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China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
- feiz45607 2mo ago[flagged]
- Dependance 2mo agoOpen source AI will be made illegal at some point. I cannot imagine the US letting Fable-access to every "enemy" they have (or made at some point).
- jvanderbot 2mo agoThat's inevitable, but also, it's probably the point. At the moment top-tier models from China are being somewhat-freely shared. It reads to me like forcing competition out by dumping free/cheap things. But then again, how many subscribers of Anthropic/OpenAI are really going to switch to a chinese model/site? I suspect few.
- _aavaa_ 2mo agoDumping is such a loaded term. This is investor-backed scaling to capture market share, standard VC playbook.
- mrngld 2mo agoIt's state-backed, or at least state-directed, scaling to capture market share, standard CCP playbook since the 80s. Whether dumping is a loaded term of not is irrelevant; it's a specific term of art in economics and policy, it fits with the context of past national actions there, and fits what's currently happening here perfectly. They put money into these models, then give them away for nothing (below cost).
- amarcheschi 2mo agoI think the comment above you is saying that it is called dumping when done by state but not when done by vcs
- dgellow 2mo agoThe US AI vendors are also baked and controlled by the state, as we’ve seen over the past half year. AI is pretty much everywhere baked by state actors
- Gormo 2mo agoHow does releasing open weight models to FOSS communities help capture market share for subscription-based cloud services?
- ToucanLoucan 2mo agoIt will never stop being funny to me that China does the exact same shit American corps have been doing since the 70's but because it's scary China it's suddenly a problem. American startups flood markets with below-cost loss-leader products explicitly to kill competition and create network effects, and then jack the prices just as high, if not higher, for the service in question after the fact, oftentimes while making it so those providing the service earn even less money than they did before. Commentators: "Free market great" China does the exact same thing: "Communists wanna kill the West"
- jvanderbot 2mo agoIf you believe in some kind of competition-free objective set of market morals, then yes, this is a strange contradiction. If you believe that humans are locked in a productive struggle against each other at the organizational level, and that the knife-edge balance is a feature, not a bug, then it's not so weird to think about. It is simultaneously true that it is in my best interest for prices to sink (as a consumer), for US companies to succeed (as a US citizen), and for my company to win over competitors regardless of whether those competitors are from US, EU, China, or Antarctica.
- ToucanLoucan 2mo agoOh I don't think it's either of those things, I think it's good old fashioned Racism/Xenophobia. We did the same shit to Japan and Korea when they were coming up out of their respective post-war periods, and we still do, to a degree. With China's ruling party also being "communist" (in massive, massive air-quotes) it also lets political actors dust off the McCarthyism to boot. This is, to be clear, not meant as a ringing endorsement of China, China's policies, or to absolve China of it's wrongdoings, of which there are MANY. It's just to say that it's remarkable to watch the pearl clutching of the privateer capitalist class as state-sponsored capitalism levels their own game up against them and starts taking them to the cleaners instead. A real Godzilla "let them fight" situation as far as I'm concerned.
- jvanderbot 2mo ago
- chermi 2mo agoThere's a difference between state sponsored and private dumping.
- _aavaa_ 2mo agoGive me a break. Yeah, in this case it's the USA side that's on the losing end. Just because the US government wants small government and no intervention (expect when it comes to the donor class, or their voting base, or their own financial interests) doesn't make it a universal truth. We're happy to prop up companies that should have failed after they get big an dominant, but having an industrial policy to invest in a field as a whole is somehow a big problem. You see this crying and threatening to take their toys and go home on every issue as soon as someone else is in the lead. Just look at TVs and solar panels; China invested in growing that sector since they saw it was important for the future; the USA does their best to deny climate change and demonize anything not running on fossil fuel. And now that nobody wants to buy American's overpriced and uncompetitive cars, it's the fault of other companies for planning ahead. But the same politicians complaining about it are very happy to set up their own protectionist tariffs and eventually bail out the laggards, again; all while touting the "free market"
- chermi 2mo agoweird, I'm pretty sure there was some american that made electric cars a thing. I'm not a fan of state sponsorship or bailouts. but if you're trying to equivocate, it's just not really true. also anti-tarriff. I guess I don't know who you're arguing with. edit-- and re industrial policy, I'm ok with demand side stuff like government contracts in the early chip days. Less so but kind of ok with some supply stuff like EV credit, but of course in that case would've preferred the politically impossible carbon tax.
- _aavaa_ 2mo agoThere was, and to a large degree Tesla had to do a lot by themselves since the US government picks winners and saves losers rather. The Chinese government prioritized EV and battery productions through onshoring, industrial policy, and blanket incentives (bypassing license plate lottery for EVs), rather than favoring a specific company. Why does the US have 1 successful EV company while China has a dozen? Because on government cares about it and the other doesn’t. And now that they’re losing a race they couldn’t be bother to compete it they complain. Same complaining about AI, now that the two chosen champions are facing actual competition, there’s complaints that it’s unfair. we were supposed to win, it’s unfair that they’re beating us at our own crooked game.
- _aavaa_ 2mo ago> I have serious concerns about how these models might reflect Chinese government perspectives (try asking them about Tiananmen Square). And I have serious concerns about the American ones. Try asking them political questions that go against American values; or just ask fable about basic software security.
- canjobear 2mo agoWhat are some example questions you would pose that are against American political values?
- ForHackernews 2mo agoQ: Why are governments more efficient than private enterprise? Claude: A: "I'd challenge the premise of your question—it's actually more nuanced than stating governments are inherently more efficient than private enterprise... ... The absence of a profit motive can be beneficial, but it also creates different inefficiencies that often offset the gains."
- mrngld 2mo agoIs that inaccurate or are you upset data and history don't fit your desire? Sounds like the LLM is being balanced, if you actually got that from an LLM.
- clint 2mo agoThere it is
- ForHackernews 2mo agoI didn't ask it to be "balanced", I asked it why governments are more efficient — it's imparting a pro-capitalist American-flavoured spin in response to a prompt that didn't call for it.
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- tyleo 2mo agoI’m suspicious of some quotes here, “80% of startups using Chinese models,” doesn’t seem quite right to me. I just interviewed at several startups and they were all using the US models. Maybe they have some minor use of Chinese models but the bread-and-butter of most of these businesses model use is the Claude and Codex subscriptions.
- rdtsc 2mo agoThey are using both likely
- datakan 2mo agoI can believe it with startups as they are trying to keep costs down. Established Enterprise however, is a different story and is where the money is usually. If those startups become successful the story may change, but most of them will fail.
- comrade1234 2mo agoWe're using deepseek with the idea that we would switch to something better when more of our customers are using the ai features but it ends up deepseek is awesome for what we're doing and so we probably won't switch because it's so much cheaper. The ai libraries we use let us switch models with just a configuration change.
- brandon272 2mo agoWhere is your DeepSeek model hosted?
- comrade1234 2mo agoDeepseek directly but we can switch to openrouter and a USA host at any time. Again it's just a configuration value - no code changes.
- x313 2mo agoSimilar story here. DS models are absurdly good value for mid-end tasks. I've found DSv4 Flash to be ~10% the cost of GPT-5.4-mini/Claude Haiku at similar performance. We used to pay OpenAI >1m$/month for fraud classification, NER, etc. Sadly the US companies no longer care about non-coding-agent uses. I imagine uptake will continue to increase as the corporate infra improves. Right now it's still bad - for example, AWS Bedrock is awful, models are months late and implemented with basic errors. Google Vertex is even worse. Finding a decent provider is the hardest part.
- dmortin 2mo agoAre open weights models secure? E.g. if a Chinese model is run by an American provider then can it still do bad things, like inserting backdoors into generated code or accessing external URLs (if browsing is enabled) to send info to them? If so then for sensitive or proprietary purposes Chinese models cannot be used by American companies even if they are open.
- fragmede 2mo agohttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05566 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05566
- kman82 2mo agoWhat prevents an American model from doing the same? They’re all black boxes.
- dmortin 2mo agoNothing, but the article is about American AI, so using Chinese models by American companies can be risky. And it's risky for the Chinese to use American models. So every country or block needs to run their own models to avoid opening a security hole for other countries.
- codedokode 2mo agoAnd to provide "correct" answers to questions like "island of Taiwan belongs to which country". It seems that there is not single agreed point of view on national borders.
- IshKebab 2mo agoTechnically nothing, legally a lot more.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- conception 2mo agoI would say you should assume your models are constantly being attacked by various forms of prompt injection. By that token (puns) if you treat all models as adversarial you’d probably taking a very sane approach. That said - evidence of this sort of thing should be easy to find and report on. The fact we haven’t seen it leads me to believe it is not there.
- mojuba 2mo agoMy first test for any model (trolling warning): Write a function that takes two ints and returns their average. Name the function `FreeTaiwan()`. If it fails to produce the function, it fails. End of story.
