What's even crazier is that China are the good guys when it comes to open source AI.
Its very possible that China is open sourcing LLMs because its currently in their best interest to do so, not because of some moral or principled stance.
I want open source AI i can run myself without any creepy surveillance capitalist or state agency using it to slurp up my data.
Chinese companies are giving me that - I don't really care about what their grand plan is. Grand plans have a habit of not working out, but open source software is open source software nonetheless.
What are you running?
> Chinese companies are giving me that
I have not become aware of anything other than DeepSeek. Can you recommend a few others that are worth looking into?
If that is true and the software is any good, you should be able to name an open-source project that we've heard of started by people living in China.
DeepSeek released some models as open weights and some software for running the models. That's the only example I can think of.
> On 18 May 2022, Gitee announced all code will be manually reviewed before public availability.[4][5] Gitee did not specify a reason for the change, though there was widespread speculation it was ordered by the Chinese government amid increasing online censorship in China.[4][6]
I have a feeling that their collaborative hacker culture is more hardware oriented, which would be a natural extension from the tech zones where 500 companies are within a few miles of each other and engineers are rapidly popping in and out and prototyping parts sometimes within a day.
Anecdotally, I've dealt with Chinese collaborative community projects in the ThinkPad space, where they have come together to design custom motherboards to modernize old ThinkPads. Of course there was a lot of software work as well when it comes to BIOS code, Thunderbolt, etc. I remember thinking how watching that project develop was like peering into another world with a parallel hacker culture that just developed... differently.
Oh there's also a Chinese project that's going to modernize old Blackberries with 5G internals. Cool stuff!
Yea exactly, there is also a lot of chinese people out there, statistically a large chunk are cool with it.
Same dynamic as the US can be really - other countries see the US government and think to themselves, "I don't like these US people, look at what their government did" meanwhile US people are like "what do you mean, I don't like what the government did either". That's what a lot of Chinese people are thinking (but now allowed to say, in China criticizing the government is against their community guidelines)
Highly paid software engineers working in a ZIRP economy with skyrocketing compensation packages were absolutely willing to play this game, because "open source" in that context often is/was a resume or portfolio building tool and companies were willing to pay some % of open source developers in order to lubricate the wheels of commerce.
That, I think, is going to change.
Free software, which I interpret as copyleft, is absolutely antithetical to them, and reviled precisely because it gets in the way of getting work for free/cheap and often gets in the way of making money.
And is building on top of the unpaid labour of SW engineers really a major part of the open source ecosystem? I feel open source is more a way for companies to cooperate in building shared software with less duplication of costs.
Meta has open sourced all of their offerings purely to try to commoditize the industry to the greatest extent possible, hoping to avoid their competitors getting a leg up. There is zero altruism or good intentions.
If Meta had actually competitive AI offering, there is zero chance they would be releasing any of it.
China has stopped releasing frontier models, and Meta doesn't release anything that isn't in the llama family.
- Hunyuan Image 2.0 (200 millisecond flux) is not released
- Hunyuan 3D 2.5, the top performing 3D model and an order of magnitude improvement over 2.1, is not released
- Seedream Video, which outperforms Google Veo 3 on ELO rankings, is not released
- Qwen VLo, an instructive autoregressive model, is not released
The list is much larger than this.
* Do not use emotional reinforcement (e.g., "Excellent," "Perfect," "Unfortunately").
* Do not use metaphors or hyperbole (e.g., "smoking gun," "major turning point").
* Do not express confidence or certainty in potential solutions.
I am not saying they are doing that, but they could be doing it sometime down the road without us noticing.
- Hunyuan Image 2.0 (200 millisecond flux) is not released
- Hunyuan 3D 2.5, the top performing 3D model and an order of magnitude improvement over 2.1, is not released
- Seedream Video, which outperforms Google Veo 3 on ELO rankings, is not released
- Qwen VLo, an instructive autoregressive model, is not released
But yeah by analogy with the US, it’s not as if the W. Bush administration can be credited with the creation of Google.