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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

#281

Post by serial_dev »

overgard wrote: post #237

I do think open-weights models are going to "win" in the sense that they're probably going to be dominant when the hardware to run them becomes affordable. (which might be a while). Although I guess you could probably rent the GPU's yourself to hypothetically save on costs. (I'm a little skeptical -- I've heard of companies doing this and the inference bills are surprisingly high -- assuming the sources are correct.…

I don’t think they need the hardware to become affordable (as a regular end user).

They need their models to be good enough and cheap enough. Then the rest will follow. Companies will figure out how to host them for you efficiently, and you pay them monthly.

I don’t think I will ever want to set up a home server, no matter how inexpensive the hardware gets. At work I still use Cursor (with Anthropic models usually) because it’s paid by my employer, but for private stuff, I’m already using cheap models with OpenCode, and it’s extremely cheap and surprisingly capable.

I think there was around half a year between where the best models became good enough (last year December?) and where the cheap models became good enough (couple of months ago?).

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

#283

Post by bluGill »

tracker1 wrote: post #273
overgard wrote: post #237

I do think open-weights models are going to "win" in the sense that they're probably going to be dominant when the hardware to run them becomes affordable. (which might be a while). Although I guess you could probably rent the GPU's yourself to hypothetically save on costs. (I'm a little skeptical -- I've heard of companies doing this and the inference bills are surprisingly high -- assuming the sources are correct.…

I think part of it is definitely to weaken US providers and the US economy as a whole. China has a completely different domestic economic structure and motivations from western cultures... it's probably closest to a fascist economy mixed with a Maoist cultural ideology behind it. There's definitely winners and losers and the state tends to have tight controls over everything though. I also think the restrictions on O…

Does it weaken the US though? It weakens the big providers but most of the economy is in companies buying and this helps them save money.

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

#284

Post by zkmon »

Intelligence will be free. Inference is not. So the battle would shift from bench marks to token pricing. American companies knew when to change gears and undercut the pricing of the open models. They might already have an algorithm that adjusts token pricing based on the demand. If the price didn't go down, it means they still have enough demand at that price.

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

#285

Post by elictronic »

seanc wrote: post #250
overgard wrote: post #237

I do think open-weights models are going to "win" in the sense that they're probably going to be dominant when the hardware to run them becomes affordable. (which might be a while). Although I guess you could probably rent the GPU's yourself to hypothetically save on costs. (I'm a little skeptical -- I've heard of companies doing this and the inference bills are surprisingly high -- assuming the sources are correct.…

If you're NVIDIA then open-weight models are a classic example of commoditizing your complements; cheaper models mean more people buying GPU's to run them. [1] Your guess is as good as mine for China though. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Nvidia selling more GPU's at the cost of it's datacenter business is pretty close to Kodak selling digital cameras at the cost of film.

The data center side is so bloated anything that eats into it is a huge negative. Their data center business brings in 20x the gpu market. Local open weight models will be what pops the bubble and China will do anything in it's power to enable that pop.

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

#286

Post by chambored »

tsunamifury wrote: post #188
postalcoder wrote: post #47

This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open. They care about zero data retention (and sticking with whatever vendor they're already using). This blog post is suspiciously close to being a restatement of what Alex Karp recently said on CNBC[0]. It's important to remember he's…

The behind the scenes element you're not aware of is Anthropic is going to companies reliant on their models and demanding HUGE one time fees (100 million+) to continue using their models or they will be cut off. This has happened to several larger companies I and others are invested in. This resulted almost every time in "screw off we'll train our own models or use refined open source ones instead" leading to a lot…

I haven’t heard this. Do you have any supporting sources or links?

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

#287

Post by applicative »

abc42 wrote: post #227
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.

If the weights are published, we can run them in our ‘murican datacenters. Everything about this Will China Win discourse seems like fan fic or sports discourse

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

#288

Post by elictronic »

kube-system wrote: post #278
overgard wrote: post #237

I do think open-weights models are going to "win" in the sense that they're probably going to be dominant when the hardware to run them becomes affordable. (which might be a while). Although I guess you could probably rent the GPU's yourself to hypothetically save on costs. (I'm a little skeptical -- I've heard of companies doing this and the inference bills are surprisingly high -- assuming the sources are correct.…

> I'm sort of baffled by what the entities that train the open-weights models get out of it though. Is it just a direct play to undercut the US providers because they view them as a threat? I just don't really understand the business model behind it. In China, it's because they are being heavily subsidized to do the research activity. It's not really complicated -- if you allocate public money for people do to a thin…

China wants the US economy to flounder. Building our entire growth model on software that can be copied and taken by a small group of people will have no possible consequences.

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

#289

Post by mempko »

pessimizer wrote: post #156
WarmWash wrote: post #45

They'll almost certainly be banned, for one good reason and one bad reason. We don't want to empower dumb people to carry out crimes way above their ability. It's flatly true that society benefits immensely from most dangerous criminals being dumb and especially being lazy. We're just one "Kid uses free Chinese model to mastermind first ever chemical attack on school" away from society running to slam the "ban" butto…

They'll almost certainly be banned, but to protect our oligarchs. Nobody will be allowed to run unlicensed AI (or OSes), the chips themselves won't allow it.

This is terrifying, thanks for putting that out in the world.

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

#290

Post by dwa3592 »

In the end its really VC money (US) versus State resources (China). In my personal opinion, building reliable LLMs is kind of a fundamental science problem which if done right has the potential to help everyone regardless of the background, so it should definitely be funded by states resources (taxes etc), which is what China is doing. In them doing so, the rest of the world also benefits, I think its a net win.
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