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Probably because American AI companies are on the hook for quite a lot of investment money. I think they are trying to find the magical moat to justify their va
by tomalaci 3mo ago
Probably because American AI companies are on the hook for quite a lot of investment money. I think they are trying to find the magical moat to justify their valuation.
Revealing optimizations similar to these would pretty much reduce their competitive position.
- lwansbrough 3mo agoChinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private. I suspect their tune will change if they ever take the lead..
- colordrops 3mo agoSo the marketplace is working.
- abc123abc123 3mo agoThis is the way! Open source models will benefit, and once open source models reach the state of "good enough" the hyped up US AI companies will fear, since the availability of free, good enough, AI models will set the ceiling for how much they can charge. Then the bubble will pop.
- VorpalWay 3mo agoYou mean open weights, I guess? There are as far as I know very few open source models, the training data is seldom released. Sadly.
- tw1984 3mo ago> Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private. US labs in Google, Meta and SpaceX are not leading, none of them managed to build something on par with GLM 5.2. Care to explain to me why they still don't collaborate and still choose to do it in private?
- lwansbrough 3mo agoNo idea I don’t work there.
- budsniffer952 3mo agoWait, are you claiming that these companies haven't contributed to the ecosystem via research and open source?
- vidarh 3mo agoI'm not sure I'd put Google in that list, but either way: Because they think they have enough capital that they can catch up and don't need the reputational boost of this.
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoAs good as Gemini's visual intelligence is, it's a terrible agent.
- 7speter 3mo agoGoogle at least still releases open source models to the public.
- VorpalWay 3mo agoAren't they only open weights, not true open source?
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo agoThe concept of open source doesn't really apply to AI models since their behavior is mostly controlled by the data they were trained on and the complex ways they are trained. Having the source code of the model by itself wouldn't help you. From a practical POV having all the training data, training infrastructure, and training know-how wouldn't help you either unless you could afford to spend the millions of dollars (hundreds of millions for a SOTA model) in compute to train it each time they released a new training set, in which case you're only talking about the big commercial companies. "open source for the people" just does not apply.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- oefrha 3mo agoWhich is a good thing. Self-serving motives are more reliable than altruistic ones.
- nubg 3mo agoVery interesting take
- broodbucket 3mo agoLook at how far OpenAI has drifted from their original mission. Everything comes back to greed, so it's ideal for the world if selfish motives happen to coincide with what's good for the world, like advancements in open models
- spongebobstoes 3mo agocan you elaborate? the original mission was "advance digital intelligence in a way that benefits all of humanity" I don't see an inconsistency. money is pragmatic, the mission needs money
- threethirtytwo 3mo agoEvery company on the face of the earth has a mission statement involving some bs goal that sounds altruistic. For a good example look at googles mission statement. The real mission statement for most companies is to make as much money as possible.
- spongebobstoes 3mo agoGoogle is only a good example because you can point to major inconsistencies between their mission and their actions OpenAI might have the same flaw, but you need to demonstrate it, not just assume it
- lelanthran 3mo agoI don't understand what is interesting about it: it's the default. Markets don't run on altruism.
- jmyeet 3mo agoProjection is a funny thing. It causes people to misread situations all the time. Southern slaveowners feared violent retribution from freed slaves, for example [1]. It was pure projection and said more about the South than it did the slaves. The reality was there was no violent retribution. It was the opposite where the former slaveowners continued to inflict violence on the formerly enslaved. I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them. A better reading (IMHO) Of the situation is that China believes that AI shouldn't be used simply to mint a few more trillionaires but the benefits should be shared with society. Why do I say this? Because we now have 70+ years of China doing exactly that. The transformation in China all the way from rural villages to Tier 1 cities has been utterly astounding. China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty. In some ways we're at a similar point to the late 1990s and 2000s when Microsoft execs complained that Linux, being free, destroyed intellectual property value. Linux should be a perfect example of how people can and do act altruistically, or at least not in a way to bait-and-switch to enrich themselves. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1d26grm/in_the_led_up_to_the_us_civil_war_slave_owners/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1d26grm/in_the_...
- FooBarWidget 3mo agoIt's even worse than that. China publishes stacks upon stacks of policy documents in which they explain clearly what they will do and why. This includes why they do poverty alleviation and why they believe big monopolies that own everything are bad. But almost no western observers care to read those documents. Instead, western observers, including HN, speculate endlessly about China's intentions, and "it would be naive to believe they would not do X" or drawing equivalences to Soviet Union or whatever. And the "journalists" sell this notion that Chinese state intentions are "untransparent" and "unknowable" while pretending the policy documents don't exist. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China. This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do. Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.
- skeledrew 3mo agoRegardless of where they are, the Chinese will always share their progress, as they're collectivist/cooperative at their core, compared to the individualistic/competitive US.
- arj 3mo agoNot everyone is motivated by greed
- tirant 3mo agoWhat do you think is the underlaying motivation?
- arj 3mo agoYou ask me what I think. So far deepseek has been very consistently trying to advance state of the art research in a transplant and public way by writing papers and publishing working code. They are also not at the mercy of the stock market in the same way many Americans companies are. Before anyone assumes too much, I live in Europe.
- lwansbrough 3mo agoNot a greed thing. It’s a national security thing.
