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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

#821

Post by snoman »

SimianSci wrote: post #362
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.…

With their models being open-weight, any two-bit firm in the world with enough capital to invest in a few servers can become a provider capable of carving out their own little niche in the economy. The Chinese see this as a lift on the entire economy, as it comodotizes the technology to a degree in which many firms can serve many sectors of the economy, a true total-economic win worth the public investment. The Ameri…

Additionally I think there is something to the idea that they are trying to undermine foreign competition as a stall. They can’t compete economically for geopolitical reasons right now but they also can’t let American firms dominate the rest of the world in that market/technology stack.

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

#822

Post by mmonaghan »

mrdevlar wrote: post #630
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least China is being consistent: they do not give a single f*ck about intellectual property or copyright…but they also give away all this distilled knowledge away for free. I’m not an American so I don’t particularly like the idea of giving an American cartel of AI companies having so much power over this technology. I don’t necessarily buy into the “China bad”, “they are communists” and all that BS either. I will…

This is proof that America has forgot it's own history. America was founded by men who hated intellectual property, who stole and smuggled the plans and expertise for textile machinery out of the United Kingdom. A gross intellectual property violation. Why? Because they were being exploited by that system. The UK was using the American colonies for raw material and keeping the machinery in the UK for finished goods.…

> the idea that anyone could own that is obscene

What if china ends up owning it? Do you think that's better or worse for the world? You're commenting your open opinions on a site run by a company that could not exist in china and cannot today. You can ask ant, xai, and chatgpt models questions and get answers that do their best to reflect the world. There's a set of questions you cannot expect trustworthy answers for from chinese models and you think they're stopping at those few questions?

get real bro

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

#823

Post by mmonaghan »

nicce wrote: post #346
nazgulsenpai wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's as simple as looking at the incentive structure. The Chinese gov't has incentive to kneecap US monopoly on frontier models. It makes sense for them to continue down this course if it strengthens their position.

Chinese gov is not even needed. Deepseek was already profitable before this whole thing started. They even had the GPUs.

how profitable though

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

#824

Post by deadfoxygrandpa »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #790
bmitc wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people always bring up state support when it comes to China? As if the U.S. doesn't provide massive tax breaks and explicit funding to industry? It's on every tech post about China, as if it gives them some sort of "unfair" advantage.

Because the scale of the subsidization is unimaginably different.

yep. the ppp loans alone dwarf any state subsidies any other country has ever done

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

#825

Post by mmonaghan »

greenmilk wrote: post #635
nazgulsenpai wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's as simple as looking at the incentive structure. The Chinese gov't has incentive to kneecap US monopoly on frontier models. It makes sense for them to continue down this course if it strengthens their position.

The Chinese gov't and also the rest of humanity... I'm not sure how everyone in the US forgot that monopolies are bad

Who's got a monopoly though lol?

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

#826

Post by crubier »

SwellJoe wrote: post #562
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 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…

Came here to say that, my bet is that in 3-4 years you'll be able to run Fable-level of intelligence models on your laptop or maybe even on you phone

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

#827

Post by mmonaghan »

paxys wrote: post #341
nazgulsenpai wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's as simple as looking at the incentive structure. The Chinese gov't has incentive to kneecap US monopoly on frontier models. It makes sense for them to continue down this course if it strengthens their position.

The Chinese govt has a strong incentive to break dependence on the US for AI needs and build domestic models, but not to spend trillions to subsidize these models for the rest of the world.

Agree but I think they'll spend whatever they can to subsidize and break dependence on US models. Whatever isn't spend on US models will be spent on chinese models. Europe will remain a small single digit % unless they get their act together.

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

#829

Post by geophile »

venusenvy47 wrote: post #791
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'm not clear what you mean with "PC office productivity software" but it seems like Microsoft Office is the winner there. Isn't that professional?

It didn’t used to be.

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

#830

Post by geophile »

gitgud wrote: post #796
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…

> Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. I would argue mainframes rebranded to "cloud" which is ubiquitous and more people interact with this computer than any other type of device... only difference is that it's a browser instead of a terminal

There is constant shifting between client and server computation. I think it is a stretch to call cloud servers “mainframes”. There are still old school mainframes, running JCL, and old school mainframe DB2 and COBOL. That ain’t cloud.
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