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It's hard to say what their motivation is. The Chinese firms seem to be working hard to commoditize intelligence which may be the most effective way to debase A

by gardnr 2mo ago

It's hard to say what their motivation is. The Chinese firms seem to be working hard to commoditize intelligence which may be the most effective way to debase American frontier labs. And yeah: it also happens to be really good for humanity.

barrenko 2mo ago
Humanity is a bit of a stretch, and to be seen over time, not that I'm saying it won't happen; let's get some hubris here.
- hodgehog11 2mo ago
  I think it is pretty safe to say at this point that having large open LLM models available is better for humanity than them remaining proprietary. Echoing Linus Torvalds' recent comments, AI is genuinely useful right now, and is here to stay in one form or another.
  - DanielHB 2mo ago
    The fear is not about the models open weights it is the erosion of training capability in other countries. Why train models when they do it for free? Until they don't of course, or they start doing what the US is doing right now by locking out some models to government only or internal market only. What people should be afraid is the rug pull.
    - revolvingthrow 2mo ago
      While a valid point, China also produces plenty of whitepapers going about the architecture and know how about the training and inference itself. There’s also the fact that unless LLMs do get to AGI (which seems… doubtful, still) there comes a point where a model is good enough for what you need. Fable and gpt 5.6 are certainly pretty neat, but I’ve been happy since opus 4.6. I’d still choose a better model, obviously, but it’s not the end of the world if I was stuck with 4.6 for a while when it already lets me get the end result at acceptable quality. It also needs to be said that the "erosion of training capability in other countries" is largely theoretical, given that Mistral hasn’t been keeping up and other countries don’t even have anything worth mentioning. You’d first need to _have_ training capability to lose it.
    - rikima_ 2mo ago
      So either you openweight it, or not. Neither is good for other countries, according to this logic.
      - DanielHB 2mo ago
        Ideally there would be open weight models from multiple geopolitical areas. It is not that different from telecom really, you don't want the whole world to be dependent on a single provider from a single country on this kind of stuff.
    - CamperBob2 2mo ago
      What people should be afraid is the rug pull. How exactly do you plan to pull a rug that's in my basement? The only people who are in a position to pull rugs are closed-model vendors. And if a nation-state or other entity can't train a model that outperforms the open-weight SotA in a given respect, then they shouldn't waste electricity trying. A more-enlightened civilization would join forces and make the combined result available to all.
      - DanielHB 2mo ago
        China has been known to set up local industry, destroy competition through subsidies, jack up prices repeatedly. US does it all the time too with tech services (uber, airbnb, are the more notorious, but all big tech is doing it now), but China is better at capex which is why they seem to be winning this race. The main difference is that the subsidies in China usually come from the gov, while in the US it comes from VC money or anti-competition practices from established big-tech companies. If China were setting up international funds and institutions for training with participation from other countries I would be 100% on board. Other countries could provide funding and workforce too and have a say in how the models are trained and safe-guarded. I am not saying China should bear the burden of open-weight models alone.
- mlrtime 2mo ago
  The whole discussion is hubris. This is a discussion of a twitter post about something that is announced to happen but hasn't yet. Not one person here has any idea what is going to happen long term.
Matl 2mo ago
> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Not that hard to say IMO, they basically see models becoming a commodity and see value in the applications on top of them. So if Alibaba Cloud is the best place to build applications on top of Qwen, why not give the model itself away?
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  > Not that hard to say IMO, Unless you work there, your opinions are guesses, and parent is saying we cannot know, which remains true even with your guesses :)
  - Matl 2mo ago
    > parent is saying we cannot know And my point is while we cannot know, it's not hard to make an informed guess as to their motivations i.e. there's some fairly obvious motivations here, not sure what yours is?
  - victorbjorklund 2mo ago
    Same can be said for every companies decisions then. Why does Antropic not open source their best models? My ”guess” is it’s because they are printing money with their closed models
    - Matl 2mo ago
      Right and what other product does Anthropic really have besides?
- traceroute66 2mo ago
  > they basically see models becoming a commodity and see value in the applications on top of them. Yeah. Its a bit like the "open core" model in open source.
- lerchmo 2mo ago
  Also probably betting on their compute and energy capabilities.
fhub 2mo ago
China is watching world sentiment shifting away from USA. Doing many small things that show both strength and openness is surely very intentional.
- vrganj 2mo ago
  The US leadership (both government and industry) really seems set on making everyone go with the Chinese competition at this point.
  - jquery 2mo ago
    That can’t be true, I was told they were making us great again. /s
  - elmer2 2mo ago
    Really? I use claude regularly, and the Chinese models are far behind and feel like a cheap copy. It's Linux on the desktop all over again. Next year will be its time.
    - vrganj 2mo ago
      Your entire account seems to have a strong agenda in portraying this message. But yes, as a European, the US hasn't exactly been making friends over here.
    - mikhailt 2mo ago
      A lot of folks are finding GLM 5.2, Kimi 3, and Deepseek just fine for their use cases. It does not have to beat US firms, it just needs to be cheaper. I use Deepseek v4 flash for a lot of reviewing and summarizing tasks, only used 4$ in the last two months. No dramatic drop in performance against other US models, it works for my use case. I do use GPT 5.6 Sol for other things but tried GLM 5.2 and it was good enough.
