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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

#461

Post by jolt42 »

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…

Windows - pfff, Microsoft charged companies like Dell for an install on computers they didn't even install it on !!!

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

#462

Post by somelamer567 »

9dev wrote: post #373
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.

...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!

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Even if a certain large Asian country has carefully constructed a pretext to do do out of confected historical grievance, and entitlement to 'rise' at the expense of others?

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

#463

Post by toomuchtodo »

dsign wrote: post #458
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.

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".

First-Mover Disadvantage - https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage - October 2001

> In business today, it’s universally assumed that speed is good—that the fleet thrive while the laggards struggle just to survive. This belief is perhaps most strongly expressed in the concept of first-mover advantage. The company that leads the way into a new market, the thinking goes, locks in a competitive advantage that ensures superior sales and profits over the long term. It’s a nice theory, with a long pedigree. Unfortunately, the facts don’t support it. We recently completed an extensive study of the results turned in by market pioneers and followers, in both consumer and industrial segments, and we found that over the long haul, early movers are considerably less profitable than later entrants. Although pioneers do enjoy sustained revenue advantages, they also suffer from persistently high costs, which eventually overwhelm the sales gains.

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

#465

Post by stefan_ »

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.

The American LLMs have been equally distilled from Chinese ones. Not least because the people whose creativity in collecting training data barely extends to pirating Annas Archive probably lack in great Chinese datasets.

Try it yourself: https://imgur.com/ZfxYmaq

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

#466

Post by alexjplant »

Onavo wrote: post #428
hyperbovine wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This behavior is actually specific to ChatGPT because they lost a music copyright lawsuit in Germany. They would refuse to output music lyrics too but they would happily do analysis on lyrics if you supply them. I suspect there might be a guardrail model involved here.

Claude does this too. I asked it recently to compare two versions of a song (the original and '97 remake of EPMD's "You Gots To Chill", if anybody wants to try and replicate this) and it flatly refused. No amount of reasoning would knock it off of its moralizing perch - reproducing any part of lyrics is expressly prohibited.

In light of this and other ridiculous behavior I'm migrating to my own OpenWebUI instance with open-weight models from OpenRouter (with ZDR, of course). We'll see how it goes.

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

#467

Post by realusername »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #452
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.

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?

I also don't believe it, if it was as easy as that, we would have hundreds of competitors.

The truth that Anthropic and OpenAI will not say, is that these Chinese labs have a lot of talented people.

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

#468

Post by jarjoura »

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 value of an LLM is the dynamic reasoning you get out of it and the cost to execute on that.

I see two forces working against this that proprietary models will always have over an open source model.

1. The biggest is content licensing. Content is quickly becoming gated by systems at the front of their load balancers, completely changing the social contract of the Internet. What used to be a quick google search for recent facts that lead me to places like reddit or twitter, is now completely walled off if you're not physically at your browser and using an IP address from a last-mile provider.

LLMs have pre-trained on the bulk of the information up to 2024/2025, but over time that will be more and more out of date.

Anthropic, OpenAI and Google will all have to pay for access to a lot of this content refresh going forward, and it does make a material difference in the output you get.

2. Liability is the other. A corporation can look at a contract for model access and see one that provides uptime guarentees, content infringement promises and model safety, and pick the contract that shields the corporation from the most liability. A 3rd party hosting platform like fireworks.ai that hosts open weights models won't provide any of that at all. They will simply bill you for time spent on their hardware and make promises that they won't log or inspect corporate traffic.

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

#469

Post by ChrisLTD »

orbital-decay wrote: post #142

Once the US implements meaningful export controls, China will do this as well. They're already mirroring US regulations, but the gates aren't closed yet .

If the US implements export controls and China doesn't, it would kill the market for OpenAI and Anthropic.

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

#470

Post by 9dev »

somelamer567 wrote: post #462
9dev wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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!

Two wrongs don't make a right. Even if a certain large Asian country has carefully constructed a pretext to do do out of confected historical grievance, and entitlement to 'rise' at the expense of others?

They sure don't. I still find the hypocrisy appalling.
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