5 ms·

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 be

by 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.
- Der_Einzige 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jchw 2mo ago
    Well of course nobody believes that, there are a large number of great Chinese open source projects, and plenty of great Chinese contributors to open source projects. I have zero doubts that Chinese people are at least equally as capable of embracing open source as anyone else. It would be strange to suggest otherwise. That said, though, I do have trouble believing the long-term story for open weights, anywhere. We do not need an evil government for open weight to "make sense", but I do think we need some government involvement for open weight to make sense in the long run. Otherwise, it's not 100% clear how they could be sustainable, and I don't think massive companies really can be trusted to just be philanthropic with no incentives indefinitely (or really, much at all to begin with.) Chinese models being open weight does help them gain some Western mindshare, whereas for obvious reasons Americans would be very suspicious of running their source code and prompts through Chinese providers. (And I think that's justified, I just also think that American providers aren't really that much better in the long run, and you should prefer to not have to go through any provider for true privacy.)
    - nylonstrung 2mo ago
      The CCP encourages open source contributions from companies, you can see this in how much Alibaba open sources across their entire stack Chinese tech leans much more heavily towards build vs. buy than the SaaS dominated West (where programmers are more expensive) so the positive externalities on their tech industry are more pronounced
      - jchw 2mo ago
        Sure, when it comes to the big corporations I don't deny CCP's influence on their strategy. Hell, in some cases, it's easy to root for their strategy, because sometimes our tech industry sucks. Don't have to love them to occasionally agree with them. But, in terms of individuals, of course, we're really not so different.
  - KeplerBoy 2mo ago
    Sir, this is a multi-billion dollar operation. There have to be some incentives.
    - bigyabai 2mo ago
      You could argue that Linux is a trillion-dollar project, it doesn't shift the goalposts.
      - polyomino 2mo ago
        Linux is a huge project and is not really comparable to Debian
        esseph 2mo ago
        This is an interesting statement that I found myself reading from two different interpretations of what you meant, and I find both possibilities to be equally true depending on your POV.
      - abalashov 2mo ago
        Yeah, but the trillion dollars are not concentrated in the Linux kernel project, but instead distributed all over the planet. That's not how the AI lab economy works.
    - m000 2mo ago
      [flagged]
      - liamwire 2mo ago
        I like the comparison, but I'm not sure it holds. What did it cost him to develop beyond intangibles such as his time and money forgone? Because the latter especially is not equivalent to upfront capex and opex costs that preempt any ability to be charitable. Genuinely asking, but I'd be hard pressed to think it's even within the same magnitude.
- shimman 2mo ago
  IDK how this doesn't apply to American tech corporations too? Or is it only scary when America corporations face actual competition nowadays where they can't rely on the US government to bomb/sanction competitors?
- watwut 2mo ago
  1.) Majority of debian contributions are from people paid for it. 2.) It is scary because they do what sillicon valley did for decades? While it bragged about disruption being the goal?
- cma 2mo ago
  It could be as simple as do open releases and publication at first to help recruit talent who want that or who want to make a name for themselves. learned from the likes of... OpenAI, Google, Meta, Emad
  - seanmcdirmid 2mo ago
