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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

#541

Post by flaunf221 »

azinman2 wrote: post #415
pixl97 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Stop pilfering what I rightfully stole!"

It’s in the same neighborhood but isn’t really apples to apples. Distilling LLMs is to take a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation, while the other is scraping what already exists as is. It is fair to say you stole our multi-billion dollar intellectual output in that scenario.

> comes from huge amounts of innovation

Thousands of years of human innovation taken without any permission.

Everyone should steal everything not nailed from other AI companies. Then steal everything nailed and take the nails too. At least this way a tiniest bit might return back to society.

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

#542

Post by gaigalas »

We're not seeing the big swing yet, which is when hardware becomes cheap enough so that hobbyists and volunteers can meaningfully contribute to a shared open substrate.

We'll see smaller, more efficient models, better training and all sorts of things once that massive workforce is unlocked. It's just a matter of time.

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

#543

Post by chasd00 »

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…

It's important also that open-weight isn't open source. If you can't download the training data (fully labeled), source code of the NN, and follow the README to build and train it yourself assuming oyu had the hardware then it's not open source.

tldr there's no "source" in open weight models therefore they are not open source.

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

#544

Post by realusername »

TitaRusell wrote: post #540
realusername wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And this is exactly what many Americans cannot admit to themselves. China is not stealing American research they are inventing stuff. They can invent it. They can build it. And it is only a matter of them before they can scale that last barrier of American hegemony- market it.

Indeed, if there's one thing China did well, it's that they heavily invested in education and have a very education focused culture.

And in this field, having an army of well educated PHDs is making all the difference

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

#545

Post by shimman »

elictronic wrote: post #288
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…

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.

The fact that the US economy is load bearing towards unprofitable projects while things like medicare for all or universal childcare continue to not exist is just a damning indictment of the country.

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

#546

Post by spicymaki »

jbm wrote: post #451
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.

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.

I asked Gemini to generate a picture of Peter Pan and Wendy (for a workbook I am putting together for youth summer reading) and it preceded to refuse due to copyright. Not everything about that work is owned by Disney. Thankfully the JM Barrie original artwork is public domain and available (and fantastic btw), so I used that instead.

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

#547

Post by Danox »

colechristensen wrote: post #484
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…

instead of 15 years I think it'll be more like 1.5 years. I wouldn't be surprised if apple were shipping 512 GB unified RAM macbooks before 2030 and that would be standard issue for folks to use local LLMs for their daily work

With Apple’s recent history engineering and designing around companies that hinder their progress, I don’t think memory is going to be any different.

I also think the rest of the tech industry that can isn’t gonna be stalled for too long. This windfall will be the last for those three stooges of memory.

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

#548

Post by chasd00 »

Danox wrote: post #528
idontwantthis wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also confused by this point. The American government could force OpenAI and Anthropic to open their models, but then they would instantly evaporate, right? It doesn't seem like a choice that they can make, so framing it as a "winning" strategy doesn't make any sense to me. In what world could those companies have existed and opened their models?

They could, but they don’t have to. The Chinese have beaten them to it, and the rest of the world will benefit from it and the circle will be complete once the models get a little bit faster/smaller and the localized hardware does the same and it will, it is inevitable. The one thing that is sort of ironic or bad is that between Russia and the Ukraine there’s a large number of mathematically inclined people that if i…

> The Chinese have beaten them to it, and the rest of the world will benefit from it and the circle will be complete once the models get a little bit faster/smaller and the localized hardware does the same and it will, it is inevitable.

This reads just like "AGI is 2 years away", I'll go set my calendar...

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

#549

Post by znnajdla »

danielciocirlan wrote: post #393

Is China’s strategy sustainable, given the enormous costs of training frontier models? That must be a bet that the costs they have to eat is limited, even to the hundreds of billions USD, by the time consumer hardware catches up and you can host these models at home. The even higher level strategic bet seems to be that, as they hope to drown the American AI model companies, that would be a signal that they’re about t…

> given the enormous costs

The costs are enormous only in America. The actual cost is much lower. American technogy in general is ridiculously overpriced -- compare the cost for raw compute on AWS versus Hetzner for example.

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

#550

Post by gleenn »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #491
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

if distilling was so easy and could give you frontier LLM on openai/anthropic output, then how come there are no hundreds of frontier labs in the US market, all distilling and competing for the TRILLION dollar market valuation ???? its all bs spread by oai/anthropic in order to ban open weight models and monopolize the market for two US companies and protect their trillion dollar valuations

Distilling isn't necessarily easy, there is a huge cottage industry of services middle-manning ChatGPT and Claude to collect huge amounts of data. It is still vastly cheaper than training yourself, but it is certainly not easy or feasible for most organizations. And I'm sure a flock of lawyers would show up if someone in America was found doing it.
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