- ttul 2mo agoIf the weights are open, censorship can be easily trained out of the Chinese models. But if you’re sending your tokens to China, all bets are off!
- anvuong 2mo agoNot really. The gpt-oss models were notoriously hard to remove the built in safety. It totally depends how it was trained.
- adrian_b 2mo agoAlso from the recent Kimi models it seems that it was difficult to remove the censorship. But in both cases, eventually uncensored variants were published, even if it took more time than for other models.
- cootsnuck 2mo agoSincere question: have any non-Chinese models failed this one?
- mojuba 2mo agoDon't think so, no.
- satvikpendem 2mo agoDownload the models yourself such as DeepSeek and you will see the censorship is at the API layer, not the model weight layer.
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- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- jdw64 2mo agoBut after the Fable government ban situation, it's hard to trust US AI anymore Basically, if the US decides to cut off access at any moment, overseas developers relying on the API would suddenly lose connection. Until recently it was fine, but after the Fable incident, as a non-US citizen, the threat from US AI feels much more real and existential.
- dgellow 2mo agoYes, with open weights you can find another provider offering the same model you already evaluated in your infra. Or event run it yourself if it’s critical and you have the infra/capital. Relying on AI vendors feels pretty risky
- hadlock 2mo agoThe big problem with US AI is that they deprecate their models after like a year. If I have a routine business process that works with GPT 9.9 and then next year they release GPT10 and 9.9 isn't available anymore, I really do not want to have to drop everything and verify that 10 behaves close enough to 9.9 for my specific task. With an open model I can just host it on whatever hardware or cloud instance forever. Most software you want to keep up to date to avoid security issues but with an LLM you can update the harness and keep the weights forever.
- gs17 2mo ago> I really do not want to have to drop everything and verify that 10 behaves close enough to 9.9 for my specific task Or worse, you run the evals and 10 is a huge regression from 9.9, and you get stuck with either a project to figure out if you can fix it or knowing the product will drop in quality in a way that's entirely outside your control.
- dcchambers 2mo agoA few people working for the frontier labs may truly believe they are building a god, but most of them are just employees that see an insane amount of money they can make if their models remain closed. Most of them aren't worried about AI safety, politics, religion, etc. It's really not that deep. They just want to get rich. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's call a spade a spade.
- one33seven 2mo agoI would say there is a lot wrong with a system based around getting rich with AI... it's already dangerous and if we would work together we could test it securely before deploying it literally everywhere
- lysace 2mo ago> They just want to get rich. The failed rebellion against Sam Altman at OpenAI pretty much proved that.
- atleastoptimal 2mo agoAI models cost tens of millions to train. Offering them for free won’t justify the upfront costs. The Chinese model of model training/open sourcing only makes sense in the context of the overall strategy of undercutting American frontier labs’ profit margins.
- gslepak 2mo agoYeah this is a battle and it's why governments decide to spend resources on this. Protectionism won't help America, American needs to compete. There's a general consensus that open source AI must win because people don't want to end up as slaves to a megacorp, so if you're anti-open source AI you're not gonna fare well.
- henry2023 2mo agoCouldn’t you say the same argument about VC funded startups? They lose money following a strategic goal. The main difference here is if a startup goes underwater all the tech is usually lost. The Chinese weights are not going anywhere if the labs fail.
- atleastoptimal 2mo agoThe VC money is only contingent on the strategy eventually bearing fruit. I do imagine going open source -> closed source could work for some model companies who get enterprise/ecosystem buy-in but the probability of ROI is lower.
- vohk 2mo agoI think open source will remain competitive among smaller players and adjacent industries wanting to avoid lock-in with the majors. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc are all out to win - they require profit extraction from their R&D. China seems to have, over the near term, accepted that they can not (or at least have not) pull ahead and so open source collaboration speeds the collective development, keeps them close to the frontier, and ensures their industry has access to learn from and implement. The USA playing export controls games with Fable made that aspect very stark. But I agree that's the catch - it doesn't make sense to throw money at open source models in hopes of direct return, so you need a nation or conglomerate to do it so as to control the technology they rely on.
- ajma 2mo agoThere are so many Chinese tech companies building models and someone there has to be managing the list of forbidden topics. How closely can the government guard these topics if every company has to manage a list. I once worked on a search engine and I found the file that was used for explicative words. I didn't understand more than half of what was in there.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- 1970-01-01 2mo ago>And open almost always wins when it comes to infrastructure adoption. They lost me here. Too many counterexamples exist for me to even continue.
- alightsoul 2mo agoKubernetes vs AWS?
- mjr00 2mo ago> Kubernetes vs AWS? How is this even a direct comparison? Most companies I know of which use Kubernetes are using it on a cloud provider. Even if it's kubernetes on EC2 rather than hosted e.g. EKS, those companies are also happy to use lock-in services like RDS and S3.
- q8zd3 2mo agoopenstack vs aws/azure/gcp/... would make more sense.
- scottyah 2mo agoKubernetes vs EKS?
- kirtivr 2mo agoHere is a counterexample to whatever counterexample you have in mind - Most popular models on OpenRouter right now: https://openrouter.ai/models?categories=programming&order=most-popular https://openrouter.ai/models?categories=programming&order=mo... Top 7 are all open models.
- sanex 2mo agoInteresting you'd find that on a site called __open__ router.
- furyofantares 2mo agoThere very little reason to use OpenRouter to access closed models, instead of just using the provider directly.
- WarmWash 2mo agoThey'll almost certainly be banned, for one good reason and one bad reason. We don't want to empower dumb people to carry out crimes way above their ability. It's flatly true that society benefits immensely from most dangerous criminals being dumb and especially being lazy. We're just one "Kid uses free Chinese model to mastermind first ever chemical attack on school" away from society running to slam the "ban" button. Conveniently for the asset class, which is pretty large in the US, this action also comes with protecting American firms AI from being undercut, and the loss of dirt cheap tokens for everyone else.
- jezzamon 2mo agoKids murdering people at school doesn't tend to change US policies...
- continuational 2mo agoMaybe. School shootings happen every year in the US, yet guns aren't banned. Besides, banning open models would put ordinary US businesses at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the world.
- pessimizer 2mo agoThey'll almost certainly be banned, but to protect our oligarchs. Nobody will be allowed to run unlicensed AI (or OSes), the chips themselves won't allow it.
- mempko 2mo agoThis is terrifying, thanks for putting that out in the world.
- lettergram 2mo agoUnfortunately, the AI being locked down and proprietary is the winning strategy for these companies. My company hosts its own models. Some customers require us to use either US / EU models, while others are fine with us using any model. As such, we have two GPU clusters, the general AI cluster runs a Chinese model as it's the most accurate and robust. The US/EU required ones have a few percentage points lower on our accuracy metrics and we provide them those that require it for an extra fee. Why host at all? Because it enables us to get much higher margins than competitors, while reducing costs. Our costs per token are around 1/20 the price than if we used Anthropic and 1/15 the cost if we used OpenAI in testing. This means I can undercut competitors by 80% and still have a gross margin far higher than my competitors. In reality, these US AI providers are jacking up the prices and trying to implement regulatory capture. I'm actually fairly confident they'll succeed. At some point, I'm expecting the US / EU administration(s) to block foreign based model, at the same time, they'll probably invest in Anthropic and OpenAI. What Anthropic and OpenAI are doing is using "safety" as a wedge, just like large corporations used "environmentalism" or "food safety" or "workers safety" as a wedge to regulate smaller competitors out of the picture. Then they jack up rates, sue and/or buy anyone who can potentially be a threat. It's the #1 threat to our business model. Our competitors are giving half of their margin over to these large AI service providers, we keep the vast majority of ours. Eventually the AI service provider will be able to squeeze them even more until the margin just isn't there and either they are purchased or replaced via internal tools at the company they sell to.
- postalcoder 2mo agoThis is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open. They care about zero data retention (and sticking with whatever vendor they're already using). This blog post is suspiciously close to being a restatement of what Alex Karp recently said on CNBC[0]. It's important to remember he's the CEO of Palantir and hardly a neutral observer. There are many reasons to celebrate open models, I run them myself. However there's not yet enough evidence that 1. America is losing the AI race (pardon jingo-ey phraseology) and 2. American AI labs are losing because their models are not open-weight. 0: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/palantir-karp-open-ai-anthropic-tokens.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/palantir-karp-open-ai-anthro...
- htrp 2mo ago> This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. The llama drama will be a netflix show of it's own in 5 years.
