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I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both? It

I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both? It's easy to wave this aside as the current administration playing political games. But I don't think there is any reason to assume that the current era of open availability of models is going to continue indefinitely. Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever, even why they get to the level that Mythos is at now, and beyond? And do you think that a competent US government would have no interest in regulating and restricting model access in 2 years time, assuming that model capabilities continue to improve? I think we bias towards thinking the status quo is the norm and will continue, but this news invites us to question that assumption and think about different ways the future could go.

gpm 3mo ago
> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever Yes. I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. And simultaneously that the only way they can actually get everyone to use their models is if it's possible for us to run them on our own hardware. (This isn't exactly a utopian view of the future)
- tw1984 3mo ago
  > I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. that doesn't require the model to be SOTA, it can be just a compact model capable of running on some inexpensive hardware. that is vastly different from SOTA models like Mythos which can potentially disrupt lots of things.
  - strangegecko 3mo ago
    Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.
    - columnarx3 3mo ago
      People choose SOTA right now because of the heavily subsidised model subscriptions. People aren't going to pay 20x the price for a model that's maybe 10% better.
      - ezst 3mo ago
        And the fact that "better" is highly subjective and domain/task/vibe-specific
    - adrianN 3mo ago
      Why do I want the model I use for coding to know Shakespeare or vice versa?
      - Jare 3mo ago
        Because you communicate with it using natural language and real-world references and descriptions of what you want, you use emotion and emphasis (especially when re-prompting), you use examples and illustrative stories and common expressions. Understanding and interpreting all of that and replying in kind, to some degree, requires a large body of non-computation, cultural knowledge, or else the prompts are just meaningless words, and the replies will look like compiler output.
        adrianN 3mo ago
        That sounds intuitively true, but I’m not convinced that it is actually the case. I don’t think we know enough about neural network training to say what training and how many parameters are necessary for what kind of performance on which tasks. To me it looks like we currently guess that more is better and try to throw as much compute and data at the problem as is economically feasible. There is little incentive for companies to invest into small model research since their moat is huge models that require special hardware to run.
- jychang 3mo ago
  This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models. Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen versions would have open source releases, but Qwen 3.7 plus does not. The second best Chinese model, Minimax M3, is testing the waters by taking longer and longer between “model release” and open sourcing it. This time, they spent 2 weeks after release before open sourcing it. There’s also a lot of rumors of GLM and Deepseek not open sourcing future models. It’s pretty obvious that you cannot take Chinese models as open source for granted, they’ll be closed source soon.
  - ls612 3mo ago
    The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.
    - londons_explore 3mo ago
      With nearly everyone using inference accelerators, the pool of hardware is no longer shared between training and use.
    - SubiculumCode 3mo ago
      No, they are open sourcing them because they don't have another play, being second/3rd tier lans
    - Slartie 3mo ago
      I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies. China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power. Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run. As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.
- nine_k 3mo ago
  The US administration restricting the use of US-trained models is one of the best gifts it could make to the Chinese LLM producers, and to the PRC government.
  - dozerly 3mo ago
    This entire administration is a gift to everybody but the US. It’s either in service of Russia, China or whoever is willing to pay Trump the most.
    - scotty79 3mo ago
