than 50km...

However the Israeli leadership, some of who call them untermensch¹, have shrunk their living space by more than 10% making the largest, current times, concentrationcamp² even worse than it was before.

[1] “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-ministe...

[2] note that Hajo Meyer, a holocaust survivor, already called it this in 2005... https://www.sp.nl/nieuws/tribune-09-2006-interview-hajo-meye...

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

#810

Post by elendilm »

ericmay wrote: post #627
derangedHorse wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine there’s a school where all the kids there are being tutored by the best. Also imagine a bunch of neighboring schools drastically falling behind that would need insane amounts of money to keep up. This becomes a problem because all the kids from the rich school will dominate the order schools. They’ll get even more money as time goes on from their kids paying it forward to the point where all other kids are bo…

Sure and to complete your analogy here, the rich schools realize that the curriculum they develop and put a lot of time and money into creating is just used by the cheap schools, so they stop developing it because nobody loses money for long and so neither the rich or cheap schools develop any new curriculum. Now what? The fundamental problem here is incentives and tactics. Either the models are actually better (whic…

Try selecting a file in your 50x iphone - triple copy of the same file or ateast double copy (assuming os will post a soft link). If a large file then you are toast.

Try mmapping > 5GB file in your 50x better iPhone.

Try running any service in the background.

The list goes on and on.

Your 50x better suddenly became 50x worse compared to a much cheaper android.

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