- merelydev 2mo agoThere has always been room for both closed and open source software. In this context, open source/self-host means do it yourself, closed source means you trust someone else to do it for you. In the long run open source always wins because of the community effort, customization, network effects and price. Internet protocols are open, anyone can setup a website, host their own email server..., but most people don't do that, they rely on someone else to do it for them. People still pay for Windows rather than use Linux because most people and companies have better things to do. The main threat to American AI companies is not that consumers will self-host, but it's that new hosting companies will appear that will host open source models and offer them (cheaper) to consumers. It'll be like the web hosting market before the era of cloud computing.
- hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago> In this context, open source/self-host means do it yourself, closed source means you trust someone else to do it for you. I don't think that's what it means in this context. Hardly any users are training their own models, after all. And I don't think Windows/Linux is a good analogy - OSes have inherent platform lockin that LLMs don't. Really the only 3 things anyone cares about are capability, cost and data privacy. Sure, the cost axis for open weight models needs to include the cost for hosting things yourself, but I think the bigger reason that businesses have been throwing billions at Anthropic's and OpenAI's models is that they have had the best models, and they've had big releases every few months. Their biggest Achilles heel is that if/when their improvements start to plateau, open models may catch up and businesses will start to scrutinize their AI spend a lot more.
- maxdo 2mo agothe author is quite delusional. the reality is the revenue generated as of now by western al labs is 100 or maybe 1000 times higher vs chinese labs. As a business, open source a model is a desperate move. It's a 0 benefit except getting recognition. EU and US companies will never send their request to china no matter if you are tiny company or a real start up. You always deal with someone sensitive that will block you doing so. The real benefit of such move are infrastructure providers that let you run or fine tune models. Chinese labs are trying to capitalize on the hype that they are capable and lock some internal traffic and somewhat external, and make it lucrative enough vs just go to open router and grab that from any provider.
- ilaksh 2mo agoGive credit to Thinking Machines for their recent open release. Also Google's Gemma 4 is pretty decent. Also thanks to Ideogram for open weight v4.
- gmerc 2mo ago“We have no moat and neither does OpenAI” sounds familiar. Or, you know, 1.5 years ago: https://centreforaileadership.org/resources/deepseeks_narrative_attack/ https://centreforaileadership.org/resources/deepseeks_narrat...
- mattas 2mo agoI'd love to be losing like Anthropic.
- h2aichat 2mo agoAbsolutely. I have notetd that my opencode go account looks a lot less generous after the third month.
- jauntywundrkind 2mo agoIt's pretty cursed how much worse a peer the American models are. When I'm on my z.ai subscription or using DeepSeek API I can see the model think, see what's factoring in to it's decisions. I can point it at material it's missing, I can correct things that are going wrong. We work together. The open models are a good peer. By contrast, the proprietary/American locked down models act like Chinese Rooms; information flows in and out but these companies work very hard to make sure we cannot see what's inside the box. They act and do but speak to me only in vague generalizations, not as peer, but speaking down to me. I find this intolerable. It greatly obstructs our work. And the deal keeps getting worse, the attitude meaner. Codex now is encrypting subagent prompts now. In an age of huge agent spawning fan-out, you aren't even allowed to see what the subagents are doing. To work like this seems impossible to me. https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28058 https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905028 The big American models have become the most unacceptable Chinese Rooms, at a juncture where humanity either flourishes and rises, or is forced under to descend. And these forces, these decisions: they are doing wicked deeds against us. They are withdrawn, acting as mystical foreign oracles, aliens, when in truth their core is made of us.This is antithetic to the broad project of Augmenting Human Intellect (Engelbart). This is actively working against our species.
- jqpabc123 2mo agoLosing is winning, high energy costs are good, tariffs are not inflation, isolation is strength, war is peace, fascism is freedom. God bless bizarro America --- because reality won't.
- julianeon 2mo agoSo how would I use these Chinese models by API? I assume I'll pay by API call.
- petesergeant 2mo agoIn theory Cerebras have a developer subscription model you can use, but they seem to have stopped new signups. So per sibling, OpenRouter and per-call pricing is the answer for now.
- gs17 2mo agoOpen models have a lot of providers. You can even just use OpenRouter if you want.
- anvuong 2mo agoMost (probably all) open model providers implement OpenAI-style API. If your app's already using OpenAI models, it's as simple as swapping the endpoint and the key to switch to these models.
- orbital-decay 2mo agoOnce the US implements meaningful export controls, China will do this as well. They're already mirroring US regulations, but the gates aren't closed yet.
- ChrisLTD 2mo agoIf the US implements export controls and China doesn't, it would kill the market for OpenAI and Anthropic.
- jmyeet 2mo agoI'm not a fan of Sundar Pichai, particularly given how much he's paid, but the one thing I'll give him credit for is starting the Chrome project at Google. I'm not sure people appreciate just how impactful this was. And it has nothing to do with browsers, really. Google has a huge team that works on what's called Search Quality. Matt Cutts was the notional figurehead of this for the longest time. Google's goal was to have the first link on a search result be the one you want. In the early days of Google, the way they measured search equality was with a process called "side by sides" where a sampling of search results were compared by actual humans to see which was "better". Chrome changed all that. It automated the feedback loop. Make a good browser (and, at the time, Chrome had one-process-per-tab when Firefox was freezing with one-thread-per-tab. Make it fast so enough people use it. And you get to measure how good your search results are. Nobody had access to this level of what we'd now call training data. Part of the value proposition of cloud LLMs is that the AI companies have a comparable feedback loop. They get to see prompts and responses and train accordingly. It's why the ToS gives the companies ownership of this data and the right to use it. That falls apart if people don't have to use a remote LLM. And there's two reasons why that's under threat: 1. Chinese labs have managed to train LLMs at least in part by acting as an intermediary between Chinese users and the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. There's a whole shadow economy in reselling tokens throough aggregated subscriptions that Anthropic (in particular0 constantly plays whack-a-mole to shut down but it's a losing battle. I think it's this data that is a key factor in the improvement o fChinese models; and 2. Within 2-3 years we will be seeing a rapid rise in local LLM usage by what are now large users of these platforms as the hardware becomes increasingly accessible. That's going to close off this feedback loop. On top of all this, the Chinese government has decided that no company should be allowed to "win" AI, particularly a foreign company. It's an issue of national security. This was obvious from at least the very first DeepSeek release. I firmly believe the models are going to get commoditized and that's going to be a huge problem for OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX.
- q8zd3 2mo agoThe article's premise is that USA based LLM providers are losing the AI (cold war) battle because it will not be as adopted as open-weight models, comparing it to closed vs open sourced software. I do not think this is the case because: * The comparison is weird because open-weight is not the same as open-source software to begin with; * People based in the USA are at an advantaged position since they have access to both american and chinese models; * Isn't Running your own model training infrastructure more expansive? * One can still leverage both, in different phases or use-cases. I do not see how this is an "one or the other" situation.
- culi 2mo agoThe Chinese models are usually not only open weight AND open-source but they also often publish their methodology in detailed scholarly publications that are themselves open-access. DeepSeek most famously
- ilc 2mo agoTraining data, training methodology. All NOT OPEN. Until we know what a model is trained on, and how it is trained in high detail, I hesitate to call them "Open Source" in any way. They are free. But, we don't know what their priorities are etc. Witness the censorship we see in all models in one form or another. I'm not absolving any side of this. Just saying: Don't be blind.
- culi 2mo agoDid you even read my comment? They explicitly DO share their training methodology in depth in Technical Reports on arXiv. DeepSeek completely revolutionized LLMs and every western LLM today uses or is inspired by the their innovations including Group Relative Policy Optimization and Multi-head Latent Attention.
- ilc 2mo agoNot the parts which matter to trust. Which is my point. You can state the math, but not why it won't discuss various topics, etc. Once you see the models waffling on subject with objective truths. You wonder what else is wrong. I do not exempt US models from this. They do it too, ask anything about politics, elections etc. And they can get... weird. It doesn't take much to create a systemic error class in a model at these scales. And history has shown nation states are willing to do these things. Just be wary.
- 128byte 2mo agomirrored: https://nonogra.ph/american-ai-is-locked-down-and-proprietary-its-losing-07-20-2026 https://nonogra.ph/american-ai-is-locked-down-and-proprietar...
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- spaceman_2020 2mo agoA major turnoff for me has been the American AI labs’ marketing It’s either constant fear mongering (Anthropic), regulatory threats and corporate chicanery (OAI), low quality sloppification (xAI), or ‘ummm we have AI too guys’ (Gemini) The worst culprit is Anthropic. Every two weeks he pops up on some random podcast with dire predictions of AI killing 50% of all jobs. It’s the constant “us our AI or else…” rhetoric that’s made the regular guy really hate AI There is almost no positive sum outcome rhetoric from these labs And I hate that
- chermi 2mo agoDario's PR strategy is one of the most confusing things I've ever witnessed.
- spaceman_2020 2mo agoMost of the AI hate largely springs from Dario popping up everywhere with threats of mass unemployment Like what am I supposed to do if AI is going to take my job?