      It's funny how the acceleration of the downfall of the US (due to trump) is a gift to everyone else. It's almost as if US didn't have as postitive impact on the world as they thought.
      - rvnx 3mo ago
        Downfall sounds exaggerated. US is a great and respectable country with amazing nature, people tech and military, very very far a collapsed state. If anything to be worried of, it's the state of Europe. Closer and closer to war, full of insecurity and no innovation. US is a great country.
        scotty79 3mo ago
        Let's agree to disagree.
        rvnx 3mo ago
        I appreciate your kindness. I have upvoted your comment, we both agree.
      - gpm 3mo ago
        A gift to [every dictatorial regime]. It's not a gift to the common people. The hundreds of thousands of people who got aids, and wouldn't have if not for Trumps withdrawal, didn't benefit. The women of Afghanistan didn't benefit. The countries of the EU... Canada... Korea... Taiwan... Ukraine... really just about any democracy didn't benefit. The downfall of the US benefiting bad people is not evidence that the US didn't have a positive impact.
- close04 3mo ago
  You don’t need the cutting edge to influence people’s opinion. “Export LLMs” to the rescue.
- vintermann 3mo ago
  There's also the Meta motivation, that even if you don't get the control you would like from releasing a model, it may still be worth it to at least deny others that control. I'm sure that matters even more to China vs. the US than it mattered to Facebook vs. Google.
- baq 3mo ago
  > > Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever > Yes. holy shit the naivete of HN nowadays.
- spiralpolitik 3mo ago
  There is no moat in the model and by making the them open, it’s hard for one to be established when the free models are “good enough”. OpenAI and Anthropic are both hamstrung by this. Anthropic does have the better chance of surviving.
deanishe 3mo ago
> Why can't it be both? Is the government going to fund all further development? Hard to imagine investors continuing to throw billions at products they aren't allowed to sell.
- CraftingLinks 3mo ago
  Why wouldn't they? They see this technology as a military asset now.
  - VBprogrammer 3mo ago
    Honestly, with the caliber of people who currently comprise the US administration; leaving the whole thing to Openclaw and some new fancy model might not be the worst idea.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  - layer8 3mo ago
    Trump and friends are only interested in investments they can personally make money from.
locknitpicker 3mo ago
> I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both? Here is why it's unlikely this is anything other than "silly behavior by a government": - some benchmarks show GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1, and even Claude Opus outperforming Claude Fable, and yet it's Fable which is restricted. - some benchmarks still show the likes of Kimi 2.5 outperforming any Claude model, and DeepSeek is getting equivalent scores (a few tenths of a percent difference) > Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever (...) That's immaterial to the discussion. Even if China forced Chinese labs to restrict access to all models, the truth of the matter is that Trump's administration to restrict access to US-based models does not prevent others from having access to models that are as capable or even better. So what's exactly the point of this?
- solumunus 3mo ago
  You’re completely overrating these benchmarks and it’s landing you at a nonsense opinion. Just actually use the models and you will see that the gap is significant.
  - irthomasthomas 3mo ago
    It should be easy for a company like Anthropic to prove this beyond a doubt. Why don't they? Why don't they have a collection of prompts and side-by-side comparisons with other models showing how far ahead they are?
    - largbae 3mo ago
      I think it's mainly because the difference in models at the frontier isn't "response to prompt X", but rather "coherence with 500K tokens of context and instructions in play"
  - viking123 3mo ago
    Good morning to the Anthropic office good sir
- 3mo ago
JohnBooty 3mo ago
Yeah, there’s been a lot of debate about this on r/localllama — will there be a steady supply of new free/open models in the future? And if not, can we simply keep augmenting “stale” models with new knowledge to keep them useful? I’m on the pessimistic side of things on both questions. As for the second question, obviously stale models can be augmented to an extent but it’s nowhere near a substitute for new knowledge being fully baked directly into its training.

