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The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

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Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#61

Post by obsidianbases1 »

xnx wrote: post #12
zkmon wrote: post #9

Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Until the taboo prevails, the cartel get's their flood of profit. That's a cartel protected by regulations.

Is "taboo" the right word? "taboo" = "banned on grounds of morality or taste". Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.

I'm not any less concerned about the US companies.

A Chinese company seems more likely to produce Chinese products that don't directly compete in the US market.

While a US company can ship the product as a feature of their platform and undercut on price while making up the revenue elsewhere

Edit: I personally use US models, but I'm not naive enough to think that's any sort of real protection of IP

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#62

Post by tcp_handshaker »

Levitz wrote: post #16
tcp_handshaker wrote: post #7

They are in the phase I need a government bailout like the banks after their crazy financial adventures of the 2000 to 2008. At which point the corruption is so big, that an Empire crumbles under its own stench? "Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no "Trump Officials Held Millions of Dollars of SpaceX Ahead of IPO" - https://finance.yaho…

[flagged]

Except you provided no argument. Explain why the AI gang, like a rich kid who run a high debt at the Casino, during their drunken weekend in Vegas...is frenetically calling on daddy US to bail them out:

"US officials eye government stakes in AI companies" - https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/us-officials-eye...

"Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98r8r7dz5no

They are facing a Capex of 2 to 3 trillion until 2030, and have now realized they are out of money.

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#63

Post by [deleted] »

blfr wrote: post #30
joe_mamba wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Weird, considering they had no issues shipping manufacturing and supply chains to China when that made economic sense.

Yes, there was a whole idea about civilizing and pacifying the world through economic cooperation that would foster middle class in countries across the world that would then in turn make them democratize and become peaceful trade partners. It didn't quite work out so now people are looking for other strategies.

[deleted]

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#64

Post by monsieurbanana »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #37

Question that I do not understand: How should a local-run Chinese Model "phone home" if someone runs it locally on the hardware? I think Im missing some understanding here?

I don't think they do at the moment, but they could be trained subtly add backdoors to code or make "phone home" api calls during dev time, triggering on certain conditions ("is user employee of xyz")

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#65

Post by jmyeet »

This is kind of a winding, long-winded way of saying that AI models are going to be commoditized, mostlikely by the Chinese. This has been my position ever since DeepSeek came out. It is a national security interest for China for an American company not to "own" AI. And they will release models to make that not happen.

We aren't yet at the point where running local models can compete with DC type infrastructure but it's not that far away either. 12B models are easy to run on consumer hardware. 31B models aren't that hard either but the tokens/sec are a bit slow. Where will we be in 3 years? 5? I think we'll be running 100B+ models on The issue is that several companies, most notably OpenAI, are predicated on:

1. There will be an AI moat; and

2. That company will "win" or "own" AI.

That's the basis of the OpenAI valuation. If that doesn't happen, it's going to be ahuge problem to recover sufficient revenue to recoup the investment. And I don't think it will happen.

In 3-5 years the NVidia hardware you buy will be several times cheaper and faster than what we have now. That will massively depreciate existing investments because it will ultimately come down to performance-per-Watt but if a theoretical G100 can do 3-4x of the inference of an H100 for the same power, the older hardware just won't be able to compete.

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#66

Post by bix6 »

Is there any truth to the Chinese models having built in f’ery? Like phoning home or inserting backdoors. Or is that just everyone blanketing “China bad”?

Also what local models are people running and actually finding useful?

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#67

Post by Avicebron »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #42
enraged_camel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We as Americans at least have some amount of influence over American corporations, and enforcement mechanisms for those breaking the rules.

I'm pretty sure those corporations have much more influence over american politicians, regulators, lawmakers, etc. than eg. russian or chinese ones.

Well sure they do, thank Citizens United and others for that. But that doesn't mean we can't appropriately categorize them as also hostile actors alongside russia, china, whoever.

It's undo influence over politics against the best interest of the American people that's the issue. Company, foreign nation, it doesn't matter.

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#68

Post by Jtarii »

rjsw wrote: post #56
KellyCriterion wrote: post #37

Question that I do not understand: How should a local-run Chinese Model "phone home" if someone runs it locally on the hardware? I think Im missing some understanding here?

I think the fear is that it might insert some "phone home" routine into the source code that it generates.

Has anyone demonstrated that this type of attack is even possible? Also the moment anyone detects this attack it will nuke deepseek/other chinese AI labs reputation completely, it is the most high risk low reward attack ever.

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#69

Post by cactusplant7374 »

computerex wrote: post #52
Der_Einzige wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that they're a hell of a lot less cheap on American hardware than on Chinese hardware. At the point you are running Chinese models on US hardware, "Why not nano or haiku" becomes the next relevant question.

Not true. Togetherai, deepinfra, fireworks AI offer a wide range of models like gpt oss that are very capable and far cheaper than the models from big 3.

Are they better? Are they better than GPT5.5?

Re: The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

#70

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

stevehawk wrote: post #45
falcor84 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a higher-order concern here that I'm paranoid enough to voice: that if used as a coding agent, an AI model affiliated with a country's government might try to make my software susceptible to attacks by that government's intelligence forces. And note that I'm not singling out China here.

so use the cheap model to do the work and the expensive domestic model to audit?

Or I can just use the domestic model, accepting that I'm paying some premium in order to reduce the complexity of my dependencies and the amount of time I have to spend thinking about supply chain risk. It's the same reason I don't buy things from Alibaba even though many things I buy from Amazon are surely available there for less.
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