China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

elictronic wrote: post #285

seanc wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

You mean they resisted the idea trying to protect their legacy business, and it ended up all but killing them?

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

#372

Post by cheriot » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

What's the incentive for the Chinese labs to continue releasing weights 5 years from now?

In the short term it attracts talent and builds brand, but they make little money on inference to support research and training costs. Tin foil hat thinking: it also pulls inference revenue away from Antropic/OpenAI and a financial crises at those organizations improves the relative position of Chinese labs.

Is there a reason to think open-weight models are a stable outcome? Open source software provides a collaboration framework for engineers from many companies to work together. Model weights are mostly a one way street.

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

#373

Post by 9dev » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

xandrius wrote: post #363

geophile wrote: post #352

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge mar…

What's interesting/funny is that the American LLM companies took from the public domain and copyrighted work to close all that content into a box they charge for. Then the Chinese took the distilled stuff out from that box and released it into the world for everyone.

...and then the American companies cried Foul! Unfair play! You've got this wrong, see, it was us who were supposed to profit off of the public, not the other way around!

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

#374

Post by elictronic » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

hintymad wrote: post #325

I 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 chea…

Why wouldn't they? They subsidized their EV industry with 230 billion dollars over the last 14 years. Solar was before that with about 17 billion.

The US puts about 0.4% of GDP towards various subsidies, China is around 4%. This isn't about cost of engineering, it's money thrown at industries directly to boost them. The us provides tax incentives. China just gives you subsidized loans to the businesses they choose to dominate.

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

#375

Post by teravor » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

I expect that there will come a time where open source is not merely not winning but there are no tokens available for sale at all. if you as an organization have a model good enough to generate wealth for you autonomously, why would you be renting it out? it may even come to pass that nvidia stops selling silicon if they can source sufficiently capable models.

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

#376

Post by verdverm » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

parineum wrote: post #327

verdverm wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

we know that

1. Different people using Ai have different outcomes

2. There is much more to agents than the model

3. Companies are not successful because of the code, look at how many shitty products we endure

Can you explain the basis for your insistence that models matter?

Can you name another technology that determines success/failure rates?

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

#377

Post by jvanderbot » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:41 PM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #300

jvanderbot wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, there's no functional competition or great power struggle or corporate race here? Just racism against chinese people for being chinese? That is your claim specifically?

Oh there most certainly is a power struggle/corporate race, for sure. AND I don't think it's pure economics at all, when so much of the rhetoric around that struggle is framed so often with this "America has to defend itself," "China will kill us," "shoot all the communists," ooh-rah United States chest-pounding, etc., it's simply impossible to have that discussion be anything close to good-faith. If you want my hone…

Thank you for sharing your take.

The issue, from my perspective, is that you're mixing predictions with strategy with truth.

Policy/advice does not need to be true to be useful, many just wish it were. "You can do it" is almost certainly false, but by god if people don't love to hear it and it helps them accomplish more. "America is in decline relative to the world" might be true, but is it helping anyone to focus on that?

There are definitely some crazy sentiments about foreign competition, but IMHO those are part of the game. they are the "You can do it" statements that are made to motivate not share factual truth all the time (because who can factually state the future or the motivations of an entire country).

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

#378

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:41 PM UTC

mbgerring wrote: post #316

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…

[flagged]

You're fixating on what's a meaningless blip in the story; the technological world was built on post-WW2 US spending that ended 40+ years ago.

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

#379

Post by stickfigure » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:41 PM UTC

applicative wrote: post #144

michaelt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge cultural influence opportunity too. Imagine if, in 10 years time, every school kid is learning the causes of the US civil war from an LLM, getting their essays on hiroshima and nagasaki graded by an LLM, and a million other things. A country with competitive LLMs gets to decide whether "it was more complicated than just slavery", and whether "it was tragic but necessary, saving lives over all". Countr…

It might seem so til you consider how an LLM is trained. An indirect illustration: I can attest that Deepseek has very good 19th German, and knowledge of German 19th c literature, science and historical scholarship. No one in China could control the training that led to this. The German training sources were well aware of the exact nature of eg American slavery, so they are in the weights. State control operates in t…

People can and will use LLMs to curate the training data for the next generation. I expect they already do.

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

#380

Post by api » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

geophile wrote: post #352

The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge mar…

The biggest exception is cloud. Big cloud carries an insane markup (bandwidth is like 10000X!) and everyone runs on it.

The strategy there is false openness where deployment complexity is the real proprietary moat. Sure Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Postgres, and all the other standard tools in the box are open source and free, but they're also arcane and complex to run and hard to make fault tolerant. So you're lured in by "open" and then locked in via a kind of "death by a thousand cuts" complexity moat.

(Personally I hold the view that complexity and arcane-ness beyond a certain point is indistinguishable from closed in practice. Open source that's really complex and hard to run is not open in any meaningful sense.)

AI may not admit that kind of moat though, because AI is very good at slicing through that kind of thing. You can prompt a model to make itself compatible with another model or to change code to make it compatible. There's no moat because the moat bridges itself.