[dead]
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
811–820 of 978 posts
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#812> I have serious concerns about how these models might reflect Chinese government perspectives (try asking them about Tiananmen Square). And I have serious concerns about the American ones. Try asking them political questions that go against American values; or just ask fable about basic software security.
I had a hn scrapper and feed daily hn front page posts to llms which summarizes stories and comment section consensus. The model (deepseek v4 flash) completely refused to work for this article because there are scattered (like 5?) mentions to the Tiananmen Square incident in the article and comments.
It's more serious than "arguing with a machine with political bias". If your service depends on a Chinese model, all it takes to get compromised is someone sneaking in one of those CCP red lines into their user content. Unless you use an uncensored version.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#813This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open. They care about zero data retention (and sticking with whatever vendor they're already using). This blog post is suspiciously close to being a restatement of what Alex Karp recently said on CNBC[0]. It's important to remember he's…
maybe cos llama was shite?
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#814Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> androids and iphones are approximately the same thing
Yet...
Android holds 70.6% of global active devices to iOS at 28.7%, but iOS captures 64.2% of consumer app spend. [1]
Possible, certainly. But this case also applies to China and its "open-weights" strategy. They won't be able to form companies either or get ahead.
[1] https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/mobile-os-market-share-2...
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#815People say this but windows and mac won the os wars and consumer linux distros are dead. No one I know uses open weights models to code day-to-day and very few use open weights models in prod for most llm tasks. This is less true for image/video stuff, where I think the competition is more vibrant.
I think the best gauge is company spend. Open weight models are a very small share compared to frontier models, and I'd bet that many companies mostly using ow models would switch to frontier if they could afford it. I also think most companies who are picking ow over frontier probably have deeper financial issues they should focus on.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#816Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sure a lot of people here do. I wouldn’t exactly call this a representative sample.
It’s a sample of the forerunners See: product adoption cycle
I encountered multiple people in HN that had Apple Vision Pro. How many people here use Linux? Have flagship model phones? Drank soylent? Microdosed LSD?
Extrapolating based on what you see on HN doesn’t make sense.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#817Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least China is being consistent: they do not give a single f*ck about intellectual property or copyright…but they also give away all this distilled knowledge away for free. I’m not an American so I don’t particularly like the idea of giving an American cartel of AI companies having so much power over this technology. I don’t necessarily buy into the “China bad”, “they are communists” and all that BS either. I will…
This is proof that America has forgot it's own history. America was founded by men who hated intellectual property, who stole and smuggled the plans and expertise for textile machinery out of the United Kingdom. A gross intellectual property violation. Why? Because they were being exploited by that system. The UK was using the American colonies for raw material and keeping the machinery in the UK for finished goods.…
Amen! Europe used to complain about the US stealing their intellectual property! The nuclear bomb would have been possible if not for Jewish scientists from Europe going to America! So until about 100 years ago, US was FAR behind Europe in technology and science.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#818The 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…
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…
Well that's kind of the point of the article. That in order to "win", the US needs an incentive structure that encourages open models.
I'm not sure what that looks like though.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#819I do not understand the logic going into these companies. Flagrantly violate all IP in Human history, essentially claiming domain over the heritage of Humanity... And... Try to privatize it? When the technology -- and data -- are both public domain to begin with? It is ming-boggling stupidity. If there is talk of bailouts as the dust settles, there it would just be further evidence the system is ethically, financiall…
At least China is being consistent: they do not give a single f*ck about intellectual property or copyright…but they also give away all this distilled knowledge away for free. I’m not an American so I don’t particularly like the idea of giving an American cartel of AI companies having so much power over this technology. I don’t necessarily buy into the “China bad”, “they are communists” and all that BS either. I will…
They're dumping, dude. They subsidize important industries so they can give it way so cheaply that free markets can't compete, and when those companies fail, they swoop in and make a profit. uber did the same thing with taxis! This isn't a free resource - it costs billions to build out the infra and maintain the inference to provide this, and you think they're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts lol.
Come on bro at least admit you're happier giving china your data than the us lol. You're definitely not using european models I can tell.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#820Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Tesla had to build the charging infrastructure (and other fragmented companies followed), they had to educate customers, they had to fight dealership requirements, they had to build up and secure the supply chain, etc. etc. The government then comes in and gives them subsidies after they’ve made it though all those filters.
The Chinese government prioritized critical minerals and made sure there was domestic mining and processing. Then they mandated that regional electricity companies install EV chargers. Then they provided consumer incentives to buy an EV (bypass license plate lotteries). Then they didn’t play favorites; so much so that when the domestic manufacturers were crap they allowed Tesla to come in and set up production. That raised the bar on suppliers and spurred actual competition from the local brands.
They build the conditions for actual competition to occur and then are letting the companies win or fail on their own merits, someone will be bictorious and they’ll be lean and mean. A true capitalist free market compared to the sweet protectionist deals the Big Three get.
Would BYD be allowed to build a car in the USA? Even a joint venture? Of course not, Washington is mulling not allowing Chinese cars to even be driven across the boarder for those silly Mexicans and Canadians who want to buy one.