dannyw 2mo ago
In China, you can’t officially use US APIs. The world saw a taste of this with Fable, but in China, this has been the situation all along. So it’s not a surprise why open weights are so cherished. As frontier models continue to block everyday individuals from securing their own codebase, I expect the adoption and usage of open weights to continue. As an example, HuggingFace recently was investigating a security incident and got locked out of frontier closed APIs. Yes, HuggingFace. https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026 https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
- zapkyeskrill 2mo ago
  How does this explain open weights? They could easily take the same closed route like their American friends
  - traceroute66 2mo ago
    > How does this explain open weights? They could easily take the same closed route like their American friends Because they are playing the Americans at their own game. What is the first thing an American company would do ? Spread the old American classic FUD ... "you can't used this closed tool because its run by the communists", right ? So you release it as open weights which is a win-win. Global adoption of the model and you get to give the American AI companies a kick in the nuts because you know they will never release open weights apart from highly quantised crippled shit. The Chinese are also playing the long game. The gradual rebalancing of the world from the US-centric model of the past. If releasing models as open weights is part of that long game, then so be it.
    - maxignol 2mo ago
      Shouldn’t we fear they start doing only close source like most us labs once they catch up in market shares ?
      - vidarh 2mo ago
        Closing future models won't take away our access to the open weight ones.
pyaamb 2mo ago
Its about closing the gap. its the gap over everyone else that will give one country leverage over everyone else in the AI age. Makes me wonder what the world would look like if a country or group of countries did this during the industrial revolution.
- backscratches 2mo ago
  Is this so different in the end than industrial revolution? I assume the loom and the automobile factory were not open source, but many people bought cars and then copied them, bought looms and copied them. Maybe a finished car is more like a binaryexecutable than a blueprint, but how a car was produced is much less obfuscated by its nature than an LLM. Regardless, the world has many competing autos and looms which were not invented from scratch every instance.
baq 2mo ago
There’s a Twitter thread making rounds by Dean Ball about deceleration in AI development caused by open models and I can’t understand how people don’t see that it’s true: open models dismantle the frontier lab capex spend potential by reducing the training budget to zero in the limit. Tokens from different providers are not fungible, but customers are nevertheless very price sensitive and close enough is good enough, eg. K3 being opus+ in capability and cheaper than opus per successful task in the long run is an obvious financial decision. No training budget means deceleration, or at least slower acceleration, margin compression and a completely demolished IPO valuation; path to machine god requires dollars and capable open models externalize training costs to true frontier labs parasitically. IMHO humanity has a better chance at not destroying itself due to less than breakneck pace - but there’s a chance frontier models get sponsored by the USG and are never released publicly so they can’t be distilled and then what?
- green7ea 2mo ago
  I’m not entirely convinced, there are many dimensions to progress. For example, DeepSeek has had a few very impressive innovations that all models could benefit from. There’s also the law of diminishing returns, the US labs have plenty of CAPEX already. Sometimes, constraints, like sanctions, can also be a source if innovation.
- anon373839 2mo ago
  He recently did a walkback of that post. But ultimately, who cares? If the only way for AI to progress is in the hands of a few closed players, well, I don’t really think humanity needs that. Of course, it’s a preposterous claim in the first place. The ultimate reason deep learning and LLMs have made it as far as they have is the explosion of open research and research artifacts in the last decade.
- cherryteastain 2mo ago
  > there’s a chance frontier models get sponsored by the USG and are never released publicly so they can’t be distilled and then what? That premise hinges on one implicit assumption: Chinese advances are due to distillation ONLY and that Chinese model providers cannot keep advancing if they do not distill, which is a very big if. If Chinese models keep advancing in such a scenario, and they almost certainly will, they will overtake publically available models by US providers and China will dominate the LLM industry.
ricardobayes 2mo ago
I'm paraphasing but the Chinese premier said recently AI should be seen as a common good that should benefit everyone.
- andsoitis 2mo ago
  Then why doesn’t he give it away for free?
  - grommz 2mo ago
    It's your job to vote for a government that gives you cheap or free AI. Europe is building AI gigafactories so that small businesses can have access to cheap AI. At least that's the plan.
    - elmer2 2mo ago
      Easy to do, when you don't need to put billions of dollars into research, and just have the end product. It reminds me of socialized healthcare: wait for US companies to develop the drugs, buy a cheap generic, and somehow point to it as a superior model.
anonuser123 2mo ago
> It's hard to say what their motivation is Why is it hard? Their government has been very clear that they plan to win on manufacturing: https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55c6d00ca5f9a087b9.html https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55... Technically they've been saying it for the last 40 years.
JKCalhoun 2mo ago
Xi Pitches China as Leader of New Global AI Order, Challenging US Dominance: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-xi-promotes-chinas-commitment-ai-access-speech-shanghai-conference-2026-07-17 https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-xi-promote...
- andsoitis 2mo ago
  > and pledged to help developing nations build AI capabilities Data centers?
