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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

#921

Post by jsiepkes »

fhe wrote: post #840
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…

Apple seems a counter example, no?

Depends how you look at it. iOS is loosing ground to Android. They might just eventually lose.

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

#922

Post by bmitc »

petcat wrote: post #918
TitaRusell wrote: post #892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Debt doesn't really mean anything at this scale. Especially when the debt is denominated in US dollars and the debtor operates an extraordinary number of aircraft carriers. It's that old saying "if you owe the bank $1,000 then you have a problem. If you owe the bank $1 trillion the the bank has a problem.

The grandparent mentioned debt, but the U.S. spends over a trillion every year in defense spending, which doesn't include other funding and tax breaks. Nearly every major technological innovation and thus corporations that use those have been born out of government defense research. Even entire universities, such as MIT, were created for this reason.

Chomsky has argued this, that we dump public funds into entities that end up being completely private. This is even worse than what happens in China. Because the government loses the return in investment and ends up being "purchased" by these corporations and their ilk. It's really a sick system.

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

#923

Post by geophile »

mvkel wrote: post #799
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…

Define "winning." Open source is cheap, yet its operating systems are the least-popular. But their existence is critical to a healthy market. It's not zero sum. What you're describing is how things become commoditized, but many companies are excellent at ensuring they aren't seen as commodities

Choose your favorite metric: mindshare, running instances, development target. Free and low-end beat expensive proprietary.

"Least popular" is an odd claim. If you count Windows desktops, and then count all the Linux installations (desktop, servers, cloud, Android, other devices), I suspect Linux would prove to be most popular. Sure, add Windows servers to the contest, that's a rounding error. And what about VMs? How do you think Windows VMs stack up against Linux VMs in number?

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

#924

Post by geophile »

inigyou wrote: post #898
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.

This is irrelevant to the current discussion.

Windows was designed to make money for MS and billg. Linux was not designed to make money for Linux.

Also, by what logic do you consider any MS software as "hign end"? That's a new one.

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

#925

Post by geophile »

engineer_22 wrote: post #678
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…

That’s not what this is. It’s industrial dumping applied to software. China has successfully applied this strategy to become the manufacturing workshop of the world. If china is subsidizing training they diminish their off-shore competitors expectations of a viable return on investment. It’s trade-war behavior.

Well that's one way to describe it.

If Nvidia gives away powerful models to sell more of its hardware is that industrial dumping too?

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

#927

Post by giancarlostoro »

I still wonder why some of our key universities in the US aren't building Open Weight Models. To this day we have "BSD" and "MIT" as key licenses for a lot of software (I know weird tangent but still... this emphasizes how significant these institutions were once!), but these top schools don't really build anything the way they used to anymore.

I'm sure someone will say students build LLMs all the time, and this and that, but there's no reason these universities cannot build their own LLM "labs" and work on a common LLM that their university builds, maintains and students and faculty can manage, and release, maybe even sell API access to.

It would be a key selling point for any student who wants a serious job in AI to work on such a project too. Universities could easily sell access to pre-hosted models mostly at-cost maybe a smidgen on top of costs, and fund the project as it gets better over time.

Any university doing this would prepare students for real software jobs mind you. Maintaining, building and supporting real infrastructure during your college years sells better than no experience.

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

#928

Post by bee_rider »

SecretDreams wrote: post #911
rad-b wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might seem like obvious pivots in hindsight , but there’s no way to make such easy predictions going forward. “Jensen’s job is to just be one step ahead of the market” — how is that a “just”? That’s arguably one of the most difficult things to do reliably (judging by how much payout it can give you). Feels like saying he’s making “just” billions of dollars.

He's effectively setting the pace of the trends. Objectively, Bitcoin was a grift and money laundering scheme. LLM valuations vs what they've made so far is probably also quite a bit more towards the grift side (yes, I use them and yes they do good work in good hands). Robotics will probably be valued similarly, despite not actually having anywhere near the needed ROIs to make sense. The only time where revenue was a…

> But it doesn't matter because Jensen sells the shovels and, in the background, tells people where to dig. Dude's basically a genius at making money.

Being the default high-throughput device is an incredibly strong position. We could say he’s a genius at making money, but really that’s downstream of the ability to keep CUDA relevant.

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

#929

Post by citrin_ru »

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…

If LLMs is just another technology then low end will eventually win. The bet which I guess many AI investors are making is that LLM will allow recursive self improvement which will lead to development of super-human AGI. The company which will get there first will rule the world thanks to an immense power enabled by AGI. There will be no 2nd or 3rd AI company, the 1st one will wipe the rest out.

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

#930

Post by versteegen »

engineer_22 wrote: post #884
consumer451 wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use AI chat every day, I find it endlessly useful. It’s replaced google search. Extremely subsidized agentic search is very superior to Google at the moment, and of course it is. Google is a public company. The AI summary model has to work instantly, is likely as dumb as a 8T param model, and gives you incorrect details constantly. This sucks so much for Google. If you click on "AI Mode," suddenly the facts becom…

Your comment about watts stuck out to me. I became curious how much power we might be talking about. I’m into Claude for $20/mo (petty bourgeois tier), let’s assume for sake of examination this is only paying for power, infrastructure already amortized Price of grid power approx $0.15/kWh $20 / ($0.15/kWh * 30 days) = 4.4 kWh per day. This same amount of energy can lift a 2-ton SUV 1/2 mile into the air. To me this s…

Not half, only on the order of 10% of the cost of inference is electricity.
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