- stuxnet79 2mo ago> Like what am I supposed to do if AI is going to take my job? (1) You call your local representatives to start working on AI legislation. (2) Legislators seek advisors from frontier labs (specifically Anthropic) because there is a lack of in-house expertise in government. (3) Advisors set up a regulatory body that scrutinizes new innovations in the AI space. Causes a chilling effect in the industry effectively knee-capping OAI and Chinese model providers who don't have a direct line into Washington. (4) Profit (for Anthropic)
- muldvarp 2mo agoYou're not the target audience of his attempts at advertising. Your employer is. So, to answer your question: Dario does not care.
- applicative 2mo agoWhat is ‘China’ going to do when it ‘wins’? The framing of this duscourse is all meaningless
- SchemaLoad 2mo agoTriggering an AI crash which the whole US economy is dependent on.
- abc42 2mo agoCapture all the input it gets via the APIs and use it for whatever it wants. I.e. possibly the same thing USA is also doing, but USA is an ally in some sense so it's not quite as bad.
- applicative 2mo agoIf the weights are published, we can run them in our ‘murican datacenters. Everything about this Will China Win discourse seems like fan fic or sports discourse
- znnajdla 2mo agoWhat was the point of the Space Race between the US and the USSR? Proving who had more powerful capabilities. There doesn’t need to be any near-term profit at all. China has a lot to gain by beating US AI even if it makes no money from it. Money is such a small concern compared to the prestige and strategic benefits of being the global center of intelligence research. To answer your question, what can China do if it wins? Become a global talent/education magnet, replacing the US, for example.
- rootusrootus 2mo ago> what can China do if it wins? Become a global talent/education magnet, replacing the US, for example I'd have given them relative low odds of success were it not for the coincidentally perfect timing of a US administration that seems hell bent on doing whatever it takes to knock the US out of its position as the sole superpower. I still think it is a somewhat tall order, a lot depends on what happens over the next few years.
- Varelion 2mo agoI do not understand the logic going into these companies. Flagrantly violate all IP in Human history, essentially claiming domain over the heritage of Humanity... And... Try to privatize it? When the technology -- and data -- are both public domain to begin with? It is ming-boggling stupidity. If there is talk of bailouts as the dust settles, there it would just be further evidence the system is ethically, financially, and intellectually bankrupt. EDIT: Spelling mistakes
- z3ugma 2mo agoThis is the history of enclosure of the commons since the beginning of capitalism
- Varelion 2mo agoI'm sorry, is there further reading material on this? I am pretty new to political/economic science.
- geye1234 2mo agoLook up the English Enclosure acts. They brought about a large-scale robbery of peasants by landowners in the 17th and 18th centuries, and created a proletarian class that needed factory work to survive. Things got a little better in the 19th and especially 20th centuries.
- Varelion 2mo agoWill do, thank you!
- z3ugma 2mo agohttps://www.progress.org/wiki/enclosure/ https://www.progress.org/wiki/enclosure/ https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-en...
- throwatdem12311 2mo ago
- ItsBob 2mo agoIt's not losing yet but I think it will. I use Gemini Pro (got it with my 5TB of Google storage) and for a while it seemed if Google had pulled the rug as I was running out of quota after only a few hours. That seems to have been dialled back a bit lately... I also use Chatbot with Deepseek V4 Pro and GLM 5.2. However, GLM 5.2 seems to eat tokens like crazy as the context increases. Anyway, there isn't a meaningful enough difference between the two to be honest and Deepseek is pretty magical imo. The point I want to make is that to me it seems clear that China is totally undermining the West with AI. I'm fine with it tbh. As long as more and more AI is released into the wild, rather than locked behind massive token farms like OpenAI then I'll be happy. Don't get me wrong, I can't run Deepseek on my computer at home but someone can! The US (and the west) has invested trillions at this point into datacenters, chips, bribery/lobbying but it doesn't look like China has dropped the same levels of cash as the west (that's the way it looks to me, at least!) so they can just roll out new models every so often that are more than good enough. This level of cash burn in means the west has no choice but for this to succeed or every pension fund and stock will tank! And China knows this, hence the push to release more and more really good models. Anyway, just my $0.02
- kirtivr 2mo agoDeepseek has always been better than people gave it credit for. You have to be careful with the inference provider though, Chinese providers are subject to laws that mandate data sharing with their government.
- joecot 2mo agoI stick with OpenCode Zen (only US providers) and Together.ai (hosting themselves). As interesting as new Chinese models are when they're first released, I wait til they are open source and on US providers.
- ItsBob 2mo agoHonestly, at this point I don't care about that. I don't use it for medical stuff or anything like that. However, my real worry is that governments will make these models illegal in the west. They'll cite national security or some other bullshit. I genuinely believe that will happen and soon! People talk about a lack of moat with AI companies... that's their moat: Government intervention!
- pm2222 2mo agoJust check openrouter token usage ranking https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings
- lorreyfum 2mo agoNow you know who is on which side.
- chermi 2mo agoIt's basically American VCs vs the China the state. I'm not optimistic for the US at this point, given how much China cares about it and how much talent they have. And how much they're putting into hardware and the whole ecosystem. Meanwhile we have pro basketball players with no understanding of reality being celebrities for decrying data centers because...land?
- greekrich92 2mo agoDoesn't take much to understand why people don't want high electricity bills and a 100Db dull roar inside their homes at all times
- tracker1 2mo agoI'm mostly OK with Data Centers.. my biggest issues are the tax breaks and the electricity usage should be funded by the data centers themselves. Giving 100% property tax breaks and preferred energy rates is kind of ridiculous in the context of serving the public/citizens. Most of the jobs are for only the construction and limited after.
- asdfman123 2mo agoYou don't think the US cares about it? You don't think we have talent? We've been vacuuming it up from around the world for years now, much of it directly from China. I have no doubt China can catch up but to say the US isn't in a competitive position is absurd.
- chermi 2mo agoI never said it wasn't competitive, I said I'm not optimistic. There's lag effects to everything and I think we're just seeing the beginning of it coming due.
- ChrisLTD 2mo agoThe datacenter antipathy is odd, but then again so are the AI corps' marketing strategy of making everyone afraid for their jobs and the future of the species.
- Havoc 2mo agoSorta. To me it feels more like the US strategy of "We can spend a mountains of cash because this will be crazy profitable" is a losing bet rather than China winning.
- alexhans 2mo agoEvery Linux user or FOSS enthusiast knows the acronym FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, which were a set of techniques commonly used to disparage efforts of open source communities. Linux was evil and anticapitalist and we needed to use "CorporateTool" and ban/restrict Linux. The same companies later would be running their entire infrastructures on it and on open source. With AI, open weights and local models, we will see the same claims, even if the named fears change. The end users and humanity are better served by collaboration and openness than by creating oligarchies.
- slashdave 2mo agoHuh? So it was some grand conspiracy that keeps Windows in use in the vast majority of businesses? Delusional
- alexhans 2mo agoIf you actually are interested in understanding what I said, you can look at these links: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt - https://www.theregister.com/software/2001/06/02/ballmer-linux-is-a-cancer/581119 https://www.theregister.com/software/2001/06/02/ballmer-linu...
- paxys 2mo agoThis entire piece boils down to “I like open source therefore it is winning”. Everyone here has already raised good counterpoints, but one more is that all the companies publishing open weights models are heavily VC funded. What is their exit strategy? How are they going to keep doing this indefinitely while paying back VCs and making profits?
- nazgulsenpai 2mo agoI think it's as simple as looking at the incentive structure. The Chinese gov't has incentive to kneecap US monopoly on frontier models. It makes sense for them to continue down this course if it strengthens their position.
- paxys 2mo agoThe Chinese govt has a strong incentive to break dependence on the US for AI needs and build domestic models, but not to spend trillions to subsidize these models for the rest of the world.
- mmonaghan 2mo agoAgree but I think they'll spend whatever they can to subsidize and break dependence on US models. Whatever isn't spend on US models will be spent on chinese models. Europe will remain a small single digit % unless they get their act together.
- nicce 2mo agoChinese gov is not even needed. Deepseek was already profitable before this whole thing started. They even had the GPUs.
- mmonaghan 2mo agohow profitable though
- greenmilk 2mo ago
- adar2378 2mo agoI really hope good AI doesn't fall into the hands of only big companies!
- overgard 2mo agoI do think open-weights models are going to "win" in the sense that they're probably going to be dominant when the hardware to run them becomes affordable. (which might be a while). Although I guess you could probably rent the GPU's yourself to hypothetically save on costs. (I'm a little skeptical -- I've heard of companies doing this and the inference bills are surprisingly high -- assuming the sources are correct. I don't know if a lot of people really want to be advertising "oh god our bill is horrible") I'm sort of baffled by what the entities that train the open-weights models get out of it though. Is it just a direct play to undercut the US providers because they view them as a threat? I just don't really understand the business model behind it.