pianopatrick 2mo ago
The Chinese firms may just be making a bad business decision.
- georgeburdell 2mo ago
  Exactly. “Involution” will be the 2027 (if not 2026) word of the year.
mycall 2mo ago
> it also happens to be really good for humanity. AI being good for humanity is still an open question, but for closed vs. open models/weights, yeah it is preferred. I foresee it won't be much longer before everyone will be slicing/distilling/tuning their models once the architecture improves.
oceanplexian 2mo ago
> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Not for anyone who reads history. Back in the late 18th century, England was the world's top economy, in big part due to its textile industry. England had an export ban on the technology, but textile worker named Samuel Slater brought blueprints over (Supposedly in response to a bounty posted in a newspaper by the US government!). The technology diffused rapidly because the legal environment made competition easy, and ironically the US had better sources of energy (superior water-power sites). Arguably, China is doing the same thing in the 21st century.
- mike_hearn 2mo ago
  Really? The USA has built a ton of AI datacenters, exactly because it does have energy. The US IP system has flexed to allow training on all copyrighted content - compare that to Europe where such training is effectively forbidden. Britain doesn't even allow commercial web crawls! And the US has allowed the entire world to sign up and use its LLM APIs.
  - knollimar 2mo ago
    Doesn't China smelt most of the world's aluminum due to inexpensive energy? I thought that was their thing
    - tredre3 2mo ago
      China smelts over 50% of the world supply. India/Russia/Canada does another 30%. Your assessment is correct, those are countries with very low energy costs.
  - vlovich123 2mo ago
    Consumer energy prices in China aren’t going up because of AI data centers. Easiest way to see they have an oversupply of energy, primarily due to solar.
    - jnwatson 2mo ago
nojito 2mo ago
> most effective way to debase American frontier labs You're not going to debase the frontier labs through distillation.
kzrdude 2mo ago
Fwiw, American industry has given away a lot for free - you could include large parts of the open source movement in that - and all the "free" VC backed services like facebook would be another prong of the same comparison. I would rather compare this way, that China is gaining soft power and goodwill, in the technology and innovation sense, in a way that's similar to how USA has done in the past.
- kettlecorn 2mo ago
  Yes it's only relatively recently that US politics has taken a turn towards being more defensive and protectionist. The tech industry along with US foreign policy has become much more zero-sum in its ideology in recent years, and I think that's a tremendous mistake.
kelnos 2mo ago
> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Feels pretty easy to me. They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn. There will still be plenty of customers who will pay them to host the models and run inference, even if the weights are open and others can offer competing products. (If necessary, the Chinese government can ban use of foreign inference services by Chinese citizens and businesses to give their own companies a domestic monopoly.) When their models equal or surpass those from the Western AI labs, they can even stop releasing weights for new models, and keep all the inference revenue for themselves. Meanwhile, they're still manufacturing much of the hardware that everyone in the world needs in order to run datacenters (see also: Spolsky's "commoditize your complement" essay). Beyond that, it's a soft-power play. As the world keeps looking at the US more and more skeptically as an ally and superpower, Chinese companies releasing weights for competitive models is a way for China to look better and more world-minded.
- TheDong 2mo ago
  I feel like there could also be a simpler explanation. Why does a debian contributor make debian free, why do they work on this thing anyone can use? Is it because linux and debian hate windows and iOS and want to see american fail? No, it's because most debian contributors believe software source code, information, should be free, users should be free to modify the code they use, and that they're building a thing they want to share with the world. Maybe the chinese AI labs believe AI is powerful and useful, are proud of what they're doing, and want to share it as broadly as they can so everyone can use it. There doesn't have to be any weird "chinese government" or "they hate the west" type vibes, it could just be the same thing as OSS, they're trying to do what they think is best for the world.
  - drschwabe 2mo ago
    Where's the drama in that !?
  - mceachen 2mo ago
    Please don't conflate a volunteer effort with no expected economic gain with a very well funded company (or fleet of companies). With the CCP's highly successful track record with subsuming other markets, Occam's razor applies to why they're doing this.
seunosewa 2mo ago
They are trying to make money. That's what firms in any capitalistic economy care about the most. Regardless of the government's presumed interference, the companies themselves are all trying to make money. All competing for subscriptions and API payments. One aspect of this is making a name for yourself i.e. PR. Making a capable model open source helps a lot with that.
fny 2mo ago
It's the exact same playbook Silicon Valley uses. Subsizide, lose piles of money, capture market share, recoup investment. They've done this in other industries like solar panels, chips, and EVs. This is no different.
carlsborg 2mo ago
Good for humanity, and also GDDR/HBM manufacturers.
skybrian 2mo ago
It’s too soon to say if it’s good for humanity; that might be overly optimistic. Commodity markets aren’t always good (for example, arms or drug markets). Will LLM’s turn out like one of those? There are people I respect arguing in favor of more regulation.
hugmynutus 2mo ago
> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Involution is a major problem in Chinese industries [1]. Where companies will sell their products at a loss, effectively playing fiscal chicken [2] with one another to dominate a market. It is such an issue the government has had to step in to prevent EV companies from destroying themselves by more-or-less requiring companies sell their goods at a profit [3]. The straight forward line of reasoning that AI/LLM labs are applying this logic to their profit. I think (we) Americans are reading a bit too far into this assuming government intervention, conspiracy, etc.. Chinese markets are downright cut throat. They're using those tactics to compete with US labs. 1. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/what-is-involution-chinas-race-to-the-bottom-competition-trend-2025-09-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/what-i... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) 3. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/05/china-warns-ev-makers-stop-price-cutting-production-involution https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/05/china-warns...
- d5lt5 2mo ago
  Except that there are 1.4 billion people in China that don't have access to US models.
applicative 2mo ago
The purpose is the same as that of all Putin-Xi-Khameni geopolitica: destruction of any democratic alternative to cults of personality.
gosub100 2mo ago
Think of those poor billionaires, I feel terrible for their awful plight!
runako 2mo ago
Popular open-source projects: Google: Chromium, Kubernetes, Android, TensorFlow Meta: React, PyTorch, Llama Microsoft: VS Code, TypeScript, .NET Core LinkedIn: Kafka Slotted in along these, an analogous explanation is that Alibaba needs Qwen internally (vs depending on an American company), but licensing is not part of their revenue strategy. (As a cloud vendor, they can make money on inference. The strategy is very similar to the US hyperscalers ex-Google.) Joel Spolsky wrote in depth about this notion of commoditizing one's complement in 2002[1] using tech examples stretching back into the '80s. 1 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
skzo 2mo ago
What I understand is that by doing this it seems like profit will shift to chip makers,as we'll run more models locally, and currently American companies have the advantage here. So what would the long game be for chinese companies?
meta_ai_x 2mo ago
US Tech companies have created $20 Trillion in stock market value on top of plenty of OS stack. They will do fine with commodity intelligence. In fact, there are no other organizations in this world that is well suited to leverage scaled intelligence than Silicon Valley and great American companies
api 2mo ago
Anyone else think the AI environmental backlash is astroturfed? I keep looking at the numbers. The power use numbers are not that problematic. Ordering a burrito on DoorDash uses more power than a few days of heavy AI use. The water argument applies to some locations, and is mostly a local governance problem... if the data centers are using too much water, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they'll push toward closed loop cooling. Yet the visceral pile-on here is so extreme, it feels fake. One thing I've learned after 40 years on this planet is: propaganda works, and much of what a large fraction of people believe across the entire political spectrum (left, right, anything else) is there because someone paid to put it there. It's depressing but it's true, and it makes sense. Propaganda is an asymmetrical attack on human cognition and discourse, and in information security the attacker always has an easier job. Crafting viral bullshit is orders of magnitude easier than fact checking. On top of this, humans are busy and don't have time to fact check and logic check everything they read. As a result, much of what we believe is "sponsored content." People get mad when you talk about this because everyone wants to believe they're too smart to fall for propaganda. In any case, the US AI labs deserve to lose for their stupid "safety" regulatory capture monopolization push, which ended up blowing their own feet off and handing the lead to China.
- nullc 2mo ago
  > Yet the visceral pile-on here is so extreme, it feels fake. Driven by people in the few roles that are soundly replaced by AI-- e.g. low tier media slop producers, who hate AI because it threatens their socially negative worthless jobs. The arguments are so paper thin because the environmental impact isn't their concern, it's just a target that sounds convincing to people who don't know better.
  - api 2mo ago
    The problem is that this kind of low-tier media slop work is what a lot of artists, writers, etc. do as "potboiler" work. It's what pays the bills. Historically art of any kind is a U-shaped market: there is low-end work and high-end work. Nothing in between. So I do understand some of the AI hate among that population. It's chopping the bottom tier work off. Either you're a top-tier massively successful artist or there is $0 to be made anywhere doing anything. Long term I think it will do that to all white collar work. There will be no entry level jobs. Period. None. Zero. You're either very experienced or there is no work. This is a huge problem, and one we will have to address.
LoveMortuus 2mo ago
> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Maybe because the industry isn't yet very sure as to what the use cases might be for these technologies they're hoping that by making it open source and accessible to everyone that someone could find interesting applications for it and even more so, perhaps, way to further the technologies themselves. There are more Chinese than Americans, so statistically speaking, I'm guessing, there'd be a greater chance for one of Chinese engineers to make advancements than one of American. But that's pure speculation on my part, being neither, I'm just happy I can be a part of it and play with the tools as well~
Art9681 2mo ago
Wait till they get the heretic treatment. It's going to be great.
ai_fry_ur_brain 2mo ago
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formvoltron 2mo ago
US firms can replace US workers with chinese AI. I'm not complaining.. but it sure is an odd situation.
popalchemist 2mo ago
Indeed, their competition is the only thing preventing network effects from giving OpenAI/Faang tech companies an easy shot at monopoly / regulatory capture.
try-working 2mo ago
This is their motivation https://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-remain-open https://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-rem...
dackdel 2mo ago
its hard to say what their motivation is, if you live under a rock and have severe brain damage.
neya 2mo ago
In case of American labs, always follow the money. In case of Chinese labs, always follow the IP.