    There must be some Alibaba posters who could clarify this. I think it’s like how Amazon pushed AWS, alibaba is hoping create a similar ecosystem. I wouldn’t conflate them with the CPC or other more niche players like deepseek.
- windsignaling 2mo ago
  There is clearly an anti-China bias here. Show me comments demonstrating the same level of distrust against Google for open-sourcing projects like Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Flutter, Chromium, etc.
  - snowpid 2mo ago
    Chromium and Kubernetes do have their business function. Tensorflow had a business function but it failed. So Google is not a great counter example.
    - windsignaling 2mo ago
      AI doesn't have a business function...?
  - akoboldfrying 2mo ago
    I'll supply such a comment: Any software open sourced by any for-profit company, including Google, is a calculated move ultimately intended to increase their bottom line, and it's naive to think otherwise.
    - jcelerier 2mo ago
      Isn't it borderline illegal for publicly traded companies to not try to maximize profit? "interest of the company" in theory but in practice
      - postepowanieadm 2mo ago
        Think about the shareholders!
      - deaux 2mo ago
        No, it is not. This is a common misconception that the large companies are very happy about. 1. The century-old Ford decision wasn't about this. It was about him refusing to pay dividends to shareholders he was feuding with. I.e. dominant shareholder using his control to starve minority shareholders of returns. The court still let him keep spending huge sums on factories and price cuts that didn't clearly maximize profits. 2. Even if the case was about profit maximization (it wasn't), the judgment was a Michigan state decision. It doesn't have force outside of it. 3. US business law is in practice actually the opposite. A business can do pretty much whatever it wants. This is fundamental. 4. Even if it were illegal (it's not), anything can reasonably be framed as being in the long-term interest of the company, including donating to causes, raising employee wages and so on. Courts never question this. Just imagine this was a thing. It's completely untenable for this reason. Who is a court to judge that something isn't in the longterm interest of shareholders unless it's literally spending all the company money on yachts for personal use? 5. No company has ever been prosecuted for this, obviously, because it's not a thing that exists. The closest you can get is that there's a potential duty to seek the best price if a company must be sold or broken up. But that's a very specific situation. It's 100% a myth. Feel free to copy this and spread it when you see someone saying this.
edm0nd 2mo ago
Yeah the Chinese totally have a really good history with being completely open and giving lol. The Chinese government totally has not been hacking into American and Western fortune 500 companies for the past few decades stealing R&D and tech to use for themselves. The Chinese also totally do not steal hundreds of billions of dollars of IP from America annually. Totally not something they would do!
- chromadon 2mo ago
  Why do you think competing companies poach engineers from each other?
- pegasus 2mo ago
  I don't see how stealing IP is inconsistent with a sympathy for openness. If anything, it's the opposite. "Information wants to be free" and all that. They were just liberating those secrets ;)
- freehorse 2mo ago
  Industrial espionage is neither a chinese invention nor (specifically) chinese practice. American companies do it to each other even.
  - applicative 2mo ago
    Agents of American companies who don't mind 15 years in the federal pen do it to American companies. So it must be right.
  - mullingitover 2mo ago
    The U.S. was openly a pirate nation for most of the 1800s. Like with the ICC, the US respects or doesn’t respect international law strictly when it’s beneficial to the state’s interests. China really can’t be held to a different standard. This activity is grade school level geopolitics: the global system of government is anarchy.
    - gf000 2mo ago
elmer2 2mo ago
