Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

werd.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

891–900 of 978 posts

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

#891

Post by shiftingleft »

woctordho wrote: post #888
gpt5 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. With open source projects, the benefit was that each individual could improve the complex system (e.g. Linux Kernel) interpedently, and over time the benefit…

There's a lot of individual effort of improving the models. See how many finetuned models and LoRAs are there on Hugging Face.

fine-tuning a model is very different from training the whole model in terms of resource requirements.

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

#892

Post by TitaRusell »

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 US is trillions in debt pal. Talk about unfair advantages!

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

#893

Post by 7952 »

walrus01 wrote: post #831
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…

> - PCs destroyed minicomputers. What's weird is that with "store your everything in the cloud and pay a monthly recurring subscription", we have now regressed to a 1960s/1970s timesharing revenue model for individual workstation computers. The default new factory out of box workflow for "enrollment" in google services, iCloud or Microsoft-everything on a new ios, macos, windows or android personal computing device i…

The cloud era seemed to start out being about availability of storage and slowly switched in big corporates to be about security and governance. The first seems stupid now considering how much local storage we have. The later might depend on what security issues crop up.

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

#895

Post by sylware »

gpt5 wrote: post #386
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 problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. With open source projects, the benefit was that each individual could improve the complex system (e.g. Linux Kernel) interpedently, and over time the benefit…

Don't have a choice, will probably have to go open-weights models as currently, "AI" is gated using 'whatwg cartel' web engines.

In the light of this, I am mechanically a proponent of very good open weights models, which I can download (for instance on on bittorrent) and run, slowly (the price), on local hardware.

That would be for coding.

If china puts its AI models on the same ground than US capital investment funds and big tech financial support (aka Big Tech international finance), they will very probably lose everything (know how, ML and inference infrastructures).

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

#896

Post by anonzzzies »

layla5alive wrote: post #696
nightpool wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? When they could be having you running an even more powerful model on a $50k machine they sell by the pallet-load to enterprise consumers? We already see RAM manufacturers abandoning the low-end market in favor of server support. It's not clear to me that Nvidia sees personal GPUs as their best long term investment compared to selling millions of server-farm class machines

You mean a $500k machine, or a $15M rack... the costs have gotten unimaginably large from the lens of just a decade ago.

... for AI... which people have to convince themselves they 'need'. I am a user, I have a 1m$ rack for my small company for AI, but I have currently 189 racks that cost about 15k one off per rack. And those make us a LOT more money than the AI ones ; most are departmental apps or websites that take very little processing power and are low on everything while people pay nice money to keep them going. Our support is better than the rest; you can just call me or come to my house and we'll do something. Not many clients leave, ever. For the past 30 years. I buy 5-10 year old servers which are complete overkill for 99% of my clients (some are fortune 500 companies but departmental stuff) and they just never leave. Makes vastly more money than AI and we are still cheaper than AWS and the department does not have to get a flexible budget (like they would have to if AWS) with us. We just have the same fixed price + yearly inflation correction and that's it. For 30 years.

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

#897

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

gpt5 wrote: post #386
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 problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. With open source projects, the benefit was that each individual could improve the complex system (e.g. Linux Kernel) interpedently, and over time the benefit…

Soo? If they need a better version, the world can pool resources together, form a company that trains the model, then the company goes under and the model becomes open source again.

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

#898

Post by inigyou »

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…

And yet the money is all at the high end. Bill Gates is much richer than Linus Torvalds. Oracle created one of the richest people (until he squandered it all on bad AI datacenter bets and got his company currently rated as a junk investment). Dell probably makes more money than IBM, but not by a lot.

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

#899

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Why use the term "you"

Does it mean the HN reader

What if that reader is "non-typical"

HN comments have argued for many years that HN users are not representative of the majority of www users

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

#900

Post by QuantumGood »

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…

Commoditization always takes volume from the marketplace, but not necessarily profit. Apple and Military tech come to mind. Positioning is rarely done well looking forward, but often shakes out in unexpected ways.
Post reply on HN