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

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

#451

Post by jbm » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:14 PM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #390

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.

Try instructing Codex to (say) fine-tune a language model based on a collection of books you've got saved. You will find yourself admonished, repeatedly and at length, not to utilize copyrighted materials to train language models, by an AI who owes its entire existence to that very act. These models might be smart but they're not close to being able to savor irony.

I was a little radicalized when ChatGPT literally refused to translate parts of 1000+ year old religious texts and told me it was due to copyright concerns.

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

#452

Post by _fizz_buzz_ » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:14 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.

So, OpenAI and Anthropic say the Chinese models are only as good because they distill their models. How true is that. I am sure it adds something. But is it more like a marginal 1% improvement or something really significant?

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

#453

Post by overgard » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:15 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…

I agree, although I think it will be a lot sooner than 10-15 years. I'm running local AI right now and it's definitely not production grade yet, but it's surprisingly good. Speculative prediction that I probably shouldn't make: when the bubble pops, depending on when it pops, RAM prices might drop a lot. I could foresee these companies having produced a lot of RAM that suddenly doesn't have a buyer. (I know high bandwidth memory is different, but I imagine there are companies that will want to take advantage of that)

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

#454

Post by pstuart » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

Glyptodon wrote: post #424

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…

I think this is all true, but that unlike with Moore's law and improved PC tooling and capabilities, we also have essentially existing biological evidence that there should be a way to create much better intelligent systems in terms of training, memory, and efficiency. With classic PC evolution we didn't even have that evidence but still could make a relatively strong inference (Moore's law). But here we basically ha…

Indeed. It feels like we're at the equivalent of what the original IBM PC offered in the personal computer revolution.

Just seeing how much has progressed as far as capability in the past 4 years as far as capability and efficiency, it's clear that there's so much more to learn and refine from.

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

#455

Post by drstewart » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #35

_aavaa_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumping is such a loaded term. This is investor-backed scaling to capture market share, standard VC playbook.

It will never stop being funny to me that China does the exact same shit American corps have been doing since the 70's but because it's scary China it's suddenly a problem. American startups flood markets with below-cost loss-leader products explicitly to kill competition and create network effects, and then jack the prices just as high, if not higher, for the service in question after the fact, oftentimes while maki…

It will never stop being funny to me that China does the exact same shit American corps have been doing since the 70's but because it's glorious China it's suddenly not a problem.

I thought it was evil late-stage capitalism? Suddenly it's a friendly panda bear that just wants to spread love and technology?

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

#456

Post by waffletower » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:17 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.

You can't be blind to training costs. And you can't be blind to Meta dabbling in the openish strategy (Llama) before the Chinese labs did.

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

#457

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

SimianSci wrote: post #362

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.…

With their models being open-weight, any two-bit firm in the world with enough capital to invest in a few servers can become a provider capable of carving out their own little niche in the economy. The Chinese see this as a lift on the entire economy, as it comodotizes the technology to a degree in which many firms can serve many sectors of the economy, a true total-economic win worth the public investment. The Ameri…

[deleted]

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

#458

Post by dsign » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:17 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.

It doesn't make me happy to say it, but the American LLM companies were first. Capital in the rest of the world is way more conservative, and I can't imagine the mega-investments OpenAI and Anthropic managed to secure happening anywhere else without existing proof that "thing is profitable".

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

#459

Post by dinfinity » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

345f506fdc718 wrote: post #435

lambda wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) running models doing pretty much anything that frontier models can do right now 10-15 years? The current rate is closer to 10-15 months. 15 months ago, the top model on the Artificial Analysis index was GPT-o3. It scores 30 on the Artificial Analysis index. Today, you can easily run Qwen 3.6 27B on a variety of consumer hardware. It scores…

> 15 months ago, the top model on the Artificial Analysis index was GPT-o3. It scores 30 on the Artificial Analysis index. There must be something really of with those benchmarks. Yes, hallucinations gotten better, but I don't see that the big frontier models got so much better in the last 12-18 Months. They just put out bigger wall of texts and feel smarter. But they still make way too many stupid errors

12 months ago "way too many stupid errors" was constant news. Today, you rarely hear about those anymore.

Sure, the novelty of the errors has worn off a bit and thus the reporting. Nevertheless the quality has improved immensely in this regard.

Also, AI video generation is now so good and accessible that it is very, very regularly used for memes, disinformation and proper (short) movie projects. AI image generation even more so (Mitch McConnell anyone?).

Pretending progress hasn't been mindboggling is insane.

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

#460

Post by geophile » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

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…

But different huge companies have different incentives. It is very much in Nvidia’s interest to have me running a powerful open source model on a $4k machine that they sell me.