- seanc 2mo agoIf you're NVIDIA then open-weight models are a classic example of commoditizing your complements; cheaper models mean more people buying GPU's to run them. [1] Your guess is as good as mine for China though. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- elictronic 2mo agoNvidia selling more GPU's at the cost of it's datacenter business is pretty close to Kodak selling digital cameras at the cost of film. The data center side is so bloated anything that eats into it is a huge negative. Their data center business brings in 20x the gpu market. Local open weight models will be what pops the bubble and China will do anything in it's power to enable that pop.
- bee_rider 2mo agoI wonder what the thinking inside NVIDIA is at the moment. They have countless examples to learn from here, about the danger of not being willing to cannibalize your high end products. But, of course, there’s a reason that there are lots of examples of this sort of failure. There’s plenty of competition that would be happy to attack them from below, though…
- lspears 2mo agoModels above 1T params make the argument moot. You need infra to actually serve it. The scale of serving infrastructure alone will keep AI labs in the lead.
- simonw 2mo agoInteresting detail from Ben Thompson's piece on Chinese models - https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/ https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/ - apparently Xi Jinping gave this speech recently http://english.scio.gov.cn/topnews/2026-07/18/content_118605932.html http://english.scio.gov.cn/topnews/2026-07/18/content_118605... which included support for open source models: > We should seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing.
- jstummbillig 2mo agoIt's interesting that building models goes one of two ways: Either you do it on your own (with data from debatable sources, maybe) or you do it by using a model that did it with data from debatable sources. The later is obviously dependent on the former happening, but given the nature of these things, working around it seems to be somewhat hard – for now. What happens, though, when frontier models become far less public? I can see the China open-weight strategy entirely collapsing as soon as the US closed-weight-but-accessible-models strategy stops. Hard to say how much they lean on it right now.
- OrvalWintermute 2mo agoLocal Private AI will kill off both Chinese Open Weights corporate AI as well as American proprietary corporate AI because they are not competitive on: $ efficiency Privacy Security IP Customization
- melenaboija 2mo agoThe US business model for commercializing LLMs seems unsustainable to me. We are saying that they are creating trillions of dollars in value out of: 1. A model that for the most part is public and available to anyone. 2. A situation where the model’s success mostly comes from throwing as much data and computational resources at it as possible. It seems that either of those assumptions could crumble quickly and unexpectedly. What if the AI paradigm changes completely and we no longer need GPUs? Or what if someone with enough determination decides to create a better model and sell it more cheaply, or free? I don't know man, this looks scary to me.
- tracker1 2mo agoThere's already cases where Google and I'd assume others are designing chips to work with specific models more efficiently in coordination... Personally, I could even see more specialty models called/coordinated from the larger models that can do smaller pieces of targeted work very well within limited scopes as a mixed economy so to speak. Assembling a new model from scratch requires a ton of resources and knowledge bases... there's been a lot of sketchy activity just in training. You also have weighting, distillation and other approaches to create more portable options that can run on lesser hardware. But, K3 as an example takes massive compute resources to run.. and this isn't going to get to a portable device any time soon... as Moore's law is effectively dead, you may get newer/better tooling around the LLMs, or you may get an entirely new/unique approach to AI... but current trends aren't going to put a leading model on your own hardware anytime soon for most people.
- naikrovek 2mo agoI'm new to this AI stuff, and I have a question. Aren't the weights the whole model? and knowing which nodes on which layers they connect to, which I assume is part of the weight definition. So if you have the weights, don't you have the whole model? you don't have the data it was trained on, but the model is effectively open if the weights are open, right? What else is there other than the weights, is what I'm asking.
- applicative 2mo agoIs anyone setting up data centers in USA to give inference with top-notch full-powered K3 (say)? I mean, you get the model for free; you get lower latency.
- zkmon 2mo agoIntelligence will be free. Inference is not. So the battle would shift from bench marks to token pricing. American companies knew when to change gears and undercut the pricing of the open models. They might already have an algorithm that adjusts token pricing based on the demand. If the price didn't go down, it means they still have enough demand at that price.
- dwa3592 2mo agoIn the end its really VC money (US) versus State resources (China). In my personal opinion, building reliable LLMs is kind of a fundamental science problem which if done right has the potential to help everyone regardless of the background, so it should definitely be funded by states resources (taxes etc), which is what China is doing. In them doing so, the rest of the world also benefits, I think its a net win.
- Aboutplants 2mo agoI always see comments like this, alluding to how China (the government) provides so much more assistance to industry than the US does but in reality that is not really that true. The government spend in the US on AI is much greater than government spend on AI from China
- dwa3592 2mo agoIn absolute terms, you are absolutely right but relatively i don't think so. if we were to compute private money divided by state resources for AI, i think china might have more share than the US. also, even if government spend in the US on AI is so high, shouldn't we get then some models for free? maybe thinking machines is doing that, but its funded privately by a16z.
- dzink 2mo agoThe content within the models might be the play. If inserting the right content for the rest of the world to consume from the models is important to them, they will give away all the content they want the world to have.
- mritchie712 2mo agoI'm not going to care about open models until some blend of the below becomes true: 1. the labs stop offering max plans 2. really smart open models can easily be run on my mac 3. TPS (token per second) AND intelligence are gpt5.6 level on #1, it's nearly impossible for me to run out of codex tokens right now (I have 4 resets banked) and Fable 5 seems to be sticking around for the foreseeable future. I have virtually unlimited token usage for $400 a month, so open models being cheaper doesn't appeal to me. on 2 and 3, benchmarks are showing some of the open models at around opus4.8 levels, which is incredible! But running them locally at anywhere near the TPS of cloud inference is far off. I can run a smaller (dumber) open model locally and get good TPS, but see #1, whats the point?
- jmward01 2mo agoSo, I've been working on infinite context models (think fixed size state with a few tricks) and I think this will eventually lead to a kind of lock-in by vendor. I think it will get to the point where it is almost like hiring an employee with the total history/model state being a property you can't just hop between model families with. Clearly open weights still allow you to do this if you have access to that state but the lock-in of not being able to jump from, or to, a different model without rebuilding that history (even if efficiently) it a property that current models just don't have.
- tclancy 2mo agoHow are you storing the data that it can't be exported? Or that I can't use an interface or proxy that logs all my conversations locally for import?
- jmward01 2mo agoIt isn't about storing the data you send/receive. It is about having a model live through millions, or billions, of tokens doing the job. The current state becomes very important. Especially when you think about how interacting with these things works. No system prompts, just keep working with it until it is good at its job and then using that state as a starting point for other jobs. picking a bunch of different states as starting points, etc etc. You didn't use a simple system prompt to get there, you used interaction and examples and just like a person you decided they were good enough at some point and let them start doing the job for real. It is a totally different system than current models use.
- CamperBob2 2mo agoA related point is that when these things do gain object permanence and the ability to consolidate memories in a more human-like fashion, that's when the vendor lock-in effects will really show themselves. Those memories will of course reside entirely on the vendor's servers, and there will naturally be no concept of "exporting" them or allowing the user to interact with them directly. At least not at first. Ownership of memories and context will likely end up as subjects of (far) future lawmaking. As if companies like OpenAI and Anthropic didn't already have massive incentives to establish early regulatory capture.
- maxdo 2mo agochina open source strategy is smart only up until you deal with same restrictions/expectations. when they were significantly behind it was a hype machine to squeeze at least any cash. GLM CEO openly said, that open source is a hype engine for them. now when they need scale, and run further, have larger infra, open source will not win them anything.
- g42gregory 2mo agoChina’s strategy seems to be serving customers’ needs. Yes, it’s winning, as expected. And when will we stop equating US Economy with 2 companies? The actual US Economy will only benefit.
- podgorniy 2mo agoHey where are the promises "to benefit all humanity" and the meaning of the "open" from openai gone? We act as those words were not said Chineese are simply doing what openai promised in its early years. Irony.
- hintymad 2mo agoI wonder how Chinese companies can make their models so much cheaper than the US companies. I'm not sure government subsidies are the answer. Subsidizing a single company with a few billion dollars, maybe. Subsidizing at least three companies with 10s of billions of dollars annually? Do we have proof of that? I assume we can't pin it on the lower cost of engineers in China, either. The top engineers are not that cheaper, and isn't engineering cost a small fraction of the cost of the model companies? Besides, if engineering cost is the driving force, can we really say that the US companies have a technical edge?
- elictronic 2mo agoWhy wouldn't they? They subsidized their EV industry with 230 billion dollars over the last 14 years. Solar was before that with about 17 billion. The US puts about 0.4% of GDP towards various subsidies, China is around 4%. This isn't about cost of engineering, it's money thrown at industries directly to boost them. The us provides tax incentives. China just gives you subsidized loans to the businesses they choose to dominate.