gpm 3mo ago

> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever Yes. I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. And simultaneously that the only way they can actually get everyone to use their models is if it's possible for us to run them on our own hardware. (This isn't exactly a utopian view of the future)

tw1984 3mo ago
> I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. that doesn't require the model to be SOTA, it can be just a compact model capable of running on some inexpensive hardware. that is vastly different from SOTA models like Mythos which can potentially disrupt lots of things.
- strangegecko 3mo ago
  Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.
  - columnarx3 3mo ago
    People choose SOTA right now because of the heavily subsidised model subscriptions. People aren't going to pay 20x the price for a model that's maybe 10% better.
    - ezst 3mo ago
      And the fact that "better" is highly subjective and domain/task/vibe-specific
  - adrianN 3mo ago
    Why do I want the model I use for coding to know Shakespeare or vice versa?
    - Jare 3mo ago
      Because you communicate with it using natural language and real-world references and descriptions of what you want, you use emotion and emphasis (especially when re-prompting), you use examples and illustrative stories and common expressions. Understanding and interpreting all of that and replying in kind, to some degree, requires a large body of non-computation, cultural knowledge, or else the prompts are just meaningless words, and the replies will look like compiler output.
      - adrianN 3mo ago
        That sounds intuitively true, but I’m not convinced that it is actually the case. I don’t think we know enough about neural network training to say what training and how many parameters are necessary for what kind of performance on which tasks. To me it looks like we currently guess that more is better and try to throw as much compute and data at the problem as is economically feasible. There is little incentive for companies to invest into small model research since their moat is huge models that require special hardware to run.
jychang 3mo ago
This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models. Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen versions would have open source releases, but Qwen 3.7 plus does not. The second best Chinese model, Minimax M3, is testing the waters by taking longer and longer between “model release” and open sourcing it. This time, they spent 2 weeks after release before open sourcing it. There’s also a lot of rumors of GLM and Deepseek not open sourcing future models. It’s pretty obvious that you cannot take Chinese models as open source for granted, they’ll be closed source soon.
- ls612 3mo ago
  The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.
  - londons_explore 3mo ago
    With nearly everyone using inference accelerators, the pool of hardware is no longer shared between training and use.
  - SubiculumCode 3mo ago
    No, they are open sourcing them because they don't have another play, being second/3rd tier lans
  - Slartie 3mo ago
    I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies. China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power. Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run. As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.
nine_k 3mo ago
The US administration restricting the use of US-trained models is one of the best gifts it could make to the Chinese LLM producers, and to the PRC government.
- dozerly 3mo ago
  This entire administration is a gift to everybody but the US. It’s either in service of Russia, China or whoever is willing to pay Trump the most.
  - scotty79 3mo ago
    It's funny how the acceleration of the downfall of the US (due to trump) is a gift to everyone else. It's almost as if US didn't have as postitive impact on the world as they thought.
    - rvnx 3mo ago
      Downfall sounds exaggerated. US is a great and respectable country with amazing nature, people tech and military, very very far a collapsed state. If anything to be worried of, it's the state of Europe. Closer and closer to war, full of insecurity and no innovation. US is a great country.
      - scotty79 3mo ago
        Let's agree to disagree.
        rvnx 3mo ago
        I appreciate your kindness. I have upvoted your comment, we both agree.
    - gpm 3mo ago
      A gift to [every dictatorial regime]. It's not a gift to the common people. The hundreds of thousands of people who got aids, and wouldn't have if not for Trumps withdrawal, didn't benefit. The women of Afghanistan didn't benefit. The countries of the EU... Canada... Korea... Taiwan... Ukraine... really just about any democracy didn't benefit. The downfall of the US benefiting bad people is not evidence that the US didn't have a positive impact.
close04 3mo ago
You don’t need the cutting edge to influence people’s opinion. “Export LLMs” to the rescue.
vintermann 3mo ago
There's also the Meta motivation, that even if you don't get the control you would like from releasing a model, it may still be worth it to at least deny others that control. I'm sure that matters even more to China vs. the US than it mattered to Facebook vs. Google.
baq 3mo ago
> > Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever > Yes. holy shit the naivete of HN nowadays.
spiralpolitik 3mo ago
There is no moat in the model and by making the them open, it’s hard for one to be established when the free models are “good enough”. OpenAI and Anthropic are both hamstrung by this. Anthropic does have the better chance of surviving.

deanishe 3mo ago

> Why can't it be both? Is the government going to fund all further development? Hard to imagine investors continuing to throw billions at products they aren't allowed to sell.

CraftingLinks 3mo ago
Why wouldn't they? They see this technology as a military asset now.
- VBprogrammer 3mo ago
  Honestly, with the caliber of people who currently comprise the US administration; leaving the whole thing to Openclaw and some new fancy model might not be the worst idea.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- layer8 3mo ago
  Trump and friends are only interested in investments they can personally make money from.

locknitpicker 3mo ago

> I am saying this probably is "silly behavior by a government" and it is a milestone that points towards what the future may look like. Why can't it be both? Here is why it's unlikely this is anything other than "silly behavior by a government": - some benchmarks show GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1, and even Claude Opus outperforming Claude Fable, and yet it's Fable which is restricted. - some benchmarks still show the likes of Kimi 2.5 outperforming any Claude model, and DeepSeek is getting equivalent scores (a few tenths of a percent difference) > Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever (...) That's immaterial to the discussion. Even if China forced Chinese labs to restrict access to all models, the truth of the matter is that Trump's administration to restrict access to US-based models does not prevent others from having access to models that are as capable or even better. So what's exactly the point of this?

solumunus 3mo ago
You’re completely overrating these benchmarks and it’s landing you at a nonsense opinion. Just actually use the models and you will see that the gap is significant.
- irthomasthomas 3mo ago
  It should be easy for a company like Anthropic to prove this beyond a doubt. Why don't they? Why don't they have a collection of prompts and side-by-side comparisons with other models showing how far ahead they are?
  - largbae 3mo ago
    I think it's mainly because the difference in models at the frontier isn't "response to prompt X", but rather "coherence with 500K tokens of context and instructions in play"
- viking123 3mo ago
  Good morning to the Anthropic office good sir
3mo ago

JohnBooty 3mo ago

Yeah, there’s been a lot of debate about this on r/localllama — will there be a steady supply of new free/open models in the future? And if not, can we simply keep augmenting “stale” models with new knowledge to keep them useful? I’m on the pessimistic side of things on both questions. As for the second question, obviously stale models can be augmented to an extent but it’s nowhere near a substitute for new knowledge being fully baked directly into its training.