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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#271

Post by ryeguy »

VulgarExigency wrote: post #121
lemax wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this assumes Chinese models will not achieve token cost optimization. Intelligence needs are fairly flat for many tasks, and the Chinese models have caught up on this front. Next they achieve greater token cost efficiency and we don’t need OpenAI.

The model that is most optimized around token cost is, in fact, Chinese. DeepSeek is astoundingly cheap by default, but if you use it from Reasonix (the harness optimized around its cache), it becomes even cheaper.

I keep seeing mention of the cache, what's special about it? All frontier llms have prefix caching, what is special about deepseek's approach?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#272

Post by riskd »

alex1138 wrote: post #256
tristanj wrote: post #29

The people who are most afraid of Chinese models are the VCs who poured into Anthropic and OpenAI at astronomically high valuations. Anthropic is valued at $1.2T and OpenAI is targeting $850B. These astronomical valuations were built on the premise that these labs would generate massive profits from premium API pricing, but the Chinese labs are completely undercutting this strategy by releasing excellent open models…

I'm a civilian, not a VC. In my own case, I'm worried how many things pass through the CCP. How censorship of mentions of Tiananmen Square is something they're quite interested in

How exhausting.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#273

Post by itake »

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #260
kinj28 wrote: post #253

I am afraid — if Chinese models go mainstream it has a clear way of pushing its narrative way beyond its otherwise borders. More like a Trojan horse it is for the Chinese. Here is a quick example of how Chinese deepseeks agent works kn its underlying model) when asked a tough question https://x.com/jinen83/status/2079406993979383902?s=46&t=D7hQ...

Is this something that is more true of a Chinese model than any other model of a different national origin? Genuine question: generalized up from individual models to “models from country X”, is there any country that doesn’t have this exact risk?

In the USA, multiple political parties balance each out other.

In China, there is 1 party. 1 view. 1 definition of the Truth.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#274

Post by pishpash »

larrysalibra wrote: post #228
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…

Ben's article "distills" down to 2 reasons that US frontier labs shouldn't be "afraid": 1. US frontier lab unit economics are better 2. US frontier labs are moving up the stack making tools that are "stickiness" and will prevent users from switching. For 1...he doesn't provide any evidence for US lab unit economics being better...the major input to unit economics is electricity...which is cheaper in China. And buildi…

More basically, production cost matters only if inference is priced at commodity prices. That's not what VC's signed up for, which is rent-seeking.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#275

Post by alex1138 »

riskd wrote: post #272
alex1138 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a civilian, not a VC. In my own case, I'm worried how many things pass through the CCP. How censorship of mentions of Tiananmen Square is something they're quite interested in

How exhausting.

Why? Why is this not a concern?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#277

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #248
isodev wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how cool it would be if actual competition prevents Anthropic or OpenAI from becoming an Apple/Google kind of cartel. I don’t care if it comes from China or not.

[flagged]

Are you saying that the US companies are above that kind of behavior?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#278

Post by riskd »

ballon_monkey wrote: post #233

The 2 things people need to remember: 1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China. 2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via mod…

It’s perfectly fine for the “West” to influence the world though, right? Or is it only a problem because… they’re Chinese?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#279

Post by killingtime74 »

credit_guy wrote: post #185

People who claim that the Chinese open weight models have some type of manifest advantage don't realize that the close weight models have a huge advantage as well: the researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta are not dumb, they can read the white papers written by DeepSeek, Moonshot, etc, and they can inspect all those architectures and they can pick and choose the best tricks there are out there, and of…

If the Google and meta engineers are not dumb how come they consistently trail behind the frontier labs and even the Chinese labs with a fraction of the funding.

Probably bad leadership

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#280

Post by pishpash »

aurareturn wrote: post #269
SoftTalker wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Models are not free. Downloading them is free. Running them is not. Is this really different from traditional software? Downloading postgres is free. Running it is not. You either buy hardware and assume the costs of owning and running that, or you pay to run it in the cloud.

I think the point here is that it takes the same hardware to inference an open source model as OpenAI/Anthropic inference their models. IE, a lower param OpenAI/Anthropic model can compete with a higher param open source model. So even if you are an American company who downloaded Chinese models in hopes of saving in cost, you still have to beat OpenAI and Anthropic in $/task which is very tough to do over the long r…

No they don't. Are OpenAI and Anthropic charging at cost, or wish to? No.
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