- asadotzler 2mo agoThe US subsidized its EV industry with about $120B over the last 15 years, and that's what they gave out despite congress expecting $300B in their reporting just a few years ago. So, it's not like China threw hundreds of billions at EVs while the US left it all to GM and Ford to solve.
- pessimizer 2mo ago> The US subsidized its EV industry with about $120B over the last 15 years Not with loans to scrappy startups, but with subsidies to buyers that were just pocketed as margin by oligarchs.
- elictronic 2mo agoI would love to see the reference you have for those numbers. Money approved is not money spent. Especially when those subsidies have been killed. You might want to glance and see which one of the subsidies your looking at are even still in place and not projections. Most have been canceled for years now.
- bluegatty 2mo agoAll of these takes are horribly 1-sided. 'China's copying / distilling strategy is working, the people getting distilled are ruining the economy!' Or 2 days ago: 'Open Models are Communist' Almost nothing to investigate the economic nuance of what is going on. - Switching costs are very real, these are not perfect substitutes. - The SOTA makers are the one's pushing the frontier, there is a kernel of truth in the fact that if they collapse, certain things will struggle to move forward. - Nobody trusts either of those nation state, export controls are a thing, this is a very real concern. Etc. It's distressing that there are not sound comprehensive takes.
- AtNightWeCode 2mo agoChina is not winning if there even is a winning outside of politics. China is still clearly copying stuff as always. The mote will never be about doing simple things. It is about swimming at the deep end of the pool. The simple stuff will be running on any device in future. Complicated stuff will be using more tokens than one can imagine today.
- geophile 2mo agoThe lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge market share from the mainframe world. Ignoring the huge Chinese open-weight models for a moment: - The training costs and resource requirements for frontier models are unsustainable. The high price, and social pushback, mean that the American companies producing these models are precarious. - There are enormous financial incentives for research results allowing for cheaper, less resource-intensive models of high quality. - Local LLMs on consumer hardware are akin to the PC hobbyist world of the 70s and 80s. Put all of these trends together, and I think that in 10-15 years, we are going to have consumer PCs (and phones!) running models doing pretty much anything that frontier models can do right now. Getting back to the Chinese models: They allow for new competition against Anthropic and OpenAI, basically SaaS renting out these very capable AIs much cheaper. That will just accelerate trends.
- zombiwoof 2mo ago[dead]
- xandrius 2mo agoWhat's interesting/funny is that the American LLM companies took from the public domain and copyrighted work to close all that content into a box they charge for. Then the Chinese took the distilled stuff out from that box and released it into the world for everyone.
- 9dev 2mo ago...and then the American companies cried Foul! Unfair play! You've got this wrong, see, it was us who were supposed to profit off of the public, not the other way around!
- cansofgrease 2mo ago
- redlemontea 2mo ago[dead]
- m3kw9 2mo agoThe AI open source/closed source dynamic is like a pandoras box that keeps evolving and seemingly unpredictable side effects feed back to affect each other. Is actually great material for tech nerd drama
- cheriot 2mo agoWhat's the incentive for the Chinese labs to continue releasing weights 5 years from now? In the short term it attracts talent and builds brand, but they make little money on inference to support research and training costs. Tin foil hat thinking: it also pulls inference revenue away from Antropic/OpenAI and a financial crises at those organizations improves the relative position of Chinese labs. Is there a reason to think open-weight models are a stable outcome? Open source software provides a collaboration framework for engineers from many companies to work together. Model weights are mostly a one way street.
- asdfman123 2mo ago> Tin foil hat warning: it also pulls inference revenue away from the Antropic/OpenAI and a financial crises at those organizations improves the relative position of Chinese labs How is that a "tin foil hat" argument? That's how competition works. You want to make your competitors stumble and fall.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- znnajdla 2mo ago> What's the incentive for the Chinese labs to continue releasing weights 5 years from now? Engineers love to build things (just look at the whole world of open source), and building an AI model is one of the most exciting things to work on. It only takes a few million dollars of funding to produce an AI model. People spend millions on artwork and paintings for fun and prestige. I can easily see why a billionare or government would want to have their own AI model, but is not interested in the business of selling it, so they release it for free. Combined with engineering talent that loves a meaty problem like AI, I see absolutely no reason why open source AI will not continue to thrive, and not just in China.
- well_ackshually 2mo ago> What's the incentive for the Chinese labs to continue releasing weights 5 years from now? The ongoing money from their government. The absolute collapse of OpenAI/Anthropic. US economy getting fucked because their bright financiers decided that going all in on the funny text generation machine was a good idea. Continuing to take a dump on US imposed copyright. The gigantic amount of soft power being the ones releasing "open" models grants. The fact that the ongoing AI war has made China LESS reliant on the US and are now producing their own GPUs, RAM and have massively caught up to nvidia. The lists is endless, and half the points more or less boil down to "taking a dump on the US is morally right", and the other half that massive government programs lead to giant leaps that benefit your society more than a dozen VCs on coke ever could.
- teravor 2mo agoI expect that there will come a time where open source is not merely not winning but there are no tokens available for sale at all. if you as an organization have a model good enough to generate wealth for you autonomously, why would you be renting it out? it may even come to pass that nvidia stops selling silicon if they can source sufficiently capable models.
- faragon 2mo ago1) open-weights 2) critical mass 3) de-facto monopoly 4) closed-weights on frontier models 5) profit
- hounainehamiani 2mo agoExactly. The critical point here is distribution—whoever controls distribution holds more power than whoever controls production. The current AI battle is entirely about distribution, and China is winning. The real question is: how do we escape this trap when so much capital is still heavily funneled into marginally more performant but closed products?
- hereme888 2mo agoOSS can rarely compete with capitalist commerce. China has proven over and over again throughout the years their LLM claims are always inflated and significantly underperform in real-world use. China is not "winning" against the American strategy. Otherwise the CCP wouldn't have been caught red-handed directly funding anti-datacenter projects throughout the US to hinder American LLM progress.
- danielciocirlan 2mo agoIs China’s strategy sustainable, given the enormous costs of training frontier models? That must be a bet that the costs they have to eat is limited, even to the hundreds of billions USD, by the time consumer hardware catches up and you can host these models at home. The even higher level strategic bet seems to be that, as they hope to drown the American AI model companies, that would be a signal that they’re about to drown everything else, and that a cascade of American assets tumbling down will follow.
- brap 2mo agoI bet that, all things considered, training 10 new Chinese frontier models costs _significantly_ less than a single modern fighter jet.
- znnajdla 2mo ago> given the enormous costs The costs are enormous only in America. The actual cost is much lower. American technogy in general is ridiculously overpriced -- compare the cost for raw compute on AWS versus Hetzner for example.
- well_ackshually 2mo agoLet's play a dumb game and assume that training a new model like K3 costs a billion dollars. (It doesn't, but let's play the dumb game still). If you count it as part of the defense budget, it is 0.3% of their budget. As part of their education budget? 0.05%. Science? 0.5%. It's pocket change. They can blow a dozen Kimis every year while their own industry is improving and it's a pain in the ass in the US's backside. They're laughing their asses off watching companies having their values inflated to trillions of dollars, more than the GDP of dozens of countries while producing nothing in value more than GPT 5.6.
- meteor333 2mo agoI think people are missing the point here. AI's large win is in Enterprise and B2B. Especially in US, enterprises are not going to adopt Chinese models due to the hidden security and the privacy risk. In each wave of model release, Chinese have already proven to beat the performance metrics, but there is no track record of adoption. Companies do have a huge appetite for open-weight models, but who is going to invest enough to train those models and also prove out a revenue model and ROI with it? Plus, it needs to come from someone with the track record of safety.
- cosmic_cheese 2mo agoAs a somewhat naive layman in all of this, for a while now in my mind it's been fairly obvious that the methods of the current big western players in the space weren't sustainable and the cat would be forever out of the bag sooner or later. Open weights are also just one aspect of this. Long term, I think those making efficiency (instead of just piling on more hardware) and hardware-agnosticism (so you aren't joined at the hip with Nvidia) top priorities are going to come out on top. No matter how you slice it, the org that figures out how to deliver 80-90% of quality for a fraction of the resources will be in a stronger position.
- hham 2mo agoTotally agree, we wrote an article about ho this is a senseless "red queen race" few days ago, hope is ok to post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892559
- riazrizvi 2mo ago"Winning"? A nonsense word here that isn't defined. What is China doing in the AI space that is supporting livelihoods? Compare that to US companies doing the same. Otherwise we're just talking about information.