by gardnr 2mo ago

barrenko 2mo ago

Humanity is a bit of a stretch, and to be seen over time, not that I'm saying it won't happen; let's get some hubris here.

hodgehog11 2mo ago
I think it is pretty safe to say at this point that having large open LLM models available is better for humanity than them remaining proprietary. Echoing Linus Torvalds' recent comments, AI is genuinely useful right now, and is here to stay in one form or another.
- DanielHB 2mo ago
  The fear is not about the models open weights it is the erosion of training capability in other countries. Why train models when they do it for free? Until they don't of course, or they start doing what the US is doing right now by locking out some models to government only or internal market only. What people should be afraid is the rug pull.
  - revolvingthrow 2mo ago
    While a valid point, China also produces plenty of whitepapers going about the architecture and know how about the training and inference itself. There’s also the fact that unless LLMs do get to AGI (which seems… doubtful, still) there comes a point where a model is good enough for what you need. Fable and gpt 5.6 are certainly pretty neat, but I’ve been happy since opus 4.6. I’d still choose a better model, obviously, but it’s not the end of the world if I was stuck with 4.6 for a while when it already lets me get the end result at acceptable quality. It also needs to be said that the "erosion of training capability in other countries" is largely theoretical, given that Mistral hasn’t been keeping up and other countries don’t even have anything worth mentioning. You’d first need to _have_ training capability to lose it.
  - rikima_ 2mo ago
    So either you openweight it, or not. Neither is good for other countries, according to this logic.
    - DanielHB 2mo ago
      Ideally there would be open weight models from multiple geopolitical areas. It is not that different from telecom really, you don't want the whole world to be dependent on a single provider from a single country on this kind of stuff.
  - CamperBob2 2mo ago
    What people should be afraid is the rug pull. How exactly do you plan to pull a rug that's in my basement? The only people who are in a position to pull rugs are closed-model vendors. And if a nation-state or other entity can't train a model that outperforms the open-weight SotA in a given respect, then they shouldn't waste electricity trying. A more-enlightened civilization would join forces and make the combined result available to all.
    - DanielHB 2mo ago
      China has been known to set up local industry, destroy competition through subsidies, jack up prices repeatedly. US does it all the time too with tech services (uber, airbnb, are the more notorious, but all big tech is doing it now), but China is better at capex which is why they seem to be winning this race. The main difference is that the subsidies in China usually come from the gov, while in the US it comes from VC money or anti-competition practices from established big-tech companies. If China were setting up international funds and institutions for training with participation from other countries I would be 100% on board. Other countries could provide funding and workforce too and have a say in how the models are trained and safe-guarded. I am not saying China should bear the burden of open-weight models alone.
mlrtime 2mo ago
The whole discussion is hubris. This is a discussion of a twitter post about something that is announced to happen but hasn't yet. Not one person here has any idea what is going to happen long term.

Matl 2mo ago

> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Not that hard to say IMO, they basically see models becoming a commodity and see value in the applications on top of them. So if Alibaba Cloud is the best place to build applications on top of Qwen, why not give the model itself away?

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> Not that hard to say IMO, Unless you work there, your opinions are guesses, and parent is saying we cannot know, which remains true even with your guesses :)
- Matl 2mo ago
  > parent is saying we cannot know And my point is while we cannot know, it's not hard to make an informed guess as to their motivations i.e. there's some fairly obvious motivations here, not sure what yours is?
- victorbjorklund 2mo ago
  Same can be said for every companies decisions then. Why does Antropic not open source their best models? My ”guess” is it’s because they are printing money with their closed models
  - Matl 2mo ago
    Right and what other product does Anthropic really have besides?
traceroute66 2mo ago
> they basically see models becoming a commodity and see value in the applications on top of them. Yeah. Its a bit like the "open core" model in open source.
lerchmo 2mo ago
Also probably betting on their compute and energy capabilities.

fhub 2mo ago

China is watching world sentiment shifting away from USA. Doing many small things that show both strength and openness is surely very intentional.

vrganj 2mo ago
The US leadership (both government and industry) really seems set on making everyone go with the Chinese competition at this point.
- jquery 2mo ago
  That can’t be true, I was told they were making us great again. /s
- elmer2 2mo ago
  Really? I use claude regularly, and the Chinese models are far behind and feel like a cheap copy. It's Linux on the desktop all over again. Next year will be its time.
  - vrganj 2mo ago
    Your entire account seems to have a strong agenda in portraying this message. But yes, as a European, the US hasn't exactly been making friends over here.
  - mikhailt 2mo ago
    A lot of folks are finding GLM 5.2, Kimi 3, and Deepseek just fine for their use cases. It does not have to beat US firms, it just needs to be cheaper. I use Deepseek v4 flash for a lot of reviewing and summarizing tasks, only used 4$ in the last two months. No dramatic drop in performance against other US models, it works for my use case. I do use GPT 5.6 Sol for other things but tried GLM 5.2 and it was good enough.

