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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

#401

Post by raincole »

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…

Except cloud services won over local-first apps.

> Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) doing

I'm not even sure in 10-15 years whether we're still going to have consumer PCs, or PCs at all.

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

#402

Post by pixl97 »

api wrote: post #383
xandrius wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is part of why I can't feel bad for them. The training data is mostly pirated. Whining about Chinese labs training off American frontier models is "waaah you pirated my pirated stuff!" The tech itself is amazing and fascinating and cool, but the industry is a mass piracy operation.

"Stop pilfering what I rightfully stole!"

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

#403

Post by asdfman123 »

chermi wrote: post #211

It's basically American VCs vs the China the state. I'm not optimistic for the US at this point, given how much China cares about it and how much talent they have. And how much they're putting into hardware and the whole ecosystem. Meanwhile we have pro basketball players with no understanding of reality being celebrities for decrying data centers because...land?

You don't think the US cares about it? You don't think we have talent? We've been vacuuming it up from around the world for years now, much of it directly from China.

I have no doubt China can catch up but to say the US isn't in a competitive position is absurd.

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

#404

Post by ericmay »

gpt5 wrote: post #386
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 problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. With open source projects, the benefit was that each individual could improve the complex system (e.g. Linux Kernel) interpedently, and over time the benefit…

> The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path.

Right... and there are two problems with this:

1. Eventually the capabilities of closed-weight models will just vastly outstrip open-weight models if the underlying assumptions about compute and scale needed are mostly on the mark. So you can release open-weight models and they will have great use cases and applications, but ultimately similar to how you don't use an open-source phone or a budget Android phone from Wal-Mart and you buy an iPhone instead, you will see that although they "do the same thing" one product is clearly superior and you just have to pay for it. For this to not be true...

2. then it incentivizes most (all?) companies, American, Chinese, or European to halt development of models because if you spend all the CAPEX and it can just be copied and turned open-source nobody will invest in that. Given that China is not halting development of proprietary models I believe the current strategy and the subsequent approach to release open-weight models is at best a stall tactic, and at worse a sign of desperation.

Open source and the support and development models around it have been great. But folks are a little too dogmatic about it. Open-source software isn't a moral good, and closed-source software isn't a moral wrong either.

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

#405

Post by cyanydeez »

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.

Whats even funnier is the attempt to restrict the hardware capabilities of Chinese models inevitably helped them (Because we know they're just as smart, if not smarter, than the staff in America) create smaller and leaner but just as capable models. That's why we now have upper-consumer models fitting on 24GB that can build, manage medium sized git repos. I've yet to find a git repo I can't throw at the Qwen3.6 35B and get it built and running.

So it's an endless amusement watching american capitalism do it's bloated oversized dance then get trounced by smaller, leaner activity. It's a pretty broad metaphor that is clearly poking at every american seam/.

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

#406

Post by cyanydeez »

ericmay wrote: post #404
gpt5 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. With open source projects, the benefit was that each individual could improve the complex system (e.g. Linux Kernel) interpedently, and over time the benefit…

> The problem (right now) is that Open Weight models depend right now on huge companies to spend billion of dollars to train and develop them, all backed up by their incentives and their state to support this, while essentially giving away their monetization path. Right... and there are two problems with this: 1. Eventually the capabilities of closed-weight models will just vastly outstrip open-weight models if the u…

Did you just assume the singularity?

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

#407

Post by diabllicseagull »

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…

if you look at how GPU memory grew in the last 15 years, it's about 10x. Sadly, 10x from today doesn't get us to a typical frontier model size of today which is a quickly moving target. some other advancement needs to happen to get us another 10x both in memory/compute requirements, and also power requirements.

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

#408

Post by maxerickson »

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.

Their data center business is selling gpus. They wrap them in a complete platform, but that's what they are selling.

They do report it separately from consumer and business sales of gpus used in PCs.

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

#409

Post by ghm2199 »

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…

> Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) running models.

I love the idea of SaaS offering these at lower rates today integrated into what ever you do and be 100% private. But I think the key challenge to mass adoption is productizing them in a way which makes sense for people to pay money for. As a commodity a local model is useless unless combined with some capabilities important to me. A PC is inherently useful because of so many applications offered on it on it. How local LLMs would be useful as a product that is useful for mass market is not yet proven.

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

#410

Post by brap »

jrflo wrote: post #370
paxys wrote: post #223

This entire piece boils down to “I like open source therefore it is winning”. Everyone here has already raised good counterpoints, but one more is that all the companies publishing open weights models are heavily VC funded. What is their exit strategy? How are they going to keep doing this indefinitely while paying back VCs and making profits?

Right, this is the classic VC playbook and people should really know better. They use capital to undercut competitors on cost to gain market share, then slowly crank up the costs until they are (hopefully) profitable. It makes 0 sense long-term to spend tens of millions on training a frontier model and releasing it for free for someone else to host on their GPUs. It is naive to believe that when the capital starts to…

> I'd expect them to shift to a model where Chinese models are hosted on Chinese infra.

You assume these Chinese companies need to make a profit. Nothing is really private in China, nothing that truly grants power, anyway.

CCP can just write off these loses as defense budget, which they basically are.

I bet that, all things considered, training 10 new Chinese frontier models costs _significantly_ less than a single modern fighter jet.

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