China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning • Hacker News Board

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

#761

Post by Chilko » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:33 PM UTC

overfeed wrote: post #728

bg24 wrote: post #719

There 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-…

> The prices are still dropping per watt.

FYI if you look into what has happened in the wholesale solar market since the end of 2025, this is no longer true. Prices are now 20% higher than they were in Nov/Dec, and were even higher earlier this year. Hard to predict the future but we may have reached a price floor, as at 2025 prices the module suppliers were below cost and losing money. The market dynamics have changed significantly since then

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

#762

Post by engineer_22 » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:35 PM UTC

DrewADesign wrote: post #752

engineer_22 wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 use AI chat every day, I find it endlessly useful. It’s replaced google search.

I’m sure a lot of people here do. I wouldn’t exactly call this a representative sample.

It’s a sample of the forerunners

See: product adoption cycle

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

#763

Post by tomhow » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:36 PM UTC

bg24 wrote: post #740

overfeed wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

[flagged]

This comment has been flagged in our software as AI-generated. Of course it could be a false positive (though from reading it myself it does come across as LLM-influenced). But if you've used AI to write or polish the text, even just a little bit, please don't. The guidelines specifically ask us not to do this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

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

#764

Post by Chilko » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:36 PM UTC

bg24 wrote: post #740

overfeed wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

[flagged]

While this has clearly been written by / with help from an LLM, the general info is correct and matches what I have heard from those suppliers (although $0.21/W future pricing is far higher than the estimates I've seen)

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

#765

Post by SchemaLoad » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:37 PM UTC

ChrisClark wrote: post #705

gulmothrowaway wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree that Chinese open-source models are going to play a bigger and bigger role in the entire ecosystem moving forward, but I don't agree with you in the sense that they are going to eventually "win." Just because they are cheapp doesn't mean they automatically win. You've picked a lot of great examples, but there is still a little bit of cherry-picking. One clear outlier is the iPhone, which coexists with Andr…

Yeah, iPhones are just fashion statements in the US. Different than LLMs

They also just work better and aren't substantially priced different to the equivalent android option.

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

#766

Post by The_Blade » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:37 PM UTC

Hugsbox wrote: post #477

Onavo wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This behavior is actually specific to ChatGPT because they lost a music copyright lawsuit in Germany. They would refuse to output music lyrics too but they would happily do analysis on lyrics if you supply them. I suspect there might be a guardrail model involved here.

The trouble is, even if they refuse to output that copyrighted material, they were still trained on it without proper licensing and will still produce derivative work based on them because that's how this whole thing works.

i remain really fucking pissed of about this asking ChatGPT for something regarding lyrics from It Was a Good Day. and the Supersonics don't even exist anymore dammit i'm really mad

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

#767

Post by bg24 » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:40 PM UTC

tomhow wrote: post #763

bg24 wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This comment has been flagged in our software as AI-generated. Of course it could be a false positive (though from reading it myself it does come across as LLM-influenced). But if you've used AI to write or polish the text, even just a little bit, please don't. The guidelines specifically ask us not to do this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

Correct. I used AI to refine the text. Thanks for the heads-up.

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

#768

Post by geophile » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:41 PM UTC

kcexn wrote: post #751

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…

How will open-source and open-weight models continue to thrive after financial incentives die off? Surely open models will suffer from outdated knowledge cutoffs if noone will pay for model training?

Nvidia will pay for training models that they can give away to consumers who will then buy their GPUs.

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

#769

Post by kajman » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:43 PM UTC

engineer_22 wrote: post #744

DrewADesign wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 use AI chat every day, I find it endlessly useful. It’s replaced google search.

I've found LLMs useful for surfacing popular recommendations. I also get the overwhelming feeling that it's all very early days still when the machine mixes together whatever was crawled into the weights with a web search or two and dumps it into a markdown blurb.

I totally agree with the above that a more polished and less obvious use of LLMs integrated back into search engines may be more useful, but will definitely be more usable.

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

#770

Post by bluegatty » Mon, Jul 20, 2026, 11:45 PM UTC

sumedh wrote: post #756

overgard wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'Libre Office' did not 'win'. I think France and other parts of the EU are switching over to it. Although that's probably more due to Microsoft's aggressive behavior recently. Agree on the cost thing generally, but I can't help but think that when the hype to "do AI" blows over, people are going to be casting a jaundiced eye towards data security, which probably means self-hosting and sandboxing

> Although that's probably more due to Microsoft's aggressive behavior recently. The current US govt might have played a role as well.

It's way more US gov than MSFT.