I don't understand when people say that comparable Chinese AI models cost less to use. Kimi K3 costs more than GPT 5.6 Terra.
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
571–580 of 978 posts
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what the thinking inside NVIDIA is at the moment. They have countless examples to learn from here, about the danger of not being willing to cannibalize your high end products. But, of course, there’s a reason that there are lots of examples of this sort of failure. There’s plenty of competition that would be happy to attack them from below, though…
I also wonder what this moment will mean for chip design going forward. The fact that we are so constrained on the GPU side along with the success of unified memory with apple silicon does make me wonder what chips in 3-5 years will look like.
Those that can will incorporate memory into their designs, and the Chinese will be a bigger part of the memory market worldwide going into the future, that alone will drive more tech companies to look at memory/ssd design differently than what they did before. Market conditions have changed you either change/adapt with it or you die.
I think memory and ssd design will end up being incorporated into the overall design of the SOC chip. And several companies that can probably will sponsor a existing company or build a foundry going forward. Once again, change or die.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#573Earlier 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?
Maybe I'm dense, but I don't understand what you are saying. American courts have decided that the output of LLMs can't be copyrighted, so what the Chinese labs are doing is perfectly legal.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#574Earlier 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 used Claude to build a complete data extraction pipeline for a popular current best seller book series: audiobook -> text (via whisper) -> local LLM (qwen) -> database. Not once did it seem to acknowledge or care about copyright. It even used knowledge it already had about the books to exclude certain ones before beginning since the character I was interested in did not appear in those. It definitely had context of what we were working on.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#575The 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 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." I don't think it'll take 10-15 years. Gemma 4 31B in the 4-bit QAT is competitive with the frontier of less than three years ago and runs on any high-end 32GB gaming PC GPU or a large-ish Mac. The question is whether the frontier will continue to get better at…
Hell, Bonsai Labs 27B parameter model can run on phones with their ternary implementation which is quite efficient. Scale that up to frontier model parameters and it's quite likely we can run them on current laptops.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#576What is ‘China’ going to do when it ‘wins’? The framing of this duscourse is all meaningless
What was the point of the Space Race between the US and the USSR? Proving who had more powerful capabilities. There doesn’t need to be any near-term profit at all. China has a lot to gain by beating US AI even if it makes no money from it. Money is such a small concern compared to the prestige and strategic benefits of being the global center of intelligence research.
To answer your question, what can China do if it wins? Become a global talent/education magnet, replacing the US, for example.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#577Earlier 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?
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.
OpenAI said it: "I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation"
They know it's real effort that's doing this well, not just "copying off someone else's test." It's real and they will react. How is the big question.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#578Capitalism, hoisted on its own petard
So determined to own the means of production, enormous amounts of money have been poured into building the frontier models
But there is not much special, except for capital density, about those very models
Surely these models should be treated as public utilities? Like power stations or water infrastructure. Absolutely necessary for a modern economy, but indistinguishable from one another
Pass the popcorn
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#579[flagged]
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. This assumes a) AI is a zero-sum game, and b) we're actually talking about on-prem AI will replace cloud-based AI. I think neither statements are true. AI is like compute: we'll need all sorts of it, in various sizes, everywhere. I'm sure Nvidia whats to own all the workloads. On t…
But they won’t with the Chinese around long-term and other tech companies that have capabilities. This is a short term bottleneck.