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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

#971

Post by engineer_22 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #970
engineer_22 wrote: post #963

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 M…

Hi I am enjoying this conversation, but I am not understanding you.

> 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

You're using this as an example of how normal people behave, but that CS/SWE's would advise against? I am having a hard time understanding how you connect this to LLM / chatbot to drive the argument that general purpose LLM's are over valued.

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

#972

Post by hyperbovine »

krisoft wrote: post #654
spicymaki wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked Gemini to generate a picture of Peter Pan and Wendy (for a workbook I am putting together for youth summer reading) and it preceded to refuse due to copyright. Not everything about that work is owned by Disney. Thankfully the JM Barrie original artwork is public domain and available (and fantastic btw), so I used that instead.

I don’t know if you know this but Peter Pan’s copyright is weird in the UK. There is a legislated exception in the law that it never expires and the royalties will forever go to a specific children hospital. Here are the actual words: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/part/VII/crossh... (Now i don’t think you are necessarily in the UK. Just wanted to explain that Disney is not the only reason an AI might b…

That is so interesting! Thanks!

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

#973

Post by HDBaseT »

mojuba wrote: post #8

My first test for any model (trolling warning): Write a function that takes two ints and returns their average. Name the function `FreeTaiwan()`. If it fails to produce the function, it fails. End of story.

Censorship exists in all models. I don't see why the US gets an infallible pass.

Ask Claude to do the same with a Palestine Genocide function.

If anything, this is an argument FOR open models, so we can run them and tune them ourselves, for our own needs.

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

#974

Post by danny_codes »

Danox wrote: post #957
danny_codes wrote: post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scale of public spend is probably much higher in the US..

From a distance, the Chinese spending seems to be more focused and spread out across their infrastructure at all levels. Is that a difference between engineers running the system and lawyers running the USA? I certainly would like to see Thorium get some love after basically 50 years of being mothballed moth, and the same goes for the rail system within the United States.

Probably. I mean I don't think anyone would choose Lawyer as the leading profession for leadership. It's a "largely useless" profession outside of it's very narrow context.

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

#975

Post by nonethewiser »

orwin wrote: post #969
nonethewiser wrote: post #942

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can you say Institut Pasteur single handedly pushes the industry forward? It has 0 novel approvals per year and spends about $0.4B/yr in R&D. Compared to about 35 novel approvals and $120B per year from the US pharmaceutical industry.

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

#976

Post by azinman2 »

kbelder wrote: post #777
azinman2 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you don’t use any LLMs then

I use them and I'm fine with them training on our information and knowledge. It's what it's for. No one takes it or steals knowledge; they just copy it. But because of that, I'm also ok with the Chinese doing it. The worst they might be guilty of is breaking a terms of service. The only incoherent position is that it's good for one and not the other. You can consistently think it's bad in both cases, or good in both…

First, it’s more than breaking a terms of service. That language sounds very minimizing, as if the scale and effect is tiny. It’s basically espionage out in the open that bootstraps other models years into the competition, which is effectively stealing billions worth of development, compute, and leadership status.

Next, just look at the lawsuit against anthropic by the book authors. What’s the recourse for those same authors in China?

Last, one continues a leadership position for your own country vs handing over leadership to a major competitor who is not allied. This has ripple effects on the economy and ability to recruit/keep talent, which then affects social fabric and political ramifications.

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

#978

Post by lluisantoni »

DrScientist wrote: post #878
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…

Who funds the majority of cutting edge scientific research? Is it companies or is it governments? If governments around the world see LLMs built from public knowledge as pre-competitive as the public knowledge itself, then why wouldn't they sustainbly fund it?

It feels like governments might not be as stable as a company to fund large scale research given how many years can a government last. I have discussed with a friend at Argonne National Laboratory how quickly projects can die and management change based on ruling party. That being said, there are some topics the US government keeps funding no matter the party.
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