The Chinese government is so nice and giving. In fact, they have so much love in their hearts for the Uyghur people, they created a special mobile app for them, just to make sure nothing bad happens to them.
- throwaway-11-1 2mo ago
  You do realize the US was fighting Uyghur terrorists alongside China 20 years ago in ago in Pakistan’s and Afghanistan for their support and cooperation with Al Queda? Like I know everyone is supposed to hate China now or whatever but can you guys show a little consistency?
  - breezybottom 2mo ago
    The only way that's an inconsistency is if you think all Uyghurs are terrorists.
chews 2mo ago
Deepseek spun out of a hedgefund that took a huge short position on Nvidia. China is actively looking to switch to chips made by huawai and ween themselves off of the difficulty of sourcing nvidia.
3x3m3 2mo ago
They believe that information should be so free so much so that they are completely censoring Tiananmen Square answers.
- yieldcrv 2mo ago
  This interpretation of the Chinese constitution is nearly 40 years old, companies comply with it, what do you expect? Despite have a free speech clause, it also has a national security clause that is used to control all facets of life and override all other rights in the constitution. Anything deemed to slightly alter China/the Party’s unity is reprimanded and illegal. Multi party states can fall into the same trapping if they give their national security law constitutional force, always one court ruling away. Yes, China is a single party system making the constitution redundant and any nominally marxist regime would find a way to do the same out of necessity. Follow your Chinese AI in thinking mode to watch its opinion of Tianamen Square references, it will be candid enough for your sensibilities and show how it operates around guardrails
harshreality 2mo ago
> Is it because linux and debian hate windows and iOS and want to see american [closed-source duopoly] fail? maybe a little?
Agingcoder 2mo ago
Models are treated as weapons with export controls - if they can do this it’s with the blessing of the Chinese government who’s getting something out of it. It’s fairly obviously about being a nuisance to the US.
- marcus_holmes 2mo ago
  Not everything that happens in the world is about the USA
  - Agingcoder 2mo ago
    Indeed and I’m not American, and don’t work in the US. It is however fairly obvious to me. We agree to disagree.
try-working 2mo ago
No, open models is a marketing strategy
NickNaraghi 2mo ago
I think your reasoning is actually more complex than the person you are responding to, unfortunately. (As someone who as published broadly used open source software)
jwarden 2mo ago
That’s a lovely thought but that’s not how China works. China is not a democracy, the geopolitical goals of the Chinese government are clear, and no large strategic company acts without approval and heavy influence from the CCP.
AYBABTME 2mo ago
The better parallel is "why did Google make Kubernetes open-source" or "why do large for profit entities engaged in competition, use open-source as a strategy against their competitors"? "Commoditize your complement" -> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
jknoepfler 2mo ago
The capital required to train Qwen at scale is enormous. The capital required to patch a linux distro is near zero. Any scale model coming out of China should be viewed as advancing a geopolitical agenda. The same skepticism should be applied to any model trained in the states, but that should be viewed through the lens of short-term business profits. There are earnest nerds everywhere, in every society. No doubt. But "Chinese AI Labs" operate at the whim of the Chinese government, in the same way "American AI Labs" operate at the whim of billionaire investors. Inferring good will from either is naive at best at this scale.
bee_rider 2mo ago
The comment you replied to implies a lot of over-complicated motivations and grand coordination. But I think “commoditize your complement” explains a lot here and is probably even simpler than your explanation.

