China’s strategy seems to be serving customers’ needs. Yes, it’s winning, as expected.
And when will we stop equating US Economy with 2 companies?
The actual US Economy will only benefit.
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
321–330 of 978 posts
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#322I’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.
They probably use Claude and Codex for their actual development, but for the products they actually build and deliver to customers I imagine a lot use open-weight models.
If you're putting a lot of your money and time into a business, do you really want it built on a service only hosted by one company that will turn it off eventually and you have no recourse?
If you build something against an open model you can take that and run it anywhere. If your favorite model provider stops hosting it, you can go elsewhere, you can go rent GPU instances, you can even shell out and buy hardware to run it yourself if you've got the capital and it makes economic sense. Change some API keys, update a URL in your config, and you move on.
If the government decides that proprietary model is too good and so it gets shut off, what do you do? If a proprietary provider decides it's not worth it for them to continue hosting that model, what do you do? If that provider silently updates the proprietary model and it makes your app broken, what do you do?
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#323Earlier 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 is known to spread love and kindness through markets with no self-interest, after all.
Of course it's in self interest. It's too bad that the US has gone the other direction and cut public funding for research.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#324Hey where are the promises "to benefit all humanity" and the meaning of the "open" from openai gone? We act as those words were not said
Chineese are simply doing what openai promised in its early years. Irony.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#325I wonder how Chinese companies can make their models so much cheaper than the US companies. I'm not sure government subsidies are the answer. Subsidizing a single company with a few billion dollars, maybe. Subsidizing at least three companies with 10s of billions of dollars annually? Do we have proof of that? I assume we can't pin it on the lower cost of engineers in China, either. The top engineers are not that cheaper, and isn't engineering cost a small fraction of the cost of the model companies? Besides, if engineering cost is the driving force, can we really say that the US companies have a technical edge?
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don’t think that’s true. The US is China’s most valuable trade partner.
edit: misread parent
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> but one that will not likely affect the outcome of the business.
We don't know that, that's the point of my statement about changing the question.
Do successful companies opt for the US/Closed models? If they do or don't it's just a correlation but it means something. Maybe it's just causal of companies being able to get more funding because the ideas are better so they opt for the more expensive model (assuming it's better).
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#328All of these takes are horribly 1-sided.
'China's copying / distilling strategy is working, the people getting distilled are ruining the economy!'
Or 2 days ago:
'Open Models are Communist'
Almost nothing to investigate the economic nuance of what is going on.
- Switching costs are very real, these are not perfect substitutes.
- The SOTA makers are the one's pushing the frontier, there is a kernel of truth in the fact that if they collapse, certain things will struggle to move forward.
- Nobody trusts either of those nation state, export controls are a thing, this is a very real concern.
Etc.
It's distressing that there are not sound comprehensive takes.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Why would they possibly want their largest customer to flounder?
It is largest customer for now, but they try to boost internal consumption as well as diversify client-base. US is also competitor, so China is interested US to fade at least in competitive areas.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#330This 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…
2-3 years ago MAIR was on a roll with Llama 1 2 3, Zuck was on his rehab tour to be a cool guy, and Meta as a whole was pumping record numbers after record numbers. I can't believe how that falters so quickly after the addition of Alexdandr Wang.
I am no fan of Wang but he came after Llama got caught benchmaxxing Llama 4 rather than training a good model. My read is that Zuckerberg tried to buy his way out of the problem like he always does, and he ended up overpaying for a lemon.
At the time the whole thing was led by Yann LeCun who seemed to spend more time arguing with people on Twitter than figuring out new techniques to make Llama the best. Meanwhile Deepseek was figuring out large scale RL on kneecapped hardware like H800s and how to scale architectures an order of magnitude bigger with MoE.