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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

#581

Post by LastTrain »

azinman2 wrote: post #422
resters wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I completely agree with your take, I think everyone has been surprised by how quickly LLMs have become highly useful and extremely powerful, and by how possible it is for relatively smaller models to also be highly useful. Given that, I would expect that in hindsight OpenAI and Anthropic would spend 40% of what they have on compute if starting over and knowing the actual landscape. The massive capital allocatio…

Don’t forget it took that huge spend to publish the papers and get to the models we have. It’s not obvious that without them we’d have LLMs springing up out of China or anywhere else.

And the published and non-published works of mankind but no one seems to want to give us any credit.

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

#582

Post by muldvarp »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #516
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?

The datacenter antipathy is odd, but then again so are the AI corps' marketing strategy of making everyone afraid for their jobs and the future of the species.

What else would they advertise with? "Our model constantly makes mistakes so you still have to hire expensive humans to proof-read everything"? The entire point of the AI industry is to automate human jobs. There is nothing else to advertise with.

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

#583

Post by foo12bar »

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.…

Would anyone besides those within China themselves use a completely closed and hidden model from China for their critical business needs?

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

#584

Post by prima-facie »

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…

Phones are already running models locally which can be used in the field for specific use cases. Maybe not for frontier coding just yet.

Also you don't need to be connected to the network to use a local AI in many instances. If all mobile apps were done with a local-first approach, then you could use a local AI to query your emails, lookup already visited pages, summarise recently received documents, and lots more. Lots of apps could use an inbox/outbox approach for receiving and sending updates instead of relying on the network at all times. And this pattern could be greatly leveraged by local agents.

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

#585

Post by snackbroken »

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?

First, copying information isn't wrong to begin with. It is literally the one thing that makes our species special.

Second, even if you are a copyright maximalist the output of an LLM is either

a) not subject to copyright because it is not the creative work of a human or

b) a derivative work of the original training material to which the LLM's operator has no rights.

Since the LLM's operator forcefully asserts that it is not infringing, any wrong that arises from taking their word for it and distilling one model into another rests squarely with the operator of the former.

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

#586

Post by js2 »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #574
jbm wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would you go from audiobook to text? Is there no epub available?

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

#587

Post by satvikpendem »

rlt wrote: post #558
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…

> free and low-end eventually wins Apple, the world's second most valuable company, seems like a counterexample.

The history of Apple shows that it's not. Consider what their early computers did to the industry.

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

#588

Post by comrade1234 »

brandon272 wrote: post #23
comrade1234 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're using deepseek with the idea that we would switch to something better when more of our customers are using the ai features but it ends up deepseek is awesome for what we're doing and so we probably won't switch because it's so much cheaper. The ai libraries we use let us switch models with just a configuration change.

Where is your DeepSeek model hosted?

Deepseek directly but we can switch to openrouter and a USA host at any time. Again it's just a configuration value - no code changes.

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

#589

Post by kccqzy »

h2aichat wrote: post #209
tyleo wrote: post #6

I’m suspicious of some quotes here, “80% of startups using Chinese models,” doesn’t seem quite right to me. I just interviewed at several startups and they were all using the US models. Maybe they have some minor use of Chinese models but the bread-and-butter of most of these businesses model use is the Claude and Codex subscriptions.

May be corporations should start having their open models running in-house. There might be a huge oportunity there. But the big price is AGI and who gets there first, right?

It’s just not possible. FWIW my employer did not get onboard to the Cloud trend and continued to buy hardware for in-house data centers. But the kind of hardware needed to run sophisticated models are simply not for sale at the volume needed by a single company.

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

#590

Post by confidantlake »

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 you are right. One small exception I can think of is Microsoft Office still crushes Libre Office.
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