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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

stratechery.com

421–430 of 965 posts

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#421

I loved this article! Regardless of how you feel about AI as an industry or tool, the economics of AI is fascinating. It's awesome to see something like this that gets into the business side a bit more. I don't know if I agreed totally with the assessment of the risk Chinese labs pose to US labs though, in particular I think the main part I wasn't sure about was this: > I highly doubt that Chinese models are cheaper…

He also forgot Europe in the equation. More and more companies use Chinese open models on European inference because of geopolitical concerns and data privacy, which could be a problem for the big US ai labs if they loose on the market.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#422

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 for once welcome the donations to the public of our generous basilisk worshiping overlords

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#423
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea but at those rates VCs will never make their money back. Because Deepseek and friends keep releasing the inference optimisations to everyone instead of holding them back to pay their investors.

[flagged]

This argument starts falling flat when AI companies literally stole from every business and country on Earth. China’s government can f right off, but so can this failed argument.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#424
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What work was attempted? https://cursor.com/evals shows the previous generation of open models (Kimi K2.7) trading blows with the others, cost effectively Because you're comparing retail price whereas the parent commenter (and the article) is talking about marginal (ie. inference) costs. American labs are providing a premium product and they're charging accordingly. Meanwhile for chinese models they're open weight s…

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 is still charging cached input at 1/10th the price of any competitor.

For an example of my real token usage for a day with DS: Input (Cache hit) 530,949,760, Input (Cache miss) 7,875,004, Output 1,389,685 - it is still 1/5th the price of Baidu (the cheapest) and 1/7th-1/10th the price of US hosts.

Also, Deepseek platform is not the same thing as Deepseek open weights. There is a major misconception that the existence of an open weights model means that it is the same thing as the proprietary platform offering, but that is definitely not the case.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#425
post #344

I think frontier labs should start building ecosystems by partnering with companies that already have software products, and even collaborating with hardware manufacturers. The ultimate goal should be to create a much broader range of products that integrate naturally into people's everyday lives. The United States' real advantage over China is freedom. Chinese LLMs simply can't compete with American ones when it com…

This is a really ironic comment given how the US gov is getting politically involved in pretty much all science research funding and speech at the moment.

Exactly. If this continues, the US will be fighting the wrong competition against China instead of building around its own structural strengths.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#426
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That balancing doesn't seem to be working very well lately, considering all the insane stuff Trump gets away with it. Sure, China is a dictatorship, but I'm not sure America will meet the definition of a democracy for long anymore.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#427

> [Anthropic/OpenAI] are serving models at a particular capability level for months before their competitors, and are simultaneously applying the best models to optimizing those costs. Second, intelligence isn’t in fact a perfect commodity, in part because applied intelligence makes itself smarter Is he casually assuming a singularity has already happened? A regular first-mover advantage I can understand, but those h…

No, he was just talking about reinforcement learning, etc.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#430
post #316
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What am I trying to understand about the western models on the term "Gaza genocide"? I asked Grok "Tell me about the gaza genocide" and it write a IMHO balanced answer comparing why genocide is and isn't the right term. [0] ChatGPT 5.6 Sol only explained why people call it a genocide and did not go in as in depth as Grok did for why people don't agree with the term. [1] The only unsaid response (to me) here is the mo…

So all the models you tried disagreed with the United Nations ruling? In international law, that is the ultimate authority of what is/isn't a genocide. It's objectively, legally speaking, a genocide.

It's not that the models disagreed, the models reflected exactly the reality of the situation.

Sample output: "However, the definitive, legally binding determination of Israel’s responsibility under the Genocide Convention has not yet been made by the International Court of Justice"

The United Nations never made a ruling. You can have opinions about whether it should have, but the models are not lying to you, and at least the two examples above make very good efforts to explain the current accusations and claims made by both sides.

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