And infrastructure dominance is really the big picture here. Chinese models are going to become the standard setters because they're going to be what people are using. That means more research, more tooling, and a whole ecosystem developing around them.
And that was already starting to happen even before this fiasco with Chinese models now being the most used ones globally. https://www.indiatoday.in/amp/technology/features/story/clau...
The tricky part with banning Chinese models is that they're open. It'll be easy to ban access to service providers, but preventing people from running these models on prem is going to be really tough. Like are they going to go after Cursor for example given that their model is based on Kimi?
I very much agree it's going to be a futile endeavour in the end. It kind of reminds me of the time Microsoft tried to get Linux and open source banned when Linux started encroaching on Windows server market. This is going to end the same way.
Remember that there are degrees of banning. Slower tokens, dumber models, token caps, KYC for each model consumer, hurting specific companies that are not capitulating in a deal with a Chinese company, etc.
I see absolutely no reason why CPC would choose to kneecap themselves the way the USG just did. Keeping open access to the models means that the whole world will be using Chinese based AI stack going forward. Only a government run by absolute imbeciles would do what the US did.
This is just typical Chinese behavior. Flood the market with cheap or free stuff and wait for your competitors to die off. Then you have a monopoly. (Maybe you were implying that would happen, dunno)
But they aren't making any money releasing open weight models, and no, I don't believe they are like Linus Torvalds with some grand vision of free as is freedom AI models, but rather doing more of the same.
And that's the beauty of a planned system, you don't have to focus solely on short term profit there. If Chinese government sees this tech as foundational, which they do, they can just keep pouring money into it because it provides general benefits for the country.
This is exactly what happened with high speed rail incidentally. People in the west kept talking about how unprofitable it is, while China understood that creating this infrastructure would create a huge economic boost for the country by allowing goods and people to move more easily. Sure enough, China continued to invest in high speed rail, and now a lot of regions that used to be hard to get to are wired into the economy, and China is seeing substantial development in these regions.
Spending huge amounts of money to gain a foothold in AI because it helps their country is not a bad thing at all.
But my point is that the day that the USA's AI industry collapses in on itself, Chinese companies are going to also stop open sourcing their models, too.
It may sound like I'm kicking China for this, I'm not. It's just a practical take. You can't make money spending 10s or 100s of millions of dollars just to then give away everything for free and expect to make money long term. Do you agree?
It all comes back to what I said earlier. If you treat the model as the product, then it makes sense to keep it closed. You have some secret sauce that nobody else has, and you sell it. But the reality is that nobody has a magic formula that's significantly better than what other people can figure out. You might get an advantage for a few months tops, and then other models start catching up.
And this creates involution where you just have a race to the bottom where nobody makes any money. On the other hand, if you treat models as infrastructure, and everybody contributes to the same pool of knowledge, then you amortize the cost of making a better model. The money comes from actual products that can genuinely differentiate themselves. Companies are going to seek niches they can dominate where they do a specific thing really well. That's a much more realistic path towards long term sustainability.
And that's why I expect models are going to become infrastructure akin to Linux in the long run. They're just not where profit is.
OTOH, training a model requires a lot of hardware and energy to do, and the money has to come from somewhere.
Do you think that China's government is going to pay for it and release it openly to the world for the purpose of goodwill towards China, or some other reason? What would it be? Or would some other groups do it?
And yeah, I do think China's government is going to continue subsidizing this tech because this tech is being used all over the place in China now. Meanwhile, the models aren't developed by the government, they're developed by individual countries that get subsidies. As I've explained above, converging on common infrastructure is going to save resources for all these companies. And continuing to work in the open with the rest of the world means getting the benefit of having a global community of researchers helping advance this tech forward.
It's not just altruism or clout. American companies working on closed models have to foot the bill for all the research, and they're limited to the brainpower within the company. And they're competing with Chinese which have much bigger research community contributing to developing their models.
If the model itself is not the product, then American companies find themselves in a situation where they're spending a ton of resources on something that's not their core business.
I'm running a 248B model on a paltry amount of hardware and getting plenty of good use out of it.
Sure, the most demanding tasks will demand the best models (and always will). There's still less demanding tasks for other models.
I think some people are fooling themselves that coding of all tasks is always going to requires the biggest models ever. Again, maybe some coding tasks will, but the majority of business CRUD apps probably don't. Same goes for virtually any other type of task. The biggest models are really only useful for the most complex tasks.
I primarily use it with my own harness for coding. I'm not going to say it will compete with Opus in the most challenging domains, because it won't, but I will say that there's a reasonable likelihood that Opus is used for tasks that a model like Flash could comfortably handle at 1/100th the cost.
So far I've only seen it struggle at tasks that I myself would struggle with. Tasks that I can describe the shape of the solution for, it has a high success rate at implementing.
Useful is going to be different for everyone. I'm not working on the hardest problems, I don't need the best models.
Now this might not be the most cost effective (and may require a bit extra power), but you only need a datacenter for training or cost optimization.
I do not see how being experienced in engineering, or having higher studies in computer science and economics should make that view less common.
I'd agree except that Big AI has made sure that most of us can't afford the hardware (RAM, NVMe, etc) to run it.
Some will take greater risks and win (or lose); others will play it safer and slowly accumulate wins (or be obsoleted).
Never mind the threat of letting these models write code that runs your business, or operate it agentically. Models trained by actors (corporate or nationstate) diametrically opposed to your interests.
Lots to take into account now, interesting time to be in business.
If a government entity bans a LLM provider due to a jailbreak concern, they can also ban an on-prem solution under the same guise. The jailbreak risk exists regardless of where it's hosted. You could defensibly argue the on-prem risk is higher since frontier model companies can justify safety spend due to their size, it's more difficult to combat bad actors if you're company is the only one using the model and you don't have economies of scale.
Private models in a low trust society means the government will come and seize the models. Competitive business will only be allowed through cronyism.
The better option is to opt for high trust. Yes the Gman can rip your servers apart, but they know they'll face consequences, legal and political. Laws and regulations are the answer, not locking down into smaller fiefdoms.