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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

#841

Post by kinj28 »

Maybe a tangent point but quality of their open weights is a directly proportional to what’s gone in while training. IMHO Chinese models must have gotten heavily biased “official Chinese view” in most topics of how it sees the world. So for AGI purposes — yes a challenge would be win in the west for these open weights

I tried DeepSeek agent to get answers from Chinese models on some tough questions regarding Chinese govt and it refused. I am very keen to go a level deep and host the model and see what it really gives an answer

https://x.com/jinen83/status/2079406993979383902?s=46&t=D7hQ...

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

#842

Post by nojvek »

janalsncm wrote: post #330
anvuong wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2-3 years ago MAIR was on a roll with Llama 1 2 3, Zuck was on his rehab tour to be a cool guy, and Meta as a whole was pumping record numbers after record numbers. I can't believe how that falters so quickly after the addition of Alexdandr Wang.

I am no fan of Wang but he came after Llama got caught benchmaxxing Llama 4 rather than training a good model. My read is that Zuckerberg tried to buy his way out of the problem like he always does, and he ended up overpaying for a lemon. At the time the whole thing was led by Yann LeCun who seemed to spend more time arguing with people on Twitter than figuring out new techniques to make Llama the best. Meanwhile Dee…

Meta had the resource curse just like with Metaverse and VR headsets.

Meanwhile Chinese labs were forced to innovate with more efficient models.

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

#843

Post by daniel_iversen »

crubier wrote: post #826
SwellJoe wrote: post #562

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." I don't think it'll take 10-15 years. Gemma 4 31B in the 4-bit QAT is competitive with the frontier of less than three years ago and runs on any high-end 32GB gaming PC GPU or a large-ish Mac. The question is whether the frontier will continue to get better at…

Came here to say that, my bet is that in 3-4 years you'll be able to run Fable-level of intelligence models on your laptop or maybe even on you phone

But isn't there the raw intelligence of a smart model and then the practical intelligence fuelled by how many parameters it has? You probably will barely be able to fit a 70 billion parameter model on a phone in 3-4 years let alone a 2+ trillion parameter model... so it depends on what you call intelligence

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

#844

Post by Isamu »

ericmay wrote: post #793
Isamu wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll take a swing at it. Open Source is a form of sharing with the wider community. Closed Source is not sharing. Moral good is based on doing good outside of your own benefit (the opposite of selfishness.) Ergo it’s a kind of moral good. And I’m not even an advocate for open source.

This argument boils down to X is good, therefore more of X is good. But you can see how that breaks down with even trivial examples. Not a great argument. The second piece of this "a moral good is based on doing good outside of your own benefit" - says who? Why? This logic is also faulty. You're also cargo-cutting self-interest in here as a moral failure when many good things depend on humans acting in their own self…

Thanks for the discussion.

>This argument boils down to X is good, therefore more of X is good.

No, I only argued that it was a moral good, the kind of good. I actually may disagree with others about whether you should pursue a good just because it’s good.

>says who? Why?

Good question, it’s just a common framing that I see in classical discussions. I didn’t intend for it to be exclusive, I think there’s moral good outside of that.

>don't confuse this for a principle that is actually examined

I hear you, I think this is a simplified version suitable for an online comment. In particular I’m not saying that if you do something other than a moral good then you are doing something wrong. There are many actions that are morally neutral. Also it is possible to construct artificial situations where you may violate some moral good in pursuit of another.

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

#845

Post by jihoons »

api wrote: post #383
xandrius wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's interesting/funny is that the American LLM companies took from the public domain and copyrighted work to close all that content into a box they charge for. Then the Chinese took the distilled stuff out from that box and released it into the world for everyone.

This is part of why I can't feel bad for them. The training data is mostly pirated. Whining about Chinese labs training off American frontier models is "waaah you pirated my pirated stuff!" The tech itself is amazing and fascinating and cool, but the industry is a mass piracy operation.

i partially agree. distillation is non-ethical; but so are the supposed way that the ai models are trained. they are often also derived from data sets that are not intended/full-consented

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

#846

Post by [deleted] »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #679
foo12bar wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would anyone besides those within China themselves use a completely closed and hidden model from China for their critical business needs?

If the outputs are independently verifiable at low cost, and the US models refuse to even try because somebody sneezed nearby and it sounded like "antigen" and not "achoo"... yeah sure. Whatever works to get the job done. The hope is that AI will open up whole new sectors of economic activity. If you have to chose between exploring that space while potentially being exposed to Chinese tampering, versus just sitting o…

[deleted]

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

#847

Post by culi »

ilc wrote: post #700
culi wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you even read my comment? They explicitly DO share their training methodology in depth in Technical Reports on arXiv. DeepSeek completely revolutionized LLMs and every western LLM today uses or is inspired by the their innovations including Group Relative Policy Optimization and Multi-head Latent Attention.

Not the parts which matter to trust. Which is my point. You can state the math, but not why it won't discuss various topics, etc. Once you see the models waffling on subject with objective truths. You wonder what else is wrong. I do not exempt US models from this. They do it too, ask anything about politics, elections etc. And they can get... weird. It doesn't take much to create a systemic error class in a model at…

What the models will and won't discuss has nothing to do with the data its trained on. The locally hosted models don't have any censorship anyways. There's no way to get rid of the censorship in the American models

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

#848

Post by Tostino »

janalsncm wrote: post #330
anvuong wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2-3 years ago MAIR was on a roll with Llama 1 2 3, Zuck was on his rehab tour to be a cool guy, and Meta as a whole was pumping record numbers after record numbers. I can't believe how that falters so quickly after the addition of Alexdandr Wang.

I am no fan of Wang but he came after Llama got caught benchmaxxing Llama 4 rather than training a good model. My read is that Zuckerberg tried to buy his way out of the problem like he always does, and he ended up overpaying for a lemon. At the time the whole thing was led by Yann LeCun who seemed to spend more time arguing with people on Twitter than figuring out new techniques to make Llama the best. Meanwhile Dee…

> At the time the whole thing was led by Yann LeCun

He was not in charge of the Meta LLM stuff, from anything i've read over the past few years.

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

#850

Post by mmooss »

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…

> The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins.

The parent comment cherry-picks evidence. There are plenty of counter-examples:

  * Office productivity suites
  * Search engines
  * Email services
  * Cloud services
  * Accounting software
etc. If the LLM market ends up like search engines, one company will dominate.
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