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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

#831

Post by walrus01 »

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…

> - PCs destroyed minicomputers.

What's weird is that with "store your everything in the cloud and pay a monthly recurring subscription", we have now regressed to a 1960s/1970s timesharing revenue model for individual workstation computers.

The default new factory out of box workflow for "enrollment" in google services, iCloud or Microsoft-everything on a new ios, macos, windows or android personal computing device is clearly designed to sign people up for subscriptions.

And same general idea of "move all your servers to the cloud" recurring revenue for what is effectively the same as mainframe timesharing for key business functions, by renting VMs in GCP, Azure, AWS in perpetuity.

Yes, you can still use your desktop or laptop PC in 2026 with zero external third party subscriptions (other than maybe your residential home ISP), but how many non-tech people actually do so now?

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

#832

Post by mmonaghan »

henry2023 wrote: post #44
atleastoptimal wrote: post #34

AI models cost tens of millions to train. Offering them for free won’t justify the upfront costs. The Chinese model of model training/open sourcing only makes sense in the context of the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins.

Couldn’t you say the same argument about VC funded startups? They lose money following a strategic goal. The main difference here is if a startup goes underwater all the tech is usually lost. The Chinese weights are not going anywhere if the labs fail.

This is true for any company following an open source strategy. You'll have the weights but you'll need to run inference, figure out your system prompt, sampling, quantization, etc etc. Loads of tuning.

elasticsearch the first example that comes to mind. you can run it yourself but elastic gives you so many lessons learned and tunes ootb that it sings with relatively little effort, though still reqiures some.

about a million dbs i could make the same comparison for

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

#833

Post by bmitc »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #790
bmitc wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because the scale of the subsidization is unimaginably different.

How much is it?

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

#834

Post by ryukoposting »

gallerdude wrote: post #658
ryukoposting wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. I see this as a fault with Meta's models, not a fault with the concept of open weights. The Llama family just aren't very useful. They make flowery prose but they're terrible at tool calling [1][2][3] so there just isn't much I can actually accomplish with them. [1] https://gorilla.…

If the models were the quality of GPT-5.6, or Opus 4.8, would Meta really reap any benefits? Maybe in a zero-sum way, because OpenAI and Anthropic would lose. But I'm not sure they'd be that much more ahead either.

Another strong point. LLMs are a technology, not a product.

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

#835

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #775
deadbabe wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google search still happens, it’s just your agent doing it.

Google search is basically Gemini now. You get a Gemini summation including several links.

"You get a Gemini summation including several links."

Who does "you" refer to

Me, I don't get a Gemini summation (Tested with old version of Chrome)

As such I do not believe that "Google search is basically Gemini now"

I believe Google search is still scanning through a doclist to find which documents, if any, contain words parsed from a query. These documents are pointed to by the URLs I get in the SERPs

I do not get any Gemini summation

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

#836

Post by linzhangrun »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #423
lambda wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 10-15 years? The current rate is closer to 10-15 months. 15 months ago, the top model on the Artificial Analysis index was GPT-o3. It scores 30 on the Artificial Analysis index. Today, you can easily run Qwen 3.6 27B on a variety of consumer hardware. It scores…

> 10-15 years? The current rate is closer to 10-15 months. The leaps between models have gotten smaller and smaller. 2023-2024 models were rocketing up in quality. 2024-2025 I’d say was pretty impressive too. But 2025-2026? Very easy to feel the slowing pace of improvement. I agree 10-15 years is overly conservative but 10-15mo is far too bullish.

The speed of model releases, in my view, is actually getting faster and faster. There were nearly nine months between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. And now in just over one month, major models already included Claude Fable 5, Claude Sonnet 5, the GPT-5.6 series, Kimi K3, GLM 5.2, Qwen 3.8 Max, Grok 4.5... and the official DeepSeek V4 release is coming soon.

Iteration speed is now measured in days.

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

#837

Post by linzhangrun »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #491
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, OpenAI and Anthropic say the Chinese models are only as good because they distill their models. How true is that. I am sure it adds something. But is it more like a marginal 1% improvement or something really significant?

if distilling was so easy and could give you frontier LLM on openai/anthropic output, then how come there are no hundreds of frontier labs in the US market, all distilling and competing for the TRILLION dollar market valuation ???? its all bs spread by oai/anthropic in order to ban open weight models and monopolize the market for two US companies and protect their trillion dollar valuations

> ban open weight models

I'm pretty sure that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has the ability to ban anything in China lol

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

#838

Post by anigbrowl »

echelon wrote: post #305
atishay811 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is the factory of the world. They don't need software to win. Rather they prefer software is free and they can win in hardware. So if AI inference is free, they can put it in as many hardware components as possible and sell them in the market - think toys, cars, tools with chips manufactured in china optimized for the use case. In long term you tend to commoditize hardware. We have thousands of device types of…

We just sacrificed our entire lucrative SaaS market to this, and perhaps even big tech itself. To the altar of AI. And now it's all going to become commoditized. Billion dollar software will be commodity. Salesforce. There are orgs already moving to their own internal tools. It does not seem hard now to rebuilt Google Search, Google Chrome, Gmail, Gsuite, Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare, Vimeo, Twilio, or even Stripe. Th…

You're right about it being relatively easy ro build your own version of something right now in the proverbial garage. But startups will still have to compete with the network effects of the large firms and the increasing push for data sovereignty from non-US customers. Not to say it's not possible, just that the technology alone isn't sufficient.

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

#839

Post by yanhangyhy »

I highly recommend everyone read a science fiction novella called Full-Spectrum Barrage Jamming, especially if you are interested in China-US relations.

Its author is Liu Cixin, whose other work The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award and was adapted into a TV series by Netflix. His thinking carries a heavy shadow of Mao Zedong's strategic philosophy. This novella is very intriguing—it is set during a time in the past when the gap between China and the US was immense, and people were trying to imagine how China could win if a war broke out. I forgot the exact details, but the general concept is to force a technological regression through electronic warfare, knocking out all smart devices. By doing this, both China and the US are dragged down to the exact same technological baseline, allowing China to win the war.

Similarly, when facing the nuclear threat from the former Soviet Union, Mao’s idea was to abandon Chinese territory and launch a counter-offensive directly into Soviet land instead. Their underlying logic is similar: if the gap between us is too vast, we don't follow the traditional route of trying to catch up; instead, we find a way to drag your absolute advantage down to our level.

He has written many novels, and I can say with full responsibility that they are incredibly revealing when it comes to understanding the behavior and mindset of the Chinese people.

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

#840

Post by fhe »

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…

Apple seems a counter example, no?
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