Comment by notfried | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notfried | Hacker News Reader

This is a highly sensational take that is basically fan fiction. From "the era of purposefully frustrating humans is over", to "the added bonus of the collapse of the US economy. Frankly, it’s well deserved." and "everyone in the world is rooting for the Chinese models"; nothing of that is grounded in reality.

The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art. Once they catch-up or lead, they will likely close them down by a government mandate. Just like Meta was fine with Llama being open source but once they started to get close to OpenAI/Google/Anthropic, they shifted their language to "maybe we won't keep doing that."

The idea that AI will end the "rent-seeking class" that has effectively existed for thousands of years is... not going to happen! The business model just adjusts. And if AI is going to be an economy-shaping super disruptor, the cloud-hosted models will continue evolving beyond what you could ever run at home under the desk.

> The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art

I think geohot is burying the lead in this text in his post with a lot of speculation.

It's not not that these specific models will become closed it's that the hardware/hosting vendors have an incentive to train models where inference is custom tuned to their chip's dimensions and VRAM.

The Chinese models do a great job of showing what's capable on consumer/prosumer hardware because of export restrictions but anyone entering the hardware space has the same incentives to undercut the frontier labs so they can sell more hardware.

It's also not clear if being at the forefront of inference quality really matters. The open source models appear to be doing a fine enough job of keeping up even if they're a few months behind. So it seems like there's not much of a technology moat for these labs other than the capital costs of training/serving.

To be fair, the author does explicitly state that their blog is:

> A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway

> the "rent-seeking class" that has effectively existed for thousands of years

This "rent seeking class" is not a historical universal, regardless of how much college marxists insist that it is. Leaders can be good or bad, and they hold power in different ways. In America today we have bad leaders (across the entirety of the political spectrum) - and AI poses a lot of challenges in how they hold power. This is not to say Chinese leaders are any better - but the way they hold power is not challenged by AI. Business models will indeed adapt - but the condition is excellent, as they say.

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