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

301–310 of 978 posts

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

#301

Post by amalcon »

atishay811 wrote: post #292
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.…

China is the factory of the world. They don't need software to win. Rather they prefer software is free and they can win in hardware. So if AI inference is free, they can put it in as many hardware components as possible and sell them in the market - think toys, cars, tools with chips manufactured in china optimized for the use case. In long term you tend to commoditize hardware. We have thousands of device types of…

So, "commoditize your complements". A big part of Microsoft's old playbook (and a smaller part of its current one), so we know it can work.

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

#302

Post by kube-system »

elictronic wrote: post #288
kube-system wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

China is looking after their own interests, but they absolutely don't want their largest export market to struggle. The global economy is not a zero-sum game, and the idea that it might be is the root of many of our policy issues in the US.

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

#304

Post by elictronic »

x313 wrote: post #272
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.…

They get money from subscriptions and tokens, same as for closed-weight providers. Yes they'll lose some traffic to hosting services, but many users prefer to use the original training company since they have a guaranteed-correct implementation. Similar business model as open-source SaaS companies. Some companies (most notably Deepseek) also manage to host their own LLMs so efficiently they undercut all third-party h…

No one cares which company they use. They care about cost and does it act in a way they expect. Expecting anything else is pretty laughable and goes against human nature. You either create a moat so deep no one else can play or you have the government force users to use your products.

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

#305

Post by echelon »

atishay811 wrote: post #292
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.…

China is the factory of the world. They don't need software to win. Rather they prefer software is free and they can win in hardware. So if AI inference is free, they can put it in as many hardware components as possible and sell them in the market - think toys, cars, tools with chips manufactured in china optimized for the use case. In long term you tend to commoditize hardware. We have thousands of device types of…

We just sacrificed our entire lucrative SaaS market to this, and perhaps even big tech itself. To the altar of AI.

And now it's all going to become commoditized.

Billion dollar software will be commodity. Salesforce. There are orgs already moving to their own internal tools.

It does not seem hard now to rebuilt Google Search, Google Chrome, Gmail, Gsuite, Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare, Vimeo, Twilio, or even Stripe. The cost barrier has to have dropped 1000x, maybe 10000x.

We have millions of engineers with the talent to do this. Many of whom are unemployed and have savings and nothing better to do. They could easily carve these markets into pieces.

We shouldn't shut down open weights. It's too late. They'll win, and that's a good thing. Big tech was a thermodynamic bubble of high energy waiting on the dam to burst, and now it has. The genie won't go back into the bottle, and that's totally fine. It's progress.

Now we need to rebuild our factories and supply chains and energy and resource inputs. Because the back half of this revolution is going to be robotics and factory automation. If we don't have the connective tissue in place, we're really going to hurt.

We'll do well if we regrow manufacturing. If we don't, we might be in for a world of trouble.

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

#306

Post by elictronic »

coliveira wrote: post #295
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.…

Chinese companies are cut out of the market by the US gov restrictions, so making the models open is a survival tactic.

It also has the benefit of crashing the US economy.

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

#307

Post by amalcon »

Avicebron wrote: post #294
bluGill wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't most of the economy riding on the stock of these handful of companies though?

Most of the growth is. If we removed AI, the US would be in a severe recession right now. Most of the absolute market cap, employment, capital, and other metrics that are not directly coupled to growth paint a better distributed picture.

Of course, growth like this can only continue for so long without changing that.

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

#308

Post by janalsncm »

elictronic wrote: post #288
kube-system wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> China wants the US economy to flounder

It’s not that simple. If the US economy goes into a recession, it will take large sectors of the weak Chinese economy with it either directly or indirectly.

It’s probably more accurate to say they don’t want American LLMs to become dominant. The huge US data center build out doesn’t depend on Anthropic and OpenAI anyways. Those data centers can just as easily serve Qwen or GLM models.

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

#309

Post by postalcoder »

SCLeo wrote: post #277
tsunamifury wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am not up-to-date in this area, and not necessarily that I don't trust you, but do you have a source for this? Just curious.

Pretty sure he’s talking about Cursor and other ai coding startups. There was a lot of drama between the two in the past year and iirc anthropic cut their capacity.

Edit: here’s the zitron post at the time: https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-bleeding-out/

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

#310

Post by mritchie712 »

I'm not going to care about open models until some blend of the below becomes true:

1. the labs stop offering max plans

2. really smart open models can easily be run on my mac

3. TPS (token per second) AND intelligence are gpt5.6 level

on #1, it's nearly impossible for me to run out of codex tokens right now (I have 4 resets banked) and Fable 5 seems to be sticking around for the foreseeable future. I have virtually unlimited token usage for $400 a month, so open models being cheaper doesn't appeal to me.

on 2 and 3, benchmarks are showing some of the open models at around opus4.8 levels, which is incredible! But running them locally at anywhere near the TPS of cloud inference is far off. I can run a smaller (dumber) open model locally and get good TPS, but see #1, whats the point?

Post reply on HN