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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#151

Post by cyanydeez »

nl wrote: post #99
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…

Have you ever worked with a non-programmer and helped them setup their AI workflows? You install MCP connectors, specific skills, work around model/harness quirks, set security boundaries etc. It's a lot of work, and most people will never want to change it once they have it working.

we have AI. WHAT is it good for if a harness cant just take a api endpoint and some permissions and duplicate.

its so distracting seeing these types of confision.

every plugin is already just multimodaling their targets.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#152

Post by not2b »

chuckadams wrote: post #78
grim_io wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forbidding distillation is like forbidding using a compiler to make another(perhaps better, more efficient) compiler.

Lots of software licenses have “non-compete” clauses that forbid you from using it to develop a competing product. Wouldn’t surprise me if there was a compiler or two out there with that restriction, most likely niche languages.

It's been common in electronic design automation tools to have license terms like that (forbidding use to create a competing product). However, competing companies have often found workarounds, either by finding loopholes or just breaking rules and hoping not to get caught.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#153

Post by galacticaactual »

mrinterweb wrote: post #51
jke_kang wrote: post #39

People seem to conflate "made in China" with "can't be trusted." id argue the bigger distinction is open vs. closed. An open model can be audited, fine-tuned, and technically run entirely on your own hardware. A closed model is basically "trust us."

Open weight models are much more auditable than closed models, but could still hide backdoors that could be near impossible to detect.

Oh really. How'd that work out for security in open source.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#154

Post by c0decracker »

spenvo wrote: post #148

"Anthropic and OpenAI likely have among the lowest costs per unit of frontier-quality intelligence" That's a big claim that his whole thesis rests on but is largely not backed up. Where are the apples-to-apples tokens-to-answer benchmarks that he's using - doesn't look like there are any, just a handwavy implication that US models are more token efficient, which they may be. But how is there so little effort in estab…

But.. if you are running Chinese model in the US, what difference does it make? Isn't the whole "scare" (khm khm) with Kimis is that now I don't need Claude, cause I can run Kimi on my own hardware in my own datacenter and it's maybe not as good as Claude July edition but it's is as good as Claude January edition.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#155

Post by ignoramous »

abernard1 wrote: post #118
mediaman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (quite excellent) article discusses several of your points. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. - Commodity market profitability is determined by marginal cost of production. LLMs have marginal cost; traditional software does not. - Models are not free. Downloading them is free. Running them is not. This has manufacturing economics, not software economics; the idea that they are "free" is an economic category…

" - The highest tier Chinese models are not more economical than US frontier models. Try GLM 5.2 and see how much it costs to do real work. I did, and it was more expensive than GPT 5.6." This is a flatly false statement for most things powering backend applications. The AI consumer "doing real work" model, either for analysis, chat, or coding could well be more cost effective with closed frontier models. But most of…

> "The highest tier Chinese models are not more economical than US frontier models. Try GLM 5.2 and see how much it costs to do real work. I did, and it was more expensive than GPT 5.6." This is a flatly false statement.

It may not be false but may be a "category error" [0]. Reserved GPU pricing & bulk inference pricing is 3x to 6x cheaper than "API rates", but renting your own GPU cluster (in this crunch) to run a 600b+ open weights is going to be "more expensive than GPT 5.6".

Even then, it remains to be seen if Huawei will pull their weight (and match up to Nvidia) as spectacularly as their fellow Chinese AI Labs have. If so, the WAICO alliance is ready to go all-in.

[0] Ben, and probably other "influencers" in this space, may be prone (knowingly or unknowingly) to favour points that make their conclusion for them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning).

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#156

Post by _factor »

wyrdcurt wrote: post #113
mrinterweb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open weight models are much more auditable than closed models, but could still hide backdoors that could be near impossible to detect.

In my opinion, the big issue with that argument is that advances in interpretability research and steering conceivably could, and probably will, render moot that (as of now, purely hypothetical) risk of subtle sabotage for open-weight models... but not for closed models.

It’s not hypothetical. Magic strings are a known and implemented feature for standard model interaction. Nearly impossible to detect unless you know where to look with current technology.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#157

Post by sergiotapia »

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…

My same progression here. I started with ChatGPT website, then Anthropic website, then Cursor, then Windsurf!, then claude, then opencode, then ohmypi, then codex, finally back on Cursor now because I think they cracked the UX for what great dev looks like. The grok 4.5 fast model + cursor ergonomics is insanely good!

The cost of me moving around these different AI models and harnesses was pretty much 0.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#158

Post by striking »

gruez wrote: post #143
striking wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm arguing we can't trust retail prices because the marginal pricing isn't meaningfully connected to it anyway. But if we have to look at what we think margins might look like, DeepSeek continues to host v4 Flash at the existing price despite competitors beating it in price ( https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash ), so there's at least one example of a Chinese lab charging a predetermined price despite co…

>DeepSeek continues to host v4 Flash at the existing price despite competitors beating it in price ( https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash ), their competitors are discounted at around 33%, so it's safe to say that's the margin, maybe less if their competitors have worse caching or quantization. Meanwhile claude code/codex resellers selling tokens for 90% off API price, presumably by reselling usage from f…

The fixed consumption plans are offering several times their worth compared to API pricing with completely free cache reads: https://she-llac.com/claude-limits

I look at that and think that they must be losing money hand over fist on something like this, not that this shows what their margins are like. If their margins are like this then I don't see why they'd be raising money and shuffling it around in circles.

> If it's really that easy to get better coding performance, why haven't the chinese labs replicated it?

Nobody said it would be easy! I just think it's possible, and that presumably they will get around to doing it at some point.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#159

Post by jay_kyburz »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #145
eli wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems only fair that if LLMs can use copyrighted data for training then they should be able to use cannot-be-copyrighted output of other LLMs. But barring the terms of service from forbidding distillation seems like a tough sell. OpenAI shouldn't be allowed to decide what types of customers it wants and doesn't want?

> OpenAI shouldn't be allowed to decide what types of customers it wants and doesn't want? Correct. It shouldn't be allowed to do that.

Err.. I would like preserve my own right to decide who I'll do business with.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#160

Post by neutronicus »

OleksandrC wrote: post #6

The article makes a point about agent harnesses being sticky (the supposed moat). I have been building my own agent harness for a while, and I can tell with confidence that the harness almost does not matter, the entirety of the AI magic is the model itself. The harness can be almost barebones (like, for example, mini-swe-agent used for benchmarks), and yet the model still does the task just fine. So from my perspect…

Yeah it certainly feels like the harnesses are pretty minimal value add on the token pipe
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