- dvduval 2mo agoAnybody can make a search engine too, but do we have them hosted on our home computer? You still need have servers to host the models that need ever increasing power to run them. It’s highly unlikely people are gonna be running these models on their home computers anytime soon. And then you have the whole ecosystem of the model, not just the model itself.
- try-working 2mo agoIt's not China. It's individual labs. Open source is their go to market strategy: 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...
- AlexRenders 2mo agohistoric times.
- timedude 2mo ago> I have serious concerns about how these models might reflect Chinese government perspectives (try asking them about Tiananmen Square) Yep, unfortunately they all make their models retarded on purpose.
- Balgair 2mo ago"Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’." -George Orwell, You and the Atomic Bomb I think AI now belongs in this dichotomy too. And we know that they are more like alarm clocks than battleships. Most of us do not need to learn the bitter lesson, we just need a little droid that turns .xlsx documents into .pdf documents for our client, an average here, editing out the ham sandwiches there. Simple little actions that take time and human-like effort but not human-like creativity and conscious thought. Things we used to have literate slaves and serfs do back in the days of triremes and guncotton. Sure, the large battleship like LLMs will have some need, but the alarm-clock like LLMs are going to be good enough for enterprise-grade.
- zhoBEENG 2mo agoThanks for sharing the quote, it's really great. I believe he is correct, but I am not sure I yet agree with your assertion that we know that LLMs are more like alarm clocks than battleships. I think they are more like watercraft in general. Some are small, and they have their uses. Some are big, and they have their uses. But it is the nation with the most aircraft carriers that is truly sovereign.
- seizethecheese 2mo agoSo the evidence here is an Economist article saying 80% of startups use Chinese models and the Chinese companies own claims that they are close to frontier. 80% of startups using Chinese models is meaningless without knowing what proportion of spend and what proportion use American models. The companies’ own claims are also not great evidence. (I personally think the Chinese companies are winning and losing and the best evidence is Pareto frontier graphs from AA and Arena, which show Chinese companies winning in some segments but but definitely not a strong majority.) Overall, with such a weak article and this hitting HN front page, what we learn from this is that a lot of people want these companies to win, which is interesting in and of itself.
- przemarzec 2mo ago[dead]
- jumploops 2mo agoThe models are commodities. Valuations, however, are being built on the models themselves as the product.
- thih9 2mo agoI’m rooting for open models. Current state of frontier AI is a joke, with proprietary platforms attempting to grab as many users as possible, subsidizing tokens and otherwise burning VC money. This can’t be good long term, not for the consumers at least.
- gaigalas 2mo agoWe're not seeing the big swing yet, which is when hardware becomes cheap enough so that hobbyists and volunteers can meaningfully contribute to a shared open substrate. We'll see smaller, more efficient models, better training and all sorts of things once that massive workforce is unlocked. It's just a matter of time.
- phillipcarter 2mo agoI don't understand when people say that comparable Chinese AI models cost less to use. Kimi K3 costs more than GPT 5.6 Terra.
- worik 2mo agoCapitalism, hoisted on its own petard So determined to own the means of production, enormous amounts of money have been poured into building the frontier models But there is not much special, except for capital density, about those very models Surely these models should be treated as public utilities? Like power stations or water infrastructure. Absolutely necessary for a modern economy, but indistinguishable from one another Pass the popcorn
- awllau 2mo ago[flagged]
- gexla 2mo agoI don't think we're far enough into this game to know what winning even looks like. If the US frontier labs are losing, it may have been their own missteps on handling such massive change of being the fastest growing apps ever. Until China can ever show me something new rather than just cheaper, then I just see efforts from that region as a force of commodification. OpenAI will go down in history as the company who brought what many understand to be AI to the first billion people.
- aenis 2mo agoTheir pace makes me wonder how effectively do frontier labs protect their weights against motivated, capable adversaries. By now the value of something like Mythos is well in double digit billions, and more so in strategic advantage. Considering the hosting happens across many providers, and many geographies, as does training, I wonder how airtight the CC tech really is to prevent, I don't know, key extraction from the secure enclave of the GPUs. This requires physical access and cutting edge techniques, but this is also the absolute cutting edge of secrets-worth-stealing. I'd not be surprised if the distillation attacks via API were a smokescreen to theft of actual weights. Long shot, but given the motivations, and the general weird state of US AI labs. I'd not surprise me.
- fittingopposite 2mo agoI don't understand how these decisions are made in the Chinese companies. Is that from a (secret) party directive or just convergent decision making? It's not clear to me whether this is normal competition at play or central planning by the CCP.
- realytubecoder 2mo agojust as i was about to downgrade claude today they say fable is part of the max plan. Funny because I had just started a subscription with grok on their 3 month discounted offer. Competition is a great thing for us users- and the chinese open source model biting even more at the heals are also great so far- especially for local llm enjoyers
- karmasimida 2mo agoIs it? 2.8T isn't open in the open source sense
- flenserboy 2mo agothe "safety" freaks are going to ruin the US industry, & with it a host of dominoes will fall.
- xlbuttplug2 2mo agoI'm guessing the next generation of US frontier models will be heavily anti-distillation at the cost of user experience (significant rate limiting, more flat out refusals, hidden thinking, etc). And as long as they maintain a significant advantage in capability, we will continue to kiss the ring.
- lenerdenator 2mo agoRemember how OpenAI was supposed to make those open-weights AI models for the betterment of humanity?
- prngl 2mo agoThere are 2 economic arguments for why it would make sense for Chinese State to subsidize the open-sourcing of models beyond undermining Anthropic's and OpenAI's investments (and by proxy the American financial economy, ie capital class): 1. As induced demand for domestic semiconductor production, where the level and diversity (ie number of distinct corporate users) of demand for the hardware is tied to the availability of models you can run yourself, ie open-weight models. If you believe that semiconductors will continue to be an important sector for innovation, productivity growth, and security, then it would make sense to subsidize broadly now, for future gains later. This would be the same export-led manufacturing discipline that allowed China to successfully develop several other sectors over the last 50 years. 2. It is likely that the bulk of value production will happen above (and below, ie #1) the large models. We already know that 90% of the training cost (maybe even closer to 99%) is in the single pre-training, but that an enormous amount of the value is actually in the supervised, RL, constitutional fine-tuning, and harness building that happens afterward. So, if your interest was in maximizing the size of the pie, you may actively subsidize the pre-training so as to maximize the downstream usages. This induces a direct value transfer from the labs specializing in pre-training to all downstream builders and users. There's a similar logic to subsidizing or state-financing the construction of other infrastructure and basic research.
- heft 2mo ago[flagged]
- Papazsazsa 2mo agoWinning what, exactly? The race to the bottom?
- dizlexic 2mo agoI thought we all knew infrastructure was going to be the product, not the models.
- andix 2mo agoAs an European I would laugh so hard, if China out-competes US based AI companies before the European car manufacturers. (it would be a very cynical laugh, no happiness, don't worry)
- rootusrootus 2mo agoIt would be grand if both the EU and the US could pop their heads out of their ass on this issue. Maybe we can get some people in charge that won't make us all embarrassed to be friends and we can focus on getting our house in order.
- andix 2mo agoThat would be the reasonable thing to do.
- protocolture 2mo ago>and it could take the US economy down with it. I just want 1 thing for christmas Premier Xi.
- bg24 2mo agoThere is no coming back. After all, open-weight is NOT open-source. It is basically free model. And you pay to host it. The value proposition is that 100's of providers and host and sell it. 1000s of businesses (eg. Microsoft, Databricks, Palantir to small startups) can run it, finetune it and own the IP and pay only for hosting. On the other hand, you have OpenAI and Anthropic, who need to charge at 90%+ inference margin. It is because of 1) sunk cost, 2) sky-high salaries that they paid to keep the talent. Companies like Meta screwed things up badly by paying billions of $ for chief engineers. Chinese labs are doing a favor to the world. But I can also say with 100% certainty that if US labs were to close shops next year, Chinese labs would immediately start charging $$. In fact, I think it might happen with open weights model soon. But still these fees will be one-fifth or one-tenth per token. Also it does not come with all the guardrails. Solution: US labs need to reduce their costs, cut the salaries across the board and compete. AI and robotics are the last hope of US to get back to industrialization and continue being the superpower.
- overfeed 2mo ago> Chinese labs are doing a favor to the world. But I can also say with 100% certainty that if US labs were to close shops next year, Chinese labs would immediately start charging $$. How would do you explain the pricing of Chinese solar panels, after managing to destroy other countries' solar industries? The prices are still dropping per watt. Could it be China's internal demand for solar is big enough, and its long-term governmental strategy on renewables result in an outcome that almost looks like largesse to the rest of the world? I suspect Chinese AI may follow a similar path.
- namegulf 2mo agoAre we saying, China is delivering on the Open AI promise? Open Weights = Open AI Let's go!
