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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

#861

Post by kaffekaka »

kmaitreys wrote: post #427
raincole wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except cloud services won over local-first apps. > Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) doing I'm not even sure in 10-15 years whether we're still going to have consumer PCs, or PCs at all.

I have similar thoughts. To those who feel on the contrary, I would genuinely like to understand why average consumer won't be priced out of hardware? The silicon industry is already quite centralised. Everywhere we already see the concept of ownership disappearing. It's quite difficult for me to visualise a non-dystopian future where our PCs are just mere screens and every compute happens on a remote cloud, owned by…

We are heading for Evil Startrek.

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

#862

Post by ItsBob »

wtfHN26 wrote: post #755
ItsBob wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, at this point I don't care about that. I don't use it for medical stuff or anything like that. However, my real worry is that governments will make these models illegal in the west. They'll cite national security or some other bullshit. I genuinely believe that will happen and soon! People talk about a lack of moat with AI companies... that's their moat: Government intervention!

> People talk about a lack of moat with AI companies... that's their moat: Government intervention! This puts American Businesses and American Developers at a massive disadvantage. The rest of the world can choose the best model by value for the task on hand. Americans would be stuck using only 2-3 big frontier labs and paying a huge premium for using American models. I don't see why hundreds of thousands of American…

It won't just be America though. I include others like Canada, UK (where I am), parts of EU etc.

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

#863

Post by SwellJoe »

daniel_iversen wrote: post #843
crubier wrote: post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not willing to believe in phone-based frontier models anytime soon. Though, Gemma 4 12B is a beast that runs comfortably on the current top of the line phones (or would run fine if allowed to run, I think there's some kind of 6GB limit on iOS, and 12B is ~7GB). I'll believe in three years we'll be able to run ~30B models on the best phones. That's 16GB in a 4-bit quantization, and I believe ~30B models will be competitive with 120B models of today, based on the curve we've been on. Qwen 27B and Gemma 4 31B are competitive with much larger models of a couple years ago.

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

#864

Post by Gareth321 »

criddell wrote: post #714
Gareth321 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Put all of these trends together, and 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. At current pace, we'll have open weight LLMs with frontier intelligence in 6-12 months. The constraint is RAM - both for the model and the context. It's likely that distillation and quantisation and TurboQuant will signifi…

> god-like So would you say we are months away from full self-driving cars that can out-drive a human being in any situation?

Remember, these cars are running local LLMs, not frontier models. The issue with self-driving cars has been the edge cases. The 0.0001% of situations where the models did not have sufficient training data. This is compounded by the hardware limitations. Onboard RAM in a typical Tesla on the road is 16GB (+16GB for the backup computer). This has to run the existing onboard OS and other operations plus the LLM. These two factors combined means that the cars are currently incapable of negotiating the 0.01% cases, let alone the 0.0001% cases. And this is compounded by the fact that LLMs cannot currently update their weights in real-time, like humans. It takes months to train a new model. Special small models can be very tricky, especially around safety and mission critical applications like FSD.

All that said, current data shows that FSD is already better than human drivers on average. See the recent regulatory decisions by the Dutch and Danish road safety authorities. So we've already crossed the rubicon. All improvements now are icing on the cake. My prediction is that local LLMs will get much better, very fast. How that's operationalised with Tesla (or other) data is yet to be seen. They have at least three new ASCIs/SoCs in the roadmap for improved LLM efficiency and with a lot more RAM. Plus they just announced new technologies allowing the local LLMs to learn from driver intervention and behaviour. Some form of vectorised RAG, which could mitigate a lot of the limitations around real-time learning.

I am very optimistic for the future of self driving. I own a Tesla with FSD now, and it's incredible. It makes mistakes, but fewer than I do, and so far has saved my butt (and my wife's) several times from obstacles and emergencies we would not have seen. The car has undeniably made us safer.

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

#865

Post by rldjbpin »

to me this behaviour is aligned with other industries China's been involved in. take solar or EVs as examples.

the dumping and involution involved in these industries is apparent and has been disrupting for the external markets affected. simultaneously both have helped make it economical to go green.

if you stop looking at LLMs as nukes, this becomes more convincing. China clearly does not want to rely on the West for what it considers core tech. they have done it for search and social; this is a natural next frontier. while they encourage a deluge of options for local use, others can make hay while the sun shine. albeit with the usual caveats.

autoregressive decoding is not an optimal paradigm for local or decentralized inference. amidst the mania and shortage, make the most of what is made available, like with solar, than crying over spilt milk.

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

#868

Post by linzhangrun »

Gareth321 wrote: post #864
criddell wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> god-like So would you say we are months away from full self-driving cars that can out-drive a human being in any situation?

Remember, these cars are running local LLMs, not frontier models. The issue with self-driving cars has been the edge cases. The 0.0001% of situations where the models did not have sufficient training data. This is compounded by the hardware limitations. Onboard RAM in a typical Tesla on the road is 16GB (+16GB for the backup computer). This has to run the existing onboard OS and other operations plus the LLM. These t…

> so far has saved my butt (and my wife's) several times from obstacles and emergencies we would not have seen.

Honestly, you need to reflect on your driving habits. FSD has only been usable for two or three years maybe? And you already encountered MULTIPLE situations requiring active safety intervention to save you during this time?

You cannot rely on the extra safety it provides. A driver with basic competence should be able to avoid most risks through anticipation before they happen.

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

#869

Post by epolanski »

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…

At this point it's just a matter of having enough ram in your consumer computer.

Until we reach a terabyte of ram at affordable prices imho this isn't going to happen.

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

#870

Post by simianwords »

geophile wrote: post #653
simianwords wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

umm do Mac vs pc and Iphone vs android

Not sure what your point is. I’m commenting on a moment in time which is like an earlier moment in time. A different moment in time will have different analogs.

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

Mac has won and it is not free.

Iphone has won and it is not low end.

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