dannyw 2mo ago

In China, you can’t officially use US APIs. The world saw a taste of this with Fable, but in China, this has been the situation all along. So it’s not a surprise why open weights are so cherished. As frontier models continue to block everyday individuals from securing their own codebase, I expect the adoption and usage of open weights to continue. As an example, HuggingFace recently was investigating a security incident and got locked out of frontier closed APIs. Yes, HuggingFace. https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026 https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026

zapkyeskrill 2mo ago
How does this explain open weights? They could easily take the same closed route like their American friends
- traceroute66 2mo ago
  > How does this explain open weights? They could easily take the same closed route like their American friends Because they are playing the Americans at their own game. What is the first thing an American company would do ? Spread the old American classic FUD ... "you can't used this closed tool because its run by the communists", right ? So you release it as open weights which is a win-win. Global adoption of the model and you get to give the American AI companies a kick in the nuts because you know they will never release open weights apart from highly quantised crippled shit. The Chinese are also playing the long game. The gradual rebalancing of the world from the US-centric model of the past. If releasing models as open weights is part of that long game, then so be it.
  - maxignol 2mo ago
    Shouldn’t we fear they start doing only close source like most us labs once they catch up in market shares ?
    - vidarh 2mo ago
      Closing future models won't take away our access to the open weight ones.

pyaamb 2mo ago

Its about closing the gap. its the gap over everyone else that will give one country leverage over everyone else in the AI age. Makes me wonder what the world would look like if a country or group of countries did this during the industrial revolution.

backscratches 2mo ago
Is this so different in the end than industrial revolution? I assume the loom and the automobile factory were not open source, but many people bought cars and then copied them, bought looms and copied them. Maybe a finished car is more like a binaryexecutable than a blueprint, but how a car was produced is much less obfuscated by its nature than an LLM. Regardless, the world has many competing autos and looms which were not invented from scratch every instance.

baq 2mo ago

There’s a Twitter thread making rounds by Dean Ball about deceleration in AI development caused by open models and I can’t understand how people don’t see that it’s true: open models dismantle the frontier lab capex spend potential by reducing the training budget to zero in the limit. Tokens from different providers are not fungible, but customers are nevertheless very price sensitive and close enough is good enough, eg. K3 being opus+ in capability and cheaper than opus per successful task in the long run is an obvious financial decision. No training budget means deceleration, or at least slower acceleration, margin compression and a completely demolished IPO valuation; path to machine god requires dollars and capable open models externalize training costs to true frontier labs parasitically. IMHO humanity has a better chance at not destroying itself due to less than breakneck pace - but there’s a chance frontier models get sponsored by the USG and are never released publicly so they can’t be distilled and then what?

green7ea 2mo ago
I’m not entirely convinced, there are many dimensions to progress. For example, DeepSeek has had a few very impressive innovations that all models could benefit from. There’s also the law of diminishing returns, the US labs have plenty of CAPEX already. Sometimes, constraints, like sanctions, can also be a source if innovation.
anon373839 2mo ago
He recently did a walkback of that post. But ultimately, who cares? If the only way for AI to progress is in the hands of a few closed players, well, I don’t really think humanity needs that. Of course, it’s a preposterous claim in the first place. The ultimate reason deep learning and LLMs have made it as far as they have is the explosion of open research and research artifacts in the last decade.
cherryteastain 2mo ago
> there’s a chance frontier models get sponsored by the USG and are never released publicly so they can’t be distilled and then what? That premise hinges on one implicit assumption: Chinese advances are due to distillation ONLY and that Chinese model providers cannot keep advancing if they do not distill, which is a very big if. If Chinese models keep advancing in such a scenario, and they almost certainly will, they will overtake publically available models by US providers and China will dominate the LLM industry.

ricardobayes 2mo ago

I'm paraphasing but the Chinese premier said recently AI should be seen as a common good that should benefit everyone.

andsoitis 2mo ago
Then why doesn’t he give it away for free?
- grommz 2mo ago
  It's your job to vote for a government that gives you cheap or free AI. Europe is building AI gigafactories so that small businesses can have access to cheap AI. At least that's the plan.
  - elmer2 2mo ago
    Easy to do, when you don't need to put billions of dollars into research, and just have the end product. It reminds me of socialized healthcare: wait for US companies to develop the drugs, buy a cheap generic, and somehow point to it as a superior model.

anonuser123 2mo ago

> It's hard to say what their motivation is Why is it hard? Their government has been very clear that they plan to win on manufacturing: https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55c6d00ca5f9a087b9.html https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55... Technically they've been saying it for the last 40 years.

