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Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

This is the major reason China has been investing in open-source LLMs: because the U.S. publicly announced its plans to restrict AI access into tiers, and certain countries — of course including China — were at the lowest tier of access. [1]

If the U.S. doesn't control the weights, though, it can't restrict China from accessing the models...

1: https://thefuturemedia.eu/new-u-s-rules-aim-to-govern-ais-gl...

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Why wouldn't China just keep their own weights secret as well?

If this really is a geopolitical play(I'm not sure if it is or isn't), it could be along the lines of: 1) most AI development in the US is happening at private companies with balance sheets, share holders, and profit motives. 2) China may be lagging in compute to beat everyone to the punch in a naked race

Therefore, releasing open weights may create a situation where AI companies can't as effectively sell their services, meaning they may curtail r&d at a certain point. China can then pour nearly infinite money into it and eventually get up to speed on compute and win the race

I think it's just because China makes it's money from other sources, not from AI, and from what I've read, the advantage of China killing the US's AI advantage is killing it's stock market / disrupting.

Seems like it may have a chance of working if you look at the companies highest valued on the S&P 500:

NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Broadcom, Alphabet (Class C),

The share of revenue that Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Alphabet and Amazon are currently deriving from the AI market as a share of their total revenue, is less than 10%.

What about NVDA (~$4.5T) and AVGO (~$1.8T)?

What about all the investments made by these companies and other VCs, hedge funds, angel investors, pension funds, etc?

They are taking the gun out of USA's hand and unloading it, figuratively speaking. With this strategy they don't have the compete at full competency with the US, because everyone else will with cheaper models. If a cheaper model can do it, then why fork out for Opus?

Because they dont have the chips, but if people in countries with the chips provide hosting or refine their models they benefit from those breakthroughs.

They're definitely investing in the chips as well. It's an ecosystem play.

It isn't "China" which open-source LLMs, but individual Chinese labs.

China didn't yet made a sovereign move on AI, besides investing in research/hardware.

This is a distinction without a difference.

Axiom of China: nothing of importance happens in China without CCP involvement.

The CCP controlling the government doesn't mean they micromanage everything. Some Chinese AI companies release the weights of even their best models (DeepSeek, Moonshot AI), others release weights for small models, but not the largest ones (Alibaba, Baidu), some keep almost everything closed (Bytedance and iFlytek, I think).

There is no CCP master plan for open models, any more than there is a Western master plan for ignoring Chinese models only available as an API.

Never suggested anything of the sort, involvement doesn’t mean direct control, it might be a passive ‘let us know if there’s progress’ issued privately, it might also be a passive ‘we want to be #1 in AI in 2030’ announced publicly, neither requires any micromanagement whatsoever: CCP’s expectation is companies figuring out how to align to party directives themselves… or face consequences.

Unlike the US, where there are no consequences for not aligning with the ruling party's directives.

The US couldn't make China follow it, so it is now following China's lead LOL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

(not that I disagree)

This isn't even whataboutism, because the comparison is just insane.

The difference between the CCP, where "private" companies must actively pursue the party's strategic interests or cease to exist (and their executives/employees can be killed), and the US, where neither of those things happen and the worst penalty for a company not following the government's direction (while continuing to follow the law, which should be an obvious caveat) is the occasional fine for not complying with regulation or losing preference for government contracts, is categorical.

Only those who are either totally ignorant or seeking to spread propaganda would even compare the two.

In other words, your original comment was pointless speculation with no real basis.

you're welcome to educate yourself if you don't trust anons on the internet.

It’s not a question of “not trusting”, it’s simply recognizing when they (you) are obviously wrong.

They don't have to micromanage companies. A company's activities must align with the goals of the CCP, or it will not continue to exist. This produces companies that will micromanage themselves in accordance with the CCP's strategic vision.

That seems irrelevant in this case, given that China has companies all over the spectrum in terms of the degree of openness of their AI products.

As far as I can tell AI is already playing a big part in the Chinese Fifteenth five year plan (2026-2030) which is their central top-down planning mechanism. That’s about as big a move as they can make.

I think the plan is due next March? I believe it includes at AI Plus initiative:

https://triviumchina.com/research/the-ai-plus-initiative-chi...

I think "investing in research and hardware" is fairly relevant to my claim of "China has been investing in open-source LLMs." China also has partial ownership of several major labs via "golden shares" [1] like Alibaba (Qwen) and Zai (GLM) [2], albeit not DeepSeek as far as I know.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/13/china-to-take-...

2: https://www.globalneighbours.org/chinas-zhipu-ai-secures-140...

and Anthropic bans access from China along with throwing some politic propagenda bs

Ask deepseek about how many people the CCP killed during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Yeah preventing people from accessing Anthropic must have been a very effective way to promote American democracy.

Or ask it to write code for an industrial control system based in Tibet...

https://venturebeat.com/security/deepseek-injects-50-more-se...

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