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

221–230 of 978 posts

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

#221

Post by alexhans »

Every Linux user or FOSS enthusiast knows the acronym FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, which were a set of techniques commonly used to disparage efforts of open source communities. Linux was evil and anticapitalist and we needed to use "CorporateTool" and ban/restrict Linux.

The same companies later would be running their entire infrastructures on it and on open source.

With AI, open weights and local models, we will see the same claims, even if the named fears change.

The end users and humanity are better served by collaboration and openness than by creating oligarchies.

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

#222

Post by chermi »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #5
jvanderbot wrote: post #2

That's inevitable, but also, it's probably the point. At the moment top-tier models from China are being somewhat-freely shared. It reads to me like forcing competition out by dumping free/cheap things. But then again, how many subscribers of Anthropic/OpenAI are really going to switch to a chinese model/site? I suspect few.

Dumping is such a loaded term. This is investor-backed scaling to capture market share, standard VC playbook.

There's a difference between state sponsored and private dumping.

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

#223

Post by paxys »

This entire piece boils down to “I like open source therefore it is winning”.

Everyone here has already raised good counterpoints, but one more is that all the companies publishing open weights models are heavily VC funded. What is their exit strategy? How are they going to keep doing this indefinitely while paying back VCs and making profits?

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

#224

Post by verdverm »

parineum wrote: post #168
verdverm wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this comparison sound if we use cloud provider? The Ai is writing code, not executing a startup. The code was never the hard part of startups

Deciding to use open models over closed models is a business decision.

The point is that for many tasks today, and likely all tasks before long, that the open vs closed will not be a differentiator. There are many open models much better than gemini, yet people still use gemini.

It's like picking AWS vs GCP. Yes it is a business decision, but one that will not likely affect the outcome of the business.

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

#225

Post by x313 »

comrade1234 wrote: post #15
tyleo wrote: post #6

I’m suspicious of some quotes here, “80% of startups using Chinese models,” doesn’t seem quite right to me. I just interviewed at several startups and they were all using the US models. Maybe they have some minor use of Chinese models but the bread-and-butter of most of these businesses model use is the Claude and Codex subscriptions.

We're using deepseek with the idea that we would switch to something better when more of our customers are using the ai features but it ends up deepseek is awesome for what we're doing and so we probably won't switch because it's so much cheaper. The ai libraries we use let us switch models with just a configuration change.

Similar story here. DS models are absurdly good value for mid-end tasks. I've found DSv4 Flash to be ~10% the cost of GPT-5.4-mini/Claude Haiku at similar performance.

We used to pay OpenAI >1m$/month for fraud classification, NER, etc. Sadly the US companies no longer care about non-coding-agent uses.

I imagine uptake will continue to increase as the corporate infra improves. Right now it's still bad - for example, AWS Bedrock is awful, models are months late and implemented with basic errors. Google Vertex is even worse. Finding a decent provider is the hardest part.

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

#226

Post by IshKebab »

kman82 wrote: post #10
dmortin wrote: post #7

Are open weights models secure? E.g. if a Chinese model is run by an American provider then can it still do bad things, like inserting backdoors into generated code or accessing external URLs (if browsing is enabled) to send info to them? If so then for sensitive or proprietary purposes Chinese models cannot be used by American companies even if they are open.

What prevents an American model from doing the same? They’re all black boxes.

Technically nothing, legally a lot more.

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

#227

Post by abc42 »

applicative wrote: post #196

What is ‘China’ going to do when it ‘wins’? The framing of this duscourse is all meaningless

Capture all the input it gets via the APIs and use it for whatever it wants.

I.e. possibly the same thing USA is also doing, but USA is an ally in some sense so it's not quite as bad.

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

#228

Post by airstrike »

parineum wrote: post #132
idiotsecant wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your point that startups fail so we should disregard the central thesis that locked down AI will eventually lost to open models?

Not op but that makes perfect sense to me. "People with mostly bad ideas/execution use Chinese models." Is the point being made. If you slice it to some measure of success, is the statement "Successful start-ups/companies use Chinese models." still true?

Hmm if you assume the 80% is uniformly distributed between successful and unsuccessful startups/companies, which by default you should, then yeah, your proposed statement is true.

Data would be needed to argue the 80% skews unsuccessful

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

#229

Post by rlt »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #34

AI models cost tens of millions to train. Offering them for free won’t justify the upfront costs. The Chinese model of model training/open sourcing only makes sense in the context of the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins.

I can see two reasons American companies might want to train models they give away for free:

1) They sell compute: chips (Nvidia), data centers (AWS, Microsoft, Google, SpaceX, etc), or even end-user device manufacturers like Apple (e.x. M7 rumored to have 1.5TB of unified memory). If Jevon's paradox holds, then cheaper (or free) models means more demand. But compute is likely supply-constrained for years anyway.

2) Their product isn't AI but depends on AI being cheap, or they don't want competitors to capture that value, i.e. "commoditize your complement" https://gwern.net/complement

It probably doesn't make sense for these companies to invest a lot of money training models that will be obsolete in a few months anyway. When progress starts to plateau I'd expect more companies to start training models they give away for free.

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

#230

Post by kettlecorn »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #34

AI models cost tens of millions to train. Offering them for free won’t justify the upfront costs. The Chinese model of model training/open sourcing only makes sense in the context of the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins.

I don't think this is accurate. AI is driving the cost of software towards 0 and these AI models themselves are software.

Releasing the models for free accelerates the trend but if you're a startup that needs leverage it's a good way to build brand and customer momentum that will be relevant in the more established future market.

I can see an American company taking on the same strategy, and in fact Thinking Machines based out of San Francisco did that just a few days ago by releasing their first model with open weights.

Post reply on HN