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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

#851

Post by alexhans »

slashdave wrote: post #780
alexhans wrote: post #221

Every Linux user or FOSS enthusiast knows the acronym FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, which were a set of techniques commonly used to disparage efforts of open source communities. Linux was evil and anticapitalist and we needed to use "CorporateTool" and ban/restrict Linux. The same companies later would be running their entire infrastructures on it and on open source. With AI, open weights and local models, we wil…

Huh? So it was some grand conspiracy that keeps Windows in use in the vast majority of businesses? Delusional

If you actually are interested in understanding what I said, you can look at these links:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt

- https://www.theregister.com/software/2001/06/02/ballmer-linu...

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

#852

Post by danny_codes »

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.

The scale of public spend is probably much higher in the US..

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

#854

Post by efitz »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #835
UncleOxidant wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

A typical US user using a typical browser with typical settings gets an AI summary above search results.

If this doesn’t describe you, then ymmv. Talk to your government or turn down your content filtering or reset the default settings in your browser, if you want to see what we see.

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

#855

Post by yorwba »

randbyte wrote: post #687
idontwantthis wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I still don't get it. Like China could be come the world's leading producer of chocolate...if they started giving away chocolate for free. Would we be having this conversation saying that Switzerland lost because they were greedy and protectionist and didn't decide to give away their chocolate for free first (I realize Switzerland probably isn't actually the world's top producer of chocolate).

Long history of open source projects already have answers on how to monetize a free and complex open source product. - Low development cost: collaborative efforts from open source contributors, innovative model training and serving for llm (Chinese models costs a fraction to train and their local chip design and manufacturing are catching up, plus cheap electricity) - monetizing by selling hosted services, while leav…

The idea that Chinese models cost less to train seems to be based on that one time DeepSeek estimated the training cost for their V3 model at GPU rental rates as $5 million, and comparing this to other companies' entire R&D budgets. Yet DeepSeek raised $7 billion of fresh money last month, enough to train more than 1000 such models. What gives?

- You need to train lots of experimental models to dial in the training process just right for the one model that actually gets released in the end. Fortunately, these can be smaller.

- However, everyone is training much bigger models now, and doing a lot of RL rollouts on top.

- You can't get the GPUs for this piecemeal at rental rates because they need to be wired together using high-bandwidth interconnects.

- Nvidia GPUs are much more expensive in China, and local alternatives are still immature and not as efficient. Some companies have gotten around this using data centers in Singapore, which should tell you that electricity prices are not the primary consideration.

- The one line item where Chinese companies can probably save quite a bit of money is salaries for rank-and-file researchers.

In any case, they need to make back that money somehow. Giving away freebies isn't going to cut it.

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

#856

Post by janalsncm »

Tostino wrote: post #848
janalsncm wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He was their “chief AI scientist” (what an abomination of a title) and led FAIR. Maybe it’s true he was not working on LLMs but I can’t even imagine what more important thing he could be doing at Meta.

Which brings me to my other point. If you want to compete with serious labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Alibaba) you need to be smart and focused, not messing around.

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

#857

Post by fittingopposite »

timmytokyo wrote: post #706
mrdevlar wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey guys I found one, this guy thinks Machine Jesus is going to save him. I'm trying to figure out if my advice to you should be to do more drugs or less. I am uncertain, perhaps I'll ask an AI.

Poe's Law. Look it up.

Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

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

#858

Post by resters »

azinman2 wrote: post #422
resters wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I completely agree with your take, I think everyone has been surprised by how quickly LLMs have become highly useful and extremely powerful, and by how possible it is for relatively smaller models to also be highly useful. Given that, I would expect that in hindsight OpenAI and Anthropic would spend 40% of what they have on compute if starting over and knowing the actual landscape. The massive capital allocatio…

Don’t forget it took that huge spend to publish the papers and get to the models we have. It’s not obvious that without them we’d have LLMs springing up out of China or anywhere else.

Perhaps, but things like Sora burned a lot of compute -- a high percentage.

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

#859

Post by bni »

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…

What about AWS, Azure, cloud computing?
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