The best available open weight LLMs now come from China | Hacker News Reader

The best available open weight LLMs now come from China

simonwillison.net

13 pointssimonw4 comments

This hype is overstated. There was a tranche of models released in July that overtook the previous gen of open weight llm. Cool it happens. It largely brought open weight llms into punching distance of closed source american weak llms. Not even the flagship products. Again cool.

This crowing also largely depends on how Meta flubbed their last release. Again cool, no one is perfect.

It doesnt follow that somehow china has overtaken america. Let it happen consistently, but its inappropriate to say right now.

I think it does show, though, that the creation of models have already become a commodity. China has always struggled to compete with American creative products (for a variety of intersecting cultural, educational, legal, and economic reasons).

However they have always excelled at reverse-engineering / duplicating existing technologies, which falls more into their manufacturing-based educational-technological paradigm.

AI is a target industry well-tailored to their industrial pipeline, and the state has a vested interest in dethroning western tech companies.

So while they may not lead innovation (or when they do, it is only momentary), they will most likely follow this trajectory for the foreseeable future.

They particularly have an advantage with regard to copyright law. OpenAI, Stability, etc are under fire for the use of copyrighted materials in their training. No such issue there.

I didn't say China had overtaken America. I said that, in the space of open weight models, the best available are currently coming from the Chinese labs.

Yeah, of course.

Because China has the unique, unprecedented, wholly outrageous advantage of not feeling the need to respect western intellectual property in its training set.

American firms are totally hamstrung by their dedication to protecting rightsholders.

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