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Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
911–920 of 983 posts
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#912Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument is - these models costs hundreds of billions to develop - to BOTH US and China. China is giving them for free despite not making financial sense because they want to weaken US's tech firms ability to compete - because China sees AI dominance as critical for their national security. The US also sees AI dominance as critical for their national security, and relies on a market economy and non-state-owned la…
I think the misconception here is that they "give them away". Sure, you can download the weights and run it yourself, but to run a 1T+ parameters you need roughly 2TB of VRAM (for full precision). That costs around $500k to $1M, not including electricity and rent. In reality, they provide their models priced via API or subscription just like any other company. The "free weights" are only useful for other research lab…
> free weights" are only useful for other research labs
No, they are useful for any compute provider who can host these models and sell inference. Which effectively puts a cap on whatever the Chinese companies can charge. So longterm that means that their margins are limited to cost + some low margin.
If they are making money by selling tokens then anyone who has sufficient compute to host their models can make more than the Chinese labs since they don’t have any R&D costs.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#913Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first token on a new AI rig costs $X (full capex cost) then every token after that costs virtually zero. Over time the cost/token trends towards zero (modulo opex). That said, AI does have higher opex than general SaaS so it can’t get as close to zero. But that’s kind of a different question, the running of some service. The “product”, the model, is a collection of files. The “manufacturing” required to add anoth…
There is a finite number of tokens that a rig will turn out over it's lifetime. Divide the cost of the rig plus electricity by that number and you have your cost per token. Yes providers can screw up on scheduling and end up paying more than they should, but that's not magic.
The AI rigs cost money, sure. But no one is talking about regulating those. We are talking about regulating models, which do have zero cost of reproduction.
It’s like banning the leaked DeCSS key. Good luck.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#914Earlier quoted context omitted.
well free markets meant something very different in adam smith's time; what they meant by free was 'free from rents' whereas today its usually mean in the milton freedman terms as 'free from any interference' which is how i interpret the parent poster... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market#Classical_Economic...
D: "I want to be free" by Milton Schulman. H: Milton Friedman. D: Why are they all called Milton? Anyway, I've only got as far as Milton Keynes. H: Maynard Keynes. D: I'm sure there's a Milton Keynes. H: Yes, there is, but it's... [appears quite miffed] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgUemV4brDU
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Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#915Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the latter because of internal censorship Having limited amounts of high quality Chinese data to train on doesn’t really decrease or affect the appeal of these models to the rest of the world. I don’t think the CCP is restricting or limiting the datasets that models can be trained on. Also the models themselves don’t even seem to be censored or restricted that much. If the Chinese government is fine with the guardr…
> doesn’t really decrease or affect the appeal of these models to the rest of the world Anyone who tried using Chinese models for serious programming tasks ditch them quickly if they have a choice. > I don’t think the CCP is restricting or limiting the datasets that models can be trained on. What I meant was censorship limits the amount of high quality training sets by limiting the amount of all training sets from wh…
> Anyone who tried using Chinese models for serious programming
Perhaps, but that’s because they are just objectively worse for many tasks than GPT/Claude. I don’t see how that ties to censorship inside of China.
> censorship limits the amount of high quality training sets by limiting the amount of all training sets
Well again, I don’t really understand how is the lack of high quality Chinese datasets matter much if they have access to English/etc. datasets. That’s only an issue to their users inside of China.
> not have access to commercial-scale advanced nodes
Well the gap was way bigger a few years ago. If Chinese companies can at some point produce GPUs that are competitive cost wise i.e. they are willing to tolerate significantly lower margins than Nvidia (whose margins are obscene) that’s not a huge issue.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#916Earlier quoted context omitted.
But isn‘t the whole argument of „winner takes all“ already dead, if china is such a big threat that the US labs need import controls? Distilling or not, they are clearly close enough to the frontier, that the supposed „free market“ country needs market controls. That may work for US markets. But not the rest of the world. Idea: petrodollar policy becomes „tokendollar“, enforced by US military dominance. If you force…
The argument is - these models costs hundreds of billions to develop - to BOTH US and China. China is giving them for free despite not making financial sense because they want to weaken US's tech firms ability to compete - because China sees AI dominance as critical for their national security. The US also sees AI dominance as critical for their national security, and relies on a market economy and non-state-owned la…
The software landscape is full of free products that are used to upsell other services. In this case the upsell is inference at data centers. China has built a big advantage in Green energy and is working at the GPU issue both on the hardware and model level. Those are the two main cost inputs into AI and should allow China to compete. The exact model being used is not going to matter as much as the cost that companies must pay.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#917Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI models. If you ask Claude Opus in Chinese which model it is, sometimes it says Qwen.
That's just conjecture though surely. Like not saying you're wrong but the same thing would result from crawling and using results from Chinese Web for training along with everything else. If the most prevalent model people are posting responses from online in Chinese is qwen then of course that would happen. There's no evidence to say either way really.
It's the exact same reason people conjecture that Qwen distills Claude.
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#918Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#919Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current panic is happening precisely because Chinese open weight models like Kimi and Qwen are demonstrably competitive with SotA models like Fable, but far cheaper. https://fireworks.ai/blog/kimik3-fable
No, the Chinese tech companies routinely super optimize for a given 'famous' or 'established' or 'mainstream' benchmarks. Any other concern is secondary. In other words, they look good on surface, but suck whenever anyone put them to any serious use. That's why they are cheap, they have to be cheap because they suck.
how can you say that with a username of "ngl999", that doesn't make sense
(IIUC, -ngl [NUM_LAYERS] specify number of layers to offload to GPU in llama.cpp, 999 on most use cases might as well be -1)
Re: Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
#920Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Someone please enlighten me what the actual argument here is, cause I can’t see it. > The only thing a ban would do is protect the American market from further downward price pressure on inference, protecting VC investors in the short term. But thats also an admittance that the American labs can’t compete on merit anymore That's the argument. To be precise the publicly stated argument is that they're attacking Amer…
But isn‘t the whole argument of „winner takes all“ already dead, if china is such a big threat that the US labs need import controls? Distilling or not, they are clearly close enough to the frontier, that the supposed „free market“ country needs market controls. That may work for US markets. But not the rest of the world. Idea: petrodollar policy becomes „tokendollar“, enforced by US military dominance. If you force…
US didn't have that much rational reasoning when it killed Japanese exports in cars, chips, and finally software. That in turn lead to China simply taking the seats Japan used to occupy, but as far as imposition of these protectionist means is considered, US does not need that much sophisticated justification internally.