by TheDong 2mo ago

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.

Der_Einzige 2mo ago
[flagged]
- jchw 2mo ago
  Well of course nobody believes that, there are a large number of great Chinese open source projects, and plenty of great Chinese contributors to open source projects. I have zero doubts that Chinese people are at least equally as capable of embracing open source as anyone else. It would be strange to suggest otherwise. That said, though, I do have trouble believing the long-term story for open weights, anywhere. We do not need an evil government for open weight to "make sense", but I do think we need some government involvement for open weight to make sense in the long run. Otherwise, it's not 100% clear how they could be sustainable, and I don't think massive companies really can be trusted to just be philanthropic with no incentives indefinitely (or really, much at all to begin with.) Chinese models being open weight does help them gain some Western mindshare, whereas for obvious reasons Americans would be very suspicious of running their source code and prompts through Chinese providers. (And I think that's justified, I just also think that American providers aren't really that much better in the long run, and you should prefer to not have to go through any provider for true privacy.)
  - nylonstrung 2mo ago
    The CCP encourages open source contributions from companies, you can see this in how much Alibaba open sources across their entire stack Chinese tech leans much more heavily towards build vs. buy than the SaaS dominated West (where programmers are more expensive) so the positive externalities on their tech industry are more pronounced
    - jchw 2mo ago
      Sure, when it comes to the big corporations I don't deny CCP's influence on their strategy. Hell, in some cases, it's easy to root for their strategy, because sometimes our tech industry sucks. Don't have to love them to occasionally agree with them. But, in terms of individuals, of course, we're really not so different.
- KeplerBoy 2mo ago
  Sir, this is a multi-billion dollar operation. There have to be some incentives.
  - bigyabai 2mo ago
    You could argue that Linux is a trillion-dollar project, it doesn't shift the goalposts.
    - polyomino 2mo ago
      Linux is a huge project and is not really comparable to Debian
      - esseph 2mo ago
        This is an interesting statement that I found myself reading from two different interpretations of what you meant, and I find both possibilities to be equally true depending on your POV.
    - abalashov 2mo ago
      Yeah, but the trillion dollars are not concentrated in the Linux kernel project, but instead distributed all over the planet. That's not how the AI lab economy works.
  - m000 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - liamwire 2mo ago
      I like the comparison, but I'm not sure it holds. What did it cost him to develop beyond intangibles such as his time and money forgone? Because the latter especially is not equivalent to upfront capex and opex costs that preempt any ability to be charitable. Genuinely asking, but I'd be hard pressed to think it's even within the same magnitude.
shimman 2mo ago
IDK how this doesn't apply to American tech corporations too? Or is it only scary when America corporations face actual competition nowadays where they can't rely on the US government to bomb/sanction competitors?
watwut 2mo ago
1.) Majority of debian contributions are from people paid for it. 2.) It is scary because they do what sillicon valley did for decades? While it bragged about disruption being the goal?
cma 2mo ago
It could be as simple as do open releases and publication at first to help recruit talent who want that or who want to make a name for themselves. learned from the likes of... OpenAI, Google, Meta, Emad
- seanmcdirmid 2mo ago
  There must be some Alibaba posters who could clarify this. I think it’s like how Amazon pushed AWS, alibaba is hoping create a similar ecosystem. I wouldn’t conflate them with the CPC or other more niche players like deepseek.
windsignaling 2mo ago
There is clearly an anti-China bias here. Show me comments demonstrating the same level of distrust against Google for open-sourcing projects like Tensorflow, Kubernetes, Flutter, Chromium, etc.
- snowpid 2mo ago
  Chromium and Kubernetes do have their business function. Tensorflow had a business function but it failed. So Google is not a great counter example.
  - windsignaling 2mo ago
    AI doesn't have a business function...?
- akoboldfrying 2mo ago
  I'll supply such a comment: Any software open sourced by any for-profit company, including Google, is a calculated move ultimately intended to increase their bottom line, and it's naive to think otherwise.
  - jcelerier 2mo ago
    Isn't it borderline illegal for publicly traded companies to not try to maximize profit? "interest of the company" in theory but in practice
    - postepowanieadm 2mo ago
      Think about the shareholders!
    - deaux 2mo ago
      No, it is not. This is a common misconception that the large companies are very happy about. 1. The century-old Ford decision wasn't about this. It was about him refusing to pay dividends to shareholders he was feuding with. I.e. dominant shareholder using his control to starve minority shareholders of returns. The court still let him keep spending huge sums on factories and price cuts that didn't clearly maximize profits. 2. Even if the case was about profit maximization (it wasn't), the judgment was a Michigan state decision. It doesn't have force outside of it. 3. US business law is in practice actually the opposite. A business can do pretty much whatever it wants. This is fundamental. 4. Even if it were illegal (it's not), anything can reasonably be framed as being in the long-term interest of the company, including donating to causes, raising employee wages and so on. Courts never question this. Just imagine this was a thing. It's completely untenable for this reason. Who is a court to judge that something isn't in the longterm interest of shareholders unless it's literally spending all the company money on yachts for personal use? 5. No company has ever been prosecuted for this, obviously, because it's not a thing that exists. The closest you can get is that there's a potential duty to seek the best price if a company must be sold or broken up. But that's a very specific situation. It's 100% a myth. Feel free to copy this and spread it when you see someone saying this.

edm0nd 2mo ago

Yeah the Chinese totally have a really good history with being completely open and giving lol. The Chinese government totally has not been hacking into American and Western fortune 500 companies for the past few decades stealing R&D and tech to use for themselves. The Chinese also totally do not steal hundreds of billions of dollars of IP from America annually. Totally not something they would do!

