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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

The way they win is to be open. I don't get why China is shutting down open source. It was a knife at the jugular of US tech dominance.

Both Alibaba and Tencent championed open source (Qwen family of models, Hunyuan family of models), but now they've shut off the releases.

There's totally a play where models become loss-leader for SaaS/PaaS/IaaS and where they extinguish your closed competition.

Imagine spreading your model so widely then making the terms: "do not use in conjunction with closed source models".

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The problem with giving away weights for free while also offering a hosted API is that once the weights are out there, anyone else can also offer it as a hosted API with similar operating costs, but only the releasing company had the initial capital outlay of training the model. So everyone else is more profitable! That's not a good business strategy.

New entrants may keep releasing weights as a marketing strategy to gain name recognition, but once they have established themselves (and investors start getting antsy about ROI) making subsequent releases closed is the logical next step.

That is also how open source works in other contexts. Initially closed source is dominant, then over time other market entrants use OSS solutions to break down the incumbent advantage.

In this case I'm expecting people with huge pools of capital (the big cloud providers) to push out open models because the weights are a commodity then people will rent their servers to multiply them together.

Even for a big cloud provider, putting out model weights and hoping that people host with them is unlikely to be as profitable as gating it behind an API that guarantees that people using the model are using their hosted version. How many people self-hosting Qwen models are doing so on Aliyun?

If you have worked or lived in China, you will know that Chinese open-source software industry is a totally shitshow.

The law in China offers little protection for open-source software. Lots of companies use open-source code in production without proper license, and there is no consequence.

Western internet influencers hype up Chinese open-source software industry for clicks while Chinese open-source developers are struggling.

These open-weight model series are planed as free-trial from the start, there is no commitment to open-source.

> Western internet influencers hype up Chinese open-source software industry for clicks while Chinese open-source developers are struggling.

That kind of downplays that Chinese open weights are basically the only option for high quality weights you can run yourself, together with Mistral. It's not just influencers who are "hyping up Chinese open-source" but people go where the options are.

> there is no commitment to open-source

Welcome to open source all around the world! Plenty of non-Chinese projects start as FOSS and then slowly move into either fully proprietary or some hybrid-model, that isn't exactly new nor not expected, Western software industry even pioneered a new license (BSL - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License) that tries to look as open source as possible while not actually being open source.

> I don't get why China is shutting down open source [...] now they've shut off the releases

What are you talking about? Feels like a very strong claim considering there are ongoing weight releases, wasn't there one just today or yesterday from a Chinese company?

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