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Comment by chvid | Hacker News Reader

It is a principled play by the Chinese. You would not have Xi showing up at AI conferences and speaking quite clearly had this not been the case.

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To add to that, to me it seems that the idea is that open weights vastly accelerate dissemination into and practical application in the wider economy, which seems to be the goal. They don't seem to subscribe to the AGI/singularity silliness so prevalent in the West.

There has recently been a post about the Cyberpunk genre here on HN. I find the parallels between that and the AGI hype noteworthy. Authors in the 80s imagined a dark and dystopian future, driven mainly by the growth of computer technology.

But if we compare what what was described in Neuromancer, vs how personal computing and the internet affected the world, we see basically very little overlap.

AGI Doomerism likewise has no basis in reality considering what LLMs have been shown to be capable of. Not saying they wont be transformative in some way or isnt already, but essentially the way these AGI prophets predicted things will go down will be completely inaccurate save for the vaguest tems (something bad will happen at some point, and AI will be involved)

Principled: open source is the right thing to do for the greater good

Tactical: Open source is the best tool to advance whatever goals I have at the moment but that could change.

What’s evidence Xi and China are principled when it comes to open source / weights?

> You would not have Xi showing up at AI conferences

How is that an indicator of a principled play? Wouldn't he do the same if it was tactical?

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