chromadon 2mo ago
Why do you think competing companies poach engineers from each other?
pegasus 2mo ago
I don't see how stealing IP is inconsistent with a sympathy for openness. If anything, it's the opposite. "Information wants to be free" and all that. They were just liberating those secrets ;)
freehorse 2mo ago
Industrial espionage is neither a chinese invention nor (specifically) chinese practice. American companies do it to each other even.
- applicative 2mo ago
  Agents of American companies who don't mind 15 years in the federal pen do it to American companies. So it must be right.
- mullingitover 2mo ago
  The U.S. was openly a pirate nation for most of the 1800s. Like with the ICC, the US respects or doesn’t respect international law strictly when it’s beneficial to the state’s interests. China really can’t be held to a different standard. This activity is grade school level geopolitics: the global system of government is anarchy.
  - gf000 2mo ago

elmer2 2mo ago

The Chinese government is so nice and giving. In fact, they have so much love in their hearts for the Uyghur people, they created a special mobile app for them, just to make sure nothing bad happens to them.

throwaway-11-1 2mo ago
You do realize the US was fighting Uyghur terrorists alongside China 20 years ago in ago in Pakistan’s and Afghanistan for their support and cooperation with Al Queda? Like I know everyone is supposed to hate China now or whatever but can you guys show a little consistency?
- breezybottom 2mo ago
  The only way that's an inconsistency is if you think all Uyghurs are terrorists.

chews 2mo ago

Deepseek spun out of a hedgefund that took a huge short position on Nvidia. China is actively looking to switch to chips made by huawai and ween themselves off of the difficulty of sourcing nvidia.

3x3m3 2mo ago

They believe that information should be so free so much so that they are completely censoring Tiananmen Square answers.

yieldcrv 2mo ago
This interpretation of the Chinese constitution is nearly 40 years old, companies comply with it, what do you expect? Despite have a free speech clause, it also has a national security clause that is used to control all facets of life and override all other rights in the constitution. Anything deemed to slightly alter China/the Party’s unity is reprimanded and illegal. Multi party states can fall into the same trapping if they give their national security law constitutional force, always one court ruling away. Yes, China is a single party system making the constitution redundant and any nominally marxist regime would find a way to do the same out of necessity. Follow your Chinese AI in thinking mode to watch its opinion of Tianamen Square references, it will be candid enough for your sensibilities and show how it operates around guardrails

harshreality 2mo ago

> Is it because linux and debian hate windows and iOS and want to see american [closed-source duopoly] fail? maybe a little?

Agingcoder 2mo ago

Models are treated as weapons with export controls - if they can do this it’s with the blessing of the Chinese government who’s getting something out of it. It’s fairly obviously about being a nuisance to the US.

marcus_holmes 2mo ago
Not everything that happens in the world is about the USA
- Agingcoder 2mo ago
  Indeed and I’m not American, and don’t work in the US. It is however fairly obvious to me. We agree to disagree.

try-working 2mo ago

No, open models is a marketing strategy

NickNaraghi 2mo ago

I think your reasoning is actually more complex than the person you are responding to, unfortunately. (As someone who as published broadly used open source software)

jwarden 2mo ago

That’s a lovely thought but that’s not how China works. China is not a democracy, the geopolitical goals of the Chinese government are clear, and no large strategic company acts without approval and heavy influence from the CCP.

AYBABTME 2mo ago

The better parallel is "why did Google make Kubernetes open-source" or "why do large for profit entities engaged in competition, use open-source as a strategy against their competitors"? "Commoditize your complement" -> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

jknoepfler 2mo ago

The capital required to train Qwen at scale is enormous. The capital required to patch a linux distro is near zero. Any scale model coming out of China should be viewed as advancing a geopolitical agenda. The same skepticism should be applied to any model trained in the states, but that should be viewed through the lens of short-term business profits. There are earnest nerds everywhere, in every society. No doubt. But "Chinese AI Labs" operate at the whim of the Chinese government, in the same way "American AI Labs" operate at the whim of billionaire investors. Inferring good will from either is naive at best at this scale.

bee_rider 2mo ago

The comment you replied to implies a lot of over-complicated motivations and grand coordination. But I think “commoditize your complement” explains a lot here and is probably even simpler than your explanation.