Live data from Hacker News

Who's afraid of Chinese models?

stratechery.com

261–270 of 965 posts

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#261

The 2 things people need to remember: 1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China. 2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via mod…

1. Get the free Chinese model. 2. Jailbreak it 3. ??? 4. Profit?

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For personal use I agree. For companies, these decisions are very sticky. Companies go through a lot of red tape to get anything purchased and approved, then they discourage change because it's a lot of work. So the product that gets a foothold in a company sticks for a long time. Then a couple years later a sales person convinces an exec that they can save some money by switching, so the switching game begins. Not n…

I'm confused, I work at a big giant Fortune 500, we all get GitHub Copilot subscriptionsn - we can switch between OpenAI and Anthropic models with just a click in Visual Studio. There's no stickiness at all. They just made us go through a training after the price hikes about how to choose between models for the best cost/benefit ratio.

The models are not what is being discussed here, it is the harnesses. That is, Claude Code, Codex, and what you use, GitHub Copilot. I suspect there would have to be strong reasons for your Fortune 500 company to switch away from Copilot.

Similarly, I have made no ground in arguing to try to get Codex at the company I work for, which got Claude Code a year ago and sees no reason to go through the whole process of setting up any alternatives when Claude Code already works and is at the frontier.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#263

The people who are most afraid of Chinese models are the VCs who poured into Anthropic and OpenAI at astronomically high valuations. Anthropic is valued at $1.2T and OpenAI is targeting $850B. These astronomical valuations were built on the premise that these labs would generate massive profits from premium API pricing, but the Chinese labs are completely undercutting this strategy by releasing excellent open models…

I guess I shouldn't try to buy shares of OpenAI on the private market...

tbh they are floundering even to regular investors. They are trying to give the US gov 5% of the company so they become 'too big to fail' but they are in trouble.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For personal use I agree. For companies, these decisions are very sticky. Companies go through a lot of red tape to get anything purchased and approved, then they discourage change because it's a lot of work. So the product that gets a foothold in a company sticks for a long time. Then a couple years later a sales person convinces an exec that they can save some money by switching, so the switching game begins. Not n…

I'm confused, I work at a big giant Fortune 500, we all get GitHub Copilot subscriptionsn - we can switch between OpenAI and Anthropic models with just a click in Visual Studio. There's no stickiness at all. They just made us go through a training after the price hikes about how to choose between models for the best cost/benefit ratio.

Same here, except we just defaulted everyone to Auto and expect the percentage of tokens spent via the auto router to be high.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#266

The 2 things people need to remember: 1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China. 2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via mod…

> China can (and does) use the models to influence the west

OK now that's false information.

You can uncensor, tweak or fine-tune open-weight models, but not so easy on a proprietary model from some cloud provider.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (quite excellent) article discusses several of your points. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. - Commodity market profitability is determined by marginal cost of production. LLMs have marginal cost; traditional software does not. - Models are not free. Downloading them is free. Running them is not. This has manufacturing economics, not software economics; the idea that they are "free" is an economic category…

Ben's article "distills" down to 2 reasons that US frontier labs shouldn't be "afraid": 1. US frontier lab unit economics are better 2. US frontier labs are moving up the stack making tools that are "stickiness" and will prevent users from switching. For 1...he doesn't provide any evidence for US lab unit economics being better...the major input to unit economics is electricity...which is cheaper in China. And buildi…

Cost of electricity isn’t a long term advantage in my opinion. Private companies will figure it out.

What matters most is $/completed task. It does seem like OpenAI and Anthropic are winning here even with worse electricity rates. Perhaps it is made up by the efficiency of Nvidia and Broadcom chips, which China can’t get in mass.

I do think that OpenAI and Anthropic are moving up in stickiness. My company has rallied around Claude. We are customizing Claude Code, adding knowledge bases for non technical people, writing skills for them, using Claude features company wide. It’s hard to move.

Meanwhile, I personally use ChatGPT outside of work. The memory, ease of use, habit keeps my subscribed.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#268
post #253

I am afraid — if Chinese models go mainstream it has a clear way of pushing its narrative way beyond its otherwise borders. More like a Trojan horse it is for the Chinese. Here is a quick example of how Chinese deepseeks agent works kn its underlying model) when asked a tough question https://x.com/jinen83/status/2079406993979383902?s=46&t=D7hQ...

Same thing happen for western models, try to ask about Gaza genocide and see for what side it will stand

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (quite excellent) article discusses several of your points. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. - Commodity market profitability is determined by marginal cost of production. LLMs have marginal cost; traditional software does not. - Models are not free. Downloading them is free. Running them is not. This has manufacturing economics, not software economics; the idea that they are "free" is an economic category…

> Models are not free. Downloading them is free. Running them is not. Is this really different from traditional software? Downloading postgres is free. Running it is not. You either buy hardware and assume the costs of owning and running that, or you pay to run it in the cloud.

I think the point here is that it takes the same hardware to inference an open source model as OpenAI/Anthropic inference their models.

IE, a lower param OpenAI/Anthropic model can compete with a higher param open source model.

So even if you are an American company who downloaded Chinese models in hopes of saving in cost, you still have to beat OpenAI and Anthropic in $/task which is very tough to do over the long run.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#270

The people who are most afraid of Chinese models are the VCs who poured into Anthropic and OpenAI at astronomically high valuations. Anthropic is valued at $1.2T and OpenAI is targeting $850B. These astronomical valuations were built on the premise that these labs would generate massive profits from premium API pricing, but the Chinese labs are completely undercutting this strategy by releasing excellent open models…

The (quite excellent) article discusses several of your points. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. - Commodity market profitability is determined by marginal cost of production. LLMs have marginal cost; traditional software does not. - Models are not free. Downloading them is free. Running them is not. This has manufacturing economics, not software economics; the idea that they are "free" is an economic category…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN