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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#351

Post by nunez »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #236
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…

> 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 error as it relates to their actual use I notice that the article, and this discussion, hasn't mentioned or considered local models. We can already run a low-spec model on a laptop. Because there is demand for this, it will improve and we…

This will matter A LOT more after Apple gets serious about integrating AI into the OS.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#353

Post by shunia_huang »

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…

But Dario said (and maybe more ppl) that Chinese models are just distillation of their model and training data, so I guess your first point is invalid?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#354

Post by bornfreddy »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #295
AlexCoventry wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Oh give me a break. Using a Chinese LLM will not put a Marxist under your bed. Did you know Gemini is shockingly bad at French poetry? Hasn’t stopped me for using it for all other tasks though.

> Using a Chinese LLM will not put a Marxist under your bed.

Interesting tangent - it might be taught to introduce stealthy backdoors in your company though. Maybe even across multiple PRs where each session puts a small chink in the armor, and together they allow unlimited access to the attacker who knows about them.

After all, LLMs are mostly black boxes. How comfortable would you be running a Chinese compiler?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#356

Post by byzantinegene »

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 reselling of fixed price plans by resellers are causing american labs to lose alot of money and that's why they're trying really hard to stamp it down.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#357

Post by Gigachad »

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…

The problem is these AI companies are running at a loss with the hopes of pumping the prices after everyone is hooked. Now they are locked in at selling API access at rock bottom price. The valuations won't hold.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#358

Post by michaelt »

gmerc wrote: post #306
larrysalibra wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He’s glossing over the reason they are not: 90% profit margin of Nvidia. Power is only a small part, single digit, it will eventually matter but does not really today. What is the cost of AI? The single largest ingredient is Nvidia profit margin. Huawei accelerators are not as efficiency yet, but they don’t nearly extract as much margin. Why would future revenue stay with the labs given this situation? This whole thi…

> Power is only a small part, single digit, it will eventually matter but does not really today.

Sorta yes, sorta no.

A single 5090 consumes 450W - at Californian energy prices of $0.38 per kWh that's $0.17 per hour. And the card itself costs $4100 on amazon. So after 2.75 years running at full power 24/7 you'll have spent more on electricity than on the card. I would have thought most data centres being built today would have a design life longer than 3 years.

Of course you can throttle the cards to ~300W without losing too much performance. But also you need more than a single 24GB card to run most modern LLMs.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#359

Post by shunia_huang »

kubb wrote: post #310
killingtime74 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That plus they don’t distill so they have worse RL examples.

But they both spent tons of money on data collecting/labeling/generation, how is it bad compared to distillation? I thought their data are much better if they spent that much, and it seems they are stupid because with that much of resources putting in there with merely no output compared to the frontier models.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#360

Post by itake »

TripolitianFish wrote: post #326
itake wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA, multiple political parties balance each out other. In China, there is 1 party. 1 view. 1 definition of the Truth.

I’d love to live in the USA you’re talking about friend. This is just oriental despotism paranoia, whatever cutsie repetition slogan you come up with is not a serious argument.

I've traveled to China ~5x [0], visited a range of cities Tier 1-3 over a collective 5 months, and grew up in the USA. I also currently live in Vietnam (~3.5 years) and spent 5.5 years working for a Singaporean company and a team stationed in Beijing.

I don't really know how else to express my experiences living in, working with, and interacting with people in both of these countries.

Perhaps you can share how life was like for you in China? Which cities were you in? What made you feel that way about China?

[0] - not including HK (~7 trips?) or TW (3 trips)

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