JKCalhoun 2mo ago

Xi Pitches China as Leader of New Global AI Order, Challenging US Dominance: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-xi-promotes-chinas-commitment-ai-access-speech-shanghai-conference-2026-07-17 https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-xi-promote...

andsoitis 2mo ago
> and pledged to help developing nations build AI capabilities Data centers?

pianopatrick 2mo ago

The Chinese firms may just be making a bad business decision.

georgeburdell 2mo ago
Exactly. “Involution” will be the 2027 (if not 2026) word of the year.

mycall 2mo ago

> it also happens to be really good for humanity. AI being good for humanity is still an open question, but for closed vs. open models/weights, yeah it is preferred. I foresee it won't be much longer before everyone will be slicing/distilling/tuning their models once the architecture improves.

oceanplexian 2mo ago

> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Not for anyone who reads history. Back in the late 18th century, England was the world's top economy, in big part due to its textile industry. England had an export ban on the technology, but textile worker named Samuel Slater brought blueprints over (Supposedly in response to a bounty posted in a newspaper by the US government!). The technology diffused rapidly because the legal environment made competition easy, and ironically the US had better sources of energy (superior water-power sites). Arguably, China is doing the same thing in the 21st century.

mike_hearn 2mo ago
Really? The USA has built a ton of AI datacenters, exactly because it does have energy. The US IP system has flexed to allow training on all copyrighted content - compare that to Europe where such training is effectively forbidden. Britain doesn't even allow commercial web crawls! And the US has allowed the entire world to sign up and use its LLM APIs.
- knollimar 2mo ago
  Doesn't China smelt most of the world's aluminum due to inexpensive energy? I thought that was their thing
  - tredre3 2mo ago
    China smelts over 50% of the world supply. India/Russia/Canada does another 30%. Your assessment is correct, those are countries with very low energy costs.
- vlovich123 2mo ago
  Consumer energy prices in China aren’t going up because of AI data centers. Easiest way to see they have an oversupply of energy, primarily due to solar.
  - jnwatson 2mo ago

nojito 2mo ago

> most effective way to debase American frontier labs You're not going to debase the frontier labs through distillation.

kzrdude 2mo ago

Fwiw, American industry has given away a lot for free - you could include large parts of the open source movement in that - and all the "free" VC backed services like facebook would be another prong of the same comparison. I would rather compare this way, that China is gaining soft power and goodwill, in the technology and innovation sense, in a way that's similar to how USA has done in the past.

kettlecorn 2mo ago
Yes it's only relatively recently that US politics has taken a turn towards being more defensive and protectionist. The tech industry along with US foreign policy has become much more zero-sum in its ideology in recent years, and I think that's a tremendous mistake.

kelnos 2mo ago

> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Feels pretty easy to me. They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn. There will still be plenty of customers who will pay them to host the models and run inference, even if the weights are open and others can offer competing products. (If necessary, the Chinese government can ban use of foreign inference services by Chinese citizens and businesses to give their own companies a domestic monopoly.) When their models equal or surpass those from the Western AI labs, they can even stop releasing weights for new models, and keep all the inference revenue for themselves. Meanwhile, they're still manufacturing much of the hardware that everyone in the world needs in order to run datacenters (see also: Spolsky's "commoditize your complement" essay). Beyond that, it's a soft-power play. As the world keeps looking at the US more and more skeptically as an ally and superpower, Chinese companies releasing weights for competitive models is a way for China to look better and more world-minded.

TheDong 2mo ago
I feel like there could also be a simpler explanation. Why does a debian contributor make debian free, why do they work on this thing anyone can use? Is it because linux and debian hate windows and iOS and want to see american fail? No, it's because most debian contributors believe software source code, information, should be free, users should be free to modify the code they use, and that they're building a thing they want to share with the world. Maybe the chinese AI labs believe AI is powerful and useful, are proud of what they're doing, and want to share it as broadly as they can so everyone can use it. There doesn't have to be any weird "chinese government" or "they hate the west" type vibes, it could just be the same thing as OSS, they're trying to do what they think is best for the world.
- drschwabe 2mo ago
  Where's the drama in that !?
- mceachen 2mo ago
  Please don't conflate a volunteer effort with no expected economic gain with a very well funded company (or fleet of companies). With the CCP's highly successful track record with subsuming other markets, Occam's razor applies to why they're doing this.

seunosewa 2mo ago

They are trying to make money. That's what firms in any capitalistic economy care about the most. Regardless of the government's presumed interference, the companies themselves are all trying to make money. All competing for subscriptions and API payments. One aspect of this is making a name for yourself i.e. PR. Making a capable model open source helps a lot with that.

fny 2mo ago

It's the exact same playbook Silicon Valley uses. Subsizide, lose piles of money, capture market share, recoup investment. They've done this in other industries like solar panels, chips, and EVs. This is no different.

carlsborg 2mo ago

Good for humanity, and also GDDR/HBM manufacturers.

skybrian 2mo ago

It’s too soon to say if it’s good for humanity; that might be overly optimistic. Commodity markets aren’t always good (for example, arms or drug markets). Will LLM’s turn out like one of those? There are people I respect arguing in favor of more regulation.