- c7b 3mo agoThe question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices. Destroying the growth story of overvalued stocks is an interesting investment strategy. It's not even new. Shortsellers understandably get terrible rep from execs, but their actions are more often in the public interest than you'd think. Normally it's exposing fraud, but here we get the really fortunate side benefit of what could eventually amount to the most significant contribution to the general software community since Linux.
- merelydev 3mo ago> The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices. Its revealing that they always seem to publish after some big announcement by American AI companies. But regardless, this is one of the benefits of a duopoly.
- nozzlegear 3mo agoNo more revealing than OpenAI, Anthropic and Google always having some new model that just so happens to be waiting in the wings whenever their competitors announce their own model bump.
- mycall 3mo agoThat's because OpenAI, Anthropic and Google work on many models in parallel which work cooperatively from the user's POV. So GPT-5.6 is just a checkpoint of their multi-model development.
- nl 3mo agoI think you are reading a lot into this. There's always an announcement by one of the frontier labs.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- alexander2002 3mo agoTrue!
- re-thc 3mo ago> Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private. Even if they're ahead they don't have enough GPUs to scale. Open sourcing is hence a good strategy to at least get market share (even if not $).
- resters 3mo agoThey are focused on the things you do when you are not over-capitalized and you can’t get unlimited nvidia hardware to train on. And the results speak for themselves. Meanwhile we in the US are blocked from buying Huawei GPUs and retirees are boasting about the nvidia in their portfolios.
- threethirtytwo 3mo agoAlso, historically, China has always viewed intellectual property as public property. Similar to open source.
- DANmode 3mo agoAre they behind in models, or behind in VC money to burn on subsidized compute offered to the public and early customers? Genuine question.
- budsniffer952 3mo ago[flagged]
- abc123abc123 3mo agoThis is incorrect binary thinking. Them releasing open source can be good, but that does not commit you to think that china or chinese companies are saints. There are many shades of grey here and one does not exclude the other (nor include it).
- budsniffer952 3mo agoAre you reading the comments?
- 13415 3mo agoI think there are some sockpuppet accounts active but what also contributes is that many people are absolutely fed up with US technological hegemony and welcome alternatives to core technologies from elsewhere.
- 1over137 3mo agoNot just US technological hegemony, but the USA has threatened to invade Europe (Greenland) and Canada, and has actually invaded Venezuela and Iran. China hasn't. Maybe lots of people that live in those places are now switching sides.
- dgellow 3mo agoOver the past 2y the US also started a trade war with Europe, triggered the worst oil shock the world ever experienced for no reasons, threatened to leave NATO, tried to force Ukraine to give up its territory to the invading country, and way more
- 7speter 3mo agoI’m think its in our best interests to lever these american ai companies to exhibit at least some degree of freedom and transparency anyway we can…
- cromka 3mo agoI seriously am far from fear mongering and doomsday mentality, but I just can't see how OpenAI and Anthropic can have a successful IPO if the quality gap between the free and paid continues to narrow like that...
- cyanydeez 3mo ago[flagged]
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- 2838383838 3mo ago[flagged]
- cyanydeez 3mo agoyou're right, full of corporate sock puppets shilling their vapor wares, idly dreaming that the world isn't what it is.
- speed_spread 3mo agoYet accumulation of power by a very small elite through state and selected corporations happens to be a defining characteristic of that political regime.
- zhoBEENG 3mo agoFor real. Reading old comment threads makes me sad, because the level of discourse was so much higher in the past. Although this place is still deeply appreciated, it’s clear that its culture is going monotonically towards reddit. Is there anywhere public anymore that isn’t being overrun by lobotomized p-zombies (partisan zombies)? Is it even possible to make such a public space? Ressentiment consumes all discourse.
- baxtr 3mo agoWho is financing DeepSeek and what are they expecting in return?
- archerx 3mo agoThey are self financed, the company that makes DeepSeek is a finance company that trades on the markets.
- rsanek 3mo agoThe CCP's approach has historically been to subsidize their companies far more than other countries do. Why would LLMs be any different? https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/magic-database-industrial-subsidies.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/magic-database-indus...
- declan_roberts 3mo agoAccess to everything every American company feeds into the AI is well worth it to the CCP.
- u8080 3mo agoAccording to EU statistics, yeah
- dgellow 3mo agoOECD isn’t the EU. And regarding the dataset: > Unlike most OECD databases, which rely on government data provided at country-level, the OECD MAGIC database uses firm-level data. The subsidy estimates included in the database are based on raw data obtained from firms’ annual reports, financial statements, bond prospectuses, IPO prospectuses, etc. The data are collected and verified manually by the OECD to maximise accuracy, consistency, and comparability. In some cases, additional information is also obtained from government databases, either to verify the firm-level information or to complement it. Care is taken to avoid double-counting where the data mix corporate and government sources.
- spacebacon 3mo ago[dead]
- davedx 3mo agoI don't really see the moat for frontier AI labs being "more efficient models" although that could help their margins - I think moats will be built by expanding the horizontal and vertical market expansion - like Anthropic is doing the most at the moment
- bluerooibos 3mo ago> Probably because American AI companies are on the hook for quite a lot of investment money That's a lot of words to say it's just capitalist greed.
- janalsncm 3mo agoChinese labs are also forced to find performance optimizations since they are aren’t allowed to buy the best chips.