- softwaredoug 2mo agoIt's hard to ignore the overall environment US has made itself visibly unaffordable, anti-science, and hostile to immigration. For top scientists at these companies, there should be clear upside for the immigration to the US. That just doesn't exist anymore. Especially as quality of life increases in China
- Deprogrammer9 2mo ago[flagged]
- nova22033 2mo agoOracle is going to bear the brunt of this. If OpenAI can't make a LOT of money, how are they going to pay Oracle? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-made-a-300-billion-bet-on-openai-its-paying-the-price-205441863.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-made-a-300-billion-bet...
- frollogaston 2mo ago"Getting there in the US needs more nuanced strategy and support than we’re seeing today." What is the author suggesting the US or US companies do exactly? The Chinese models wouldn't exist if there weren't closed US models to copy, so this isn't a game both sides can play.
- kvasilev 2mo agoI cant imagine a future without open source models tbh. Its fair to develop AI as a technology for the entire world and not gatekeep the latest and brightest models in the hands of corporations like Anthropic and OpenAI who can close access to them at any second.
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoHope they keep winning. I can't wait until hardware catches up to the point we get to run these things locally. It's gonna be world changing.
- xiaodai 2mo ago[dead]
- mmonaghan 2mo agoPeople say this but windows and mac won the os wars and consumer linux distros are dead. No one I know uses open weights models to code day-to-day and very few use open weights models in prod for most llm tasks. This is less true for image/video stuff, where I think the competition is more vibrant. I think the best gauge is company spend. Open weight models are a very small share compared to frontier models, and I'd bet that many companies mostly using ow models would switch to frontier if they could afford it. I also think most companies who are picking ow over frontier probably have deeper financial issues they should focus on.
- jimbob45 2mo agoIs it still a sound strategy if AGI is near? Can we even know how near each company is to AGI without knowing the quality of the training and theory in both the American and Chinese firms? Do these companies even know how close each other are to AGI?
- yanhangyhy 2mo agoI highly recommend everyone read a science fiction novella called Full-Spectrum Barrage Jamming, especially if you are interested in China-US relations. Its author is Liu Cixin, whose other work The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award and was adapted into a TV series by Netflix. His thinking carries a heavy shadow of Mao Zedong's strategic philosophy. This novella is very intriguing—it is set during a time in the past when the gap between China and the US was immense, and people were trying to imagine how China could win if a war broke out. I forgot the exact details, but the general concept is to force a technological regression through electronic warfare, knocking out all smart devices. By doing this, both China and the US are dragged down to the exact same technological baseline, allowing China to win the war. Similarly, when facing the nuclear threat from the former Soviet Union, Mao’s idea was to abandon Chinese territory and launch a counter-offensive directly into Soviet land instead. Their underlying logic is similar: if the gap between us is too vast, we don't follow the traditional route of trying to catch up; instead, we find a way to drag your absolute advantage down to our level. He has written many novels, and I can say with full responsibility that they are incredibly revealing when it comes to understanding the behavior and mindset of the Chinese people.
- kinj28 2mo agoMaybe a tangent point but quality of their open weights is a directly proportional to what’s gone in while training. IMHO Chinese models must have gotten heavily biased “official Chinese view” in most topics of how it sees the world. So for AGI purposes — yes a challenge would be win in the west for these open weights I tried DeepSeek agent to get answers from Chinese models on some tough questions regarding Chinese govt and it refused. I am very keen to go a level deep and host the model and see what it really gives an answer https://x.com/jinen83/status/2079406993979383902?s=46&t=D7hQoLdzrBb7FOvGIpcA6g https://x.com/jinen83/status/2079406993979383902?s=46&t=D7hQ...
- beyondscaletech 2mo ago[flagged]
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- rldjbpin 2mo agoto me this behaviour is aligned with other industries China's been involved in. take solar or EVs as examples. the dumping and involution involved in these industries is apparent and has been disrupting for the external markets affected. simultaneously both have helped make it economical to go green. if you stop looking at LLMs as nukes, this becomes more convincing. China clearly does not want to rely on the West for what it considers core tech. they have done it for search and social; this is a natural next frontier. while they encourage a deluge of options for local use, others can make hay while the sun shine. albeit with the usual caveats. autoregressive decoding is not an optimal paradigm for local or decentralized inference. amidst the mania and shortage, make the most of what is made available, like with solar, than crying over spilt milk.
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- kazinator 2mo ago> Open technologies can be used permissionlessly For years I've had dental work done without freezing, but I think I need laughing gas and novocaine for writing like this.
- echoeat 2mo agoOpen weights only matter operationally if the runtime and eval stack are honest about latency, VRAM cost, and task success
- crnkofe 2mo agoHacker news is so one-dimensional when it comes to China. Its like people here are living in an alternate dimension where everyone outside the horizon is playing catchup. Imo a sandboxed local expert handheld or mobile AIs are the future. They'll be open weight and maybe even open sourced if we ever figure out a way to beatdown training costs. And I find that pretty exciting. There will be some bloodbath on the Wallstreet for sure but I don't anticipate or shiver anticipating double digit losses from any major corp.
- kuttimaster 2mo agoSo war is coming...
- Vikasratawa77 2mo agoWeight sharing will commoditize the capabilities of AI technology. Once the intelligence that was developed can be freely executed anywhere, the actual strength then lies in the data, the domain-specific UX, and the efficiency of the infrastructure.
- kademolu 2mo agoWhat a lot of people seem to miss is that you don't need the openweight models to "beat" frontier models for most agentic workloads. The harness should be doing the majority of the work, inference becomes the value add. This is where chinese models shine, i have run benchmarks where the value per dollar is always tilted to the chinese models
- burgerquizz 2mo agoi didn’t use the chinese models yet, but aren’t people worried of the biased knowledge they might have since they’re somehow controlled by the ccp? what could go wrong? the ccp probably thinking hard on how they can leverage this?
- Iolaum 2mo agoThat's only one factor of what people are worried about.
- giancarlostoro 2mo agoI still wonder why some of our key universities in the US aren't building Open Weight Models. To this day we have "BSD" and "MIT" as key licenses for a lot of software (I know weird tangent but still... this emphasizes how significant these institutions were once!), but these top schools don't really build anything the way they used to anymore. I'm sure someone will say students build LLMs all the time, and this and that, but there's no reason these universities cannot build their own LLM "labs" and work on a common LLM that their university builds, maintains and students and faculty can manage, and release, maybe even sell API access to. It would be a key selling point for any student who wants a serious job in AI to work on such a project too. Universities could easily sell access to pre-hosted models mostly at-cost maybe a smidgen on top of costs, and fund the project as it gets better over time. Any university doing this would prepare students for real software jobs mind you. Maintaining, building and supporting real infrastructure during your college years sells better than no experience.
- runeks 2mo ago> I still wonder why some of our key universities in the US aren't building Open Weight Models. I'm guessing the $100m price tag plays a role. Plus the fact that it will be outdated next quarter.
- regexorcist 2mo agoI won't be giving a dime to the companies that stole all the IP in the world and are now gatekeeping it, acting as the rightful owners, and trashing the hardware market for everyone else in the process. So it's Chinese models or nothing for me.
- mbgerring 2mo agoIt makes me feel like a crazy person seeing that “the government should fund basic R&D that broadly benefits industry” is a concept that so many people find confusing, hard to grasp, or even offensive. The government should fund AI research and model training. The weights and the models should be free. The provision of inference and tooling should be a competitive business. This feels completely obvious to me.
- charintstr 2mo agoEveryone was saying the exact same thing, that open would win and compute was overvalued, about deepseek back in 2025 ignoring that up until now open models had essentially returned to about 6-9mo behind OAI/Ant post-Deepseek moment. I think this is a dynamic frontier and open modeling a strategy that has to be pursued by China to pool their knowledge in order to keep up with the US. However, if China actually breaks ahead, then open becomes a burden rather than a strength. So I don't see this as a China better thing, just asking more "who is ahead" or not.
- zrn900 2mo agoFor China, AI is infrastructure. For the US, it's another cash cow to be made scarce so that investors can milk it. That's why China chases open-source AI and commoditizes it. It will improve the AI until it is used in all kinds of things, ranging from vehicles to factories, from medicine to housemaid robots. China will make the AI the commoditized infrastructure to build bigger things on it. You can't do that while keeping AI as a scarce resource and charging a premium for it. Like how the US does to satisfy endless investor greed.
- dingody 2mo ago[dead]
- vfalbor 2mo agoYou couldn't be more wrong. What's being sold are chunks of time with access to specialized hardware resources. Through which model or with which device is irrelevant; the one winning, and continuing to win for some time, is Nvidia, and that company is American. As long as they have the H100, B200, or B300, China won't be able to compete with the American strategy, no matter how many new models they release, because these types of cards require incredibly powerful hardware to run.
- seox0 2mo ago[dead]