hugmynutus 2mo ago

> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Involution is a major problem in Chinese industries [1]. Where companies will sell their products at a loss, effectively playing fiscal chicken [2] with one another to dominate a market. It is such an issue the government has had to step in to prevent EV companies from destroying themselves by more-or-less requiring companies sell their goods at a profit [3]. The straight forward line of reasoning that AI/LLM labs are applying this logic to their profit. I think (we) Americans are reading a bit too far into this assuming government intervention, conspiracy, etc.. Chinese markets are downright cut throat. They're using those tactics to compete with US labs. 1. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/what-is-involution-chinas-race-to-the-bottom-competition-trend-2025-09-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/what-i... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) 3. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/05/china-warns-ev-makers-stop-price-cutting-production-involution https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/05/china-warns...

d5lt5 2mo ago
Except that there are 1.4 billion people in China that don't have access to US models.

applicative 2mo ago

The purpose is the same as that of all Putin-Xi-Khameni geopolitica: destruction of any democratic alternative to cults of personality.

gosub100 2mo ago

Think of those poor billionaires, I feel terrible for their awful plight!

runako 2mo ago

Popular open-source projects: Google: Chromium, Kubernetes, Android, TensorFlow Meta: React, PyTorch, Llama Microsoft: VS Code, TypeScript, .NET Core LinkedIn: Kafka Slotted in along these, an analogous explanation is that Alibaba needs Qwen internally (vs depending on an American company), but licensing is not part of their revenue strategy. (As a cloud vendor, they can make money on inference. The strategy is very similar to the US hyperscalers ex-Google.) Joel Spolsky wrote in depth about this notion of commoditizing one's complement in 2002[1] using tech examples stretching back into the '80s. 1 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

skzo 2mo ago

What I understand is that by doing this it seems like profit will shift to chip makers,as we'll run more models locally, and currently American companies have the advantage here. So what would the long game be for chinese companies?

meta_ai_x 2mo ago

US Tech companies have created $20 Trillion in stock market value on top of plenty of OS stack. They will do fine with commodity intelligence. In fact, there are no other organizations in this world that is well suited to leverage scaled intelligence than Silicon Valley and great American companies

api 2mo ago

Anyone else think the AI environmental backlash is astroturfed? I keep looking at the numbers. The power use numbers are not that problematic. Ordering a burrito on DoorDash uses more power than a few days of heavy AI use. The water argument applies to some locations, and is mostly a local governance problem... if the data centers are using too much water, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they'll push toward closed loop cooling. Yet the visceral pile-on here is so extreme, it feels fake. One thing I've learned after 40 years on this planet is: propaganda works, and much of what a large fraction of people believe across the entire political spectrum (left, right, anything else) is there because someone paid to put it there. It's depressing but it's true, and it makes sense. Propaganda is an asymmetrical attack on human cognition and discourse, and in information security the attacker always has an easier job. Crafting viral bullshit is orders of magnitude easier than fact checking. On top of this, humans are busy and don't have time to fact check and logic check everything they read. As a result, much of what we believe is "sponsored content." People get mad when you talk about this because everyone wants to believe they're too smart to fall for propaganda. In any case, the US AI labs deserve to lose for their stupid "safety" regulatory capture monopolization push, which ended up blowing their own feet off and handing the lead to China.

nullc 2mo ago
> Yet the visceral pile-on here is so extreme, it feels fake. Driven by people in the few roles that are soundly replaced by AI-- e.g. low tier media slop producers, who hate AI because it threatens their socially negative worthless jobs. The arguments are so paper thin because the environmental impact isn't their concern, it's just a target that sounds convincing to people who don't know better.
- api 2mo ago
  The problem is that this kind of low-tier media slop work is what a lot of artists, writers, etc. do as "potboiler" work. It's what pays the bills. Historically art of any kind is a U-shaped market: there is low-end work and high-end work. Nothing in between. So I do understand some of the AI hate among that population. It's chopping the bottom tier work off. Either you're a top-tier massively successful artist or there is $0 to be made anywhere doing anything. Long term I think it will do that to all white collar work. There will be no entry level jobs. Period. None. Zero. You're either very experienced or there is no work. This is a huge problem, and one we will have to address.

LoveMortuus 2mo ago

> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Maybe because the industry isn't yet very sure as to what the use cases might be for these technologies they're hoping that by making it open source and accessible to everyone that someone could find interesting applications for it and even more so, perhaps, way to further the technologies themselves. There are more Chinese than Americans, so statistically speaking, I'm guessing, there'd be a greater chance for one of Chinese engineers to make advancements than one of American. But that's pure speculation on my part, being neither, I'm just happy I can be a part of it and play with the tools as well~

Art9681 2mo ago

Wait till they get the heretic treatment. It's going to be great.

ai_fry_ur_brain 2mo ago

[dead]

formvoltron 2mo ago

US firms can replace US workers with chinese AI. I'm not complaining.. but it sure is an odd situation.

popalchemist 2mo ago

Indeed, their competition is the only thing preventing network effects from giving OpenAI/Faang tech companies an easy shot at monopoly / regulatory capture.

try-working 2mo ago

This is their motivation https://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-remain-open https://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-rem...

dackdel 2mo ago

its hard to say what their motivation is, if you live under a rock and have severe brain damage.

neya 2mo ago

In case of American labs, always follow the money. In case of Chinese labs, always follow the IP.