Are we saying, China is delivering on the Open AI promise?
Open Weights = Open AI
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China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
721–730 of 978 posts
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#722Is 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…
Let's play a dumb game and assume that training a new model like K3 costs a billion dollars. (It doesn't, but let's play the dumb game still).
If you count it as part of the defense budget, it is 0.3% of their budget. As part of their education budget? 0.05%. Science? 0.5%.
It's pocket change. They can blow a dozen Kimis every year while their own industry is improving and it's a pain in the ass in the US's backside. They're laughing their asses off watching companies having their values inflated to trillions of dollars, more than the GDP of dozens of countries while producing nothing in value more than GPT 5.6.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#723Earlier 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.
a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation
The published algorithms like the transformer architecture are not patentable. You spent a lot of money on compute and China used the uncopyright-able output to steer its own training models? Too bad. I feel especially unsympathetic to OpenAI, who went from being a presenting itself as a benevolent nonprofit to a very-much-for-private private entity over night.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#724Earlier 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…
> it's because they are being heavily subsidized to do the research activity Is it actually true? This seems pivotal because currently most theories rest on the idea that individual Chinese companies are acting in China's overall economic or strategic interest. It's a tough sell to believe they all just do that through implicit desire to align with the CCP's direction. I would believe it much more easily if there wer…
Yes, incentives are why people go to work in the morning. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA4012-1.html
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#725The 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…
Personally, I don’t think the general-purpose LLM as a standalone tool is long for this world, at least not in consumer-facing applications. I think when the economics make more sense, product designers will make things that people actually want to use that will pretty transparently handle whatever model interactions are necessary, when it makes sense. As a consumer, the last things I want in an interface are to a) b…
>As a consumer, the last things I want in an interface are to a) be sycophantic enough to lessen my judgment
This is EXACTLY what people like/are addicted to about chatbots.
My sister-in-law bombed an interview and asked AI about her answers to the interviewer's questions, chatgpt or whatever it was told her that her answers weren't bad, but that the interviewer could not see the gold in her responses. She said she felt much better.
I see this effect with all the non-tech people in my life
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why wouldn't they? They subsidized their EV industry with 230 billion dollars over the last 14 years. Solar was before that with about 17 billion. The US puts about 0.4% of GDP towards various subsidies, China is around 4%. This isn't about cost of engineering, it's money thrown at industries directly to boost them. The us provides tax incentives. China just gives you subsidized loans to the businesses they choose to…
The US subsidized its EV industry with about $120B over the last 15 years, and that's what they gave out despite congress expecting $300B in their reporting just a few years ago. So, it's not like China threw hundreds of billions at EVs while the US left it all to GM and Ford to solve.
I would love to see the reference you have for those numbers. Money approved is not money spent. Especially when those subsidies have been killed.
You might want to glance and see which one of the subsidies your looking at are even still in place and not projections. Most have been canceled for years now.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#727Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd expect them to shift to a model where Chinese models are hosted on Chinese infra. You assume these Chinese companies need to make a profit. Nothing is really private in China, nothing that truly grants power, anyway. CCP can just write off these loses as defense budget, which they basically are. I bet that, all things considered, training 10 new Chinese frontier models costs _significantly_ less than a single m…
Which on itself is wild. The main issue with the discussion isn't a rift in capabilities, but a rift in the valuation model itself. If China can match the pace and produce frontier models at a fraction of the cost of US alternatives, even without access to SOTA hardware, what is the competitive advantage for the current valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI?
The Chinese ecosystem is largely built on stealing intellectual property from and/or distilling of US closed source models.
I’m not getting into the ethics/comedy aspect of it, but let’s not pretend this isn’t the case. Plenty of evidence, the motive is obvious, and the numbers are in plain sight (valuations, salaries, etc).
As long as this continues I think closed source will continue being a few steps ahead, but the steps will probably get smaller over time.
Having said that, this is already priced in, the market predicts this gap will be large enough for the US companies to profit from (astronomically).
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#728There is no coming back. After all, open-weight is NOT open-source. It is basically free model. And you pay to host it. The value proposition is that 100's of providers and host and sell it. 1000s of businesses (eg. Microsoft, Databricks, Palantir to small startups) can run it, finetune it and own the IP and pay only for hosting. On the other hand, you have OpenAI and Anthropic, who need to charge at 90%+ inference m…
> Chinese labs are doing a favor to the world. But I can also say with 100% certainty that if US labs were to close shops next year, Chinese labs would immediately start charging $$.
How would do you explain the pricing of Chinese solar panels, after managing to destroy other countries' solar industries? The prices are still dropping per watt.
Could it be China's internal demand for solar is big enough, and its long-term governmental strategy on renewables result in an outcome that almost looks like largesse to the rest of the world? I suspect Chinese AI may follow a similar path.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#729Earlier quoted context omitted.
China is looking after their own interests, but they absolutely don't want their largest export market to struggle. The global economy is not a zero-sum game, and the idea that it might be is the root of many of our policy issues in the US.
Chinas interests today are a US with reduced power and a global economy more focused on China. Someone loses power for someone else to gain. It’s literally the definition of a zero sum game? China targets areas it thinks it can win and dominate in the future.
Bringing "power" into the conversation is a whole different layer of complexity which I was not addressing. I was speaking about economics, which is in no way a zero sum game. Economic activity creates value.
Re: China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
#730Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have similar thoughts. To those who feel on the contrary, I would genuinely like to understand why average consumer won't be priced out of hardware? The silicon industry is already quite centralised. Everywhere we already see the concept of ownership disappearing. It's quite difficult for me to visualise a non-dystopian future where our PCs are just mere screens and every compute happens on a remote cloud, owned by…
It's quite difficult for me to visualise a non-dystopian future where our PCs are just mere screens and every compute happens on a remote cloud, owned by some corporation, charging you subscription fees to even add and multiply numbers. I'm actually kind of surprised that hasn't happened by now even ignoring AI. Governments and marketers would love to be able to spy on literally everything you do, the copyright carte…
we have already gone through multiple cycles of remote and edge compute (mainframe to pc, pc to cloud, cloud to phone). as the software/hardware landscape changes, the economics of what can be run on what device will change accordingly. I very much doubt that it will permanently go one way.