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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

#961

Post by engineer_22 »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #952
engineer_22 wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With a crane and a good pulley system, a human should be able to pull that off inside of hour. Not all that impressive to me.

RIGHT - 30 HOURS OF WORK FOR $20 - WHAT A VALUE

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

#962

Post by engineer_22 »

versteegen wrote: post #930
engineer_22 wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Great, I can expect the price of Claude to drop to $2/mo

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

#963

Post by engineer_22 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #816
engineer_22 wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a sample of the forerunners See: product adoption cycle

I encountered multiple people in HN that had Apple Vision Pro. How many people here use Linux? Have flagship model phones? Drank soylent? Microdosed LSD? Extrapolating based on what you see on HN doesn’t make sense.

Bottom line up front: LLM unlocks the power of a workstation for normal people.

Google Search ate the internet because everyone was using it. Some people said "free search isn't a business model, look what happened to yahoo"... and those people were wrong; not because they misunderstood the economics, but because they misunderstood what people needed.

Google Search reduced the friction of using the internet for normal people - suddenly the internet could be accessed with plain language, simple phrases, no networking knowledge or domain expertise required.

LLM is doing the same thing - reducing friction. Tradesmen and small businesses are building company landing pages and doing SEO by themselves. Businesses in every industry are programming applications in-house to unshackle themselves from SaaS systems. Entrepreneurs can build automated systems to handle mundane processes and get back to pulling the levers that actually move the needle. An LLM can level up your employees on the software they're already using.

The economic potential is only beginning to be realized.

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

#964

Post by oska »

rootsudo wrote: post #912
oska wrote: post #890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> windows, office, Visual Basic This is all (Microsoft) junk and so I wonder if you actually benefitted from this 'piracy'. And of course, it's well known that MS turned a blind eye to such 'piracy' in lesser developed countries, as they knew that they were gaining a future paying customer base.

You're saying that using the most used operating system from the 90's, the 00's and the 2010's, as well as the number one producitivty desktop publishing software and visual basic would not benefit a user, especially when they had a near zero cost to understand the core concepts of end user computing? Really?

You could make a case for using Windows in the 90s (and yeah, I did; the last version of Windows I used was NT in the 90s). After that your time was much better spent on learning and using Linux (downloadable for free).

Visual Basic is a whole steaming pile of crap and you would always have been better learning to use non-corporate, non-proprietary languages and development stacks than wasting your time on that. And calling Office "the number one productivity desktop publishing software" only shows that you have fully drunk the Kool-Aid. More 'office productivity' has probably been lost to Microsoft Word than any other text-processing software on the planet.

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

#966

Post by vfalbor »

You couldn't be more wrong. What's being sold are chunks of time with access to specialized hardware resources. Through which model or with which device is irrelevant; the one winning, and continuing to win for some time, is Nvidia, and that company is American. As long as they have the H100, B200, or B300, China won't be able to compete with the American strategy, no matter how many new models they release, because these types of cards require incredibly powerful hardware to run.

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

#967

Post by woctordho »

shiftingleft wrote: post #891
woctordho wrote: post #888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So is making a PR different from making the whole software. This is what an open source community is good for.

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

#968

Post by orwin »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #950
orwin wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That why i usually keep to the insurance example, i agree that comparing municipality power to private companies owning a monopoly is unfair. Administrative costs for insurance are very easy to verify, and the facts stay consistent across countries. If i cherry picked something, it is the admin overhead for US insurers. US health care insurers are particulary effective with their average of 14% admin overhead, SwissL…

I mean insurance is very specific industry, and does not easily generalize.

Insurance is the perfect industry because in no other industry you can calculate efficiency this easily: if I give you 100, how much is used to reimburse other insuree. It turns out for public insurance, often more than 90, even in more corrupt countries, and for private insurance, often anywhere between 70 and 90.

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

#969

Post by orwin »

nonethewiser wrote: post #942
thomaslord wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem to be relevant to the comment you replied to. They didn't mention anything about paying less to pharmaceutical companies, they argued that the administrative overhead of providing the insurance itself is lower. As I read it, your argument seems to be that American healthcare must be more expensive than similar-quality healthcare elsewhere because we're paying higher pharmaceutical prices to fund res…

The cost of medicine is a factor in the cost of healthcare. R&D has to be funded somehow. I agree it’s not the only factor. Does his country’s pharmaceutical industry push the frontier of medicine forward?

Yes. Institut Pasteur discovered a lot of the molecules currently used in general medecine, created more new vaccines than any other institute and currently is at the very edge of gene therapy.

Not that is has anything to do with efficiency. If you give 100 to my public healthcare, 94 of that will be used to reimburse health expenses, if you give 100 to US private healthcare, only 86 will be used to reimburse health expenses. That has nothing to do with initial costs.

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

#970

Post by DrewADesign »

engineer_22 wrote: post #963
DrewADesign wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encountered multiple people in HN that had Apple Vision Pro. How many people here use Linux? Have flagship model phones? Drank soylent? Microdosed LSD? Extrapolating based on what you see on HN doesn’t make sense.

Bottom line up front: LLM unlocks the power of a workstation for normal people. Google Search ate the internet because everyone was using it. Some people said "free search isn't a business model, look what happened to yahoo"... and those people were wrong; not because they misunderstood the economics, but because they misunderstood what people needed. Google Search reduced the friction of using the internet for norma…

Bottom line — all evidence gathered by modern interface design shows that most people don’t like conversing with their computers for anything more than a few single sentence commands. And people hate being forced to use chatbots with the fire of a thousand suns. If people chose their tools based on what engineers determined was the superior usage strategy or technology, nobody would use centralized social media, or MS Windows, unencrypted text chat, email without pgp, etc etc etc
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