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Comment by digdigdag | Hacker News Reader

What you're seeing is the distilled (no pun intended) result of realpolitik at play. China's labs aren't as open as they are out of altruism, but rather to capitalize and undercut the monopoly held by U.S. competitors.

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This is pure speculation. China labs are geeks and nerds like some of us. They were amazed at LLM and like everyone want to build their own. They were happy to get meaningful next token predictions. I think most of you forgot how bad these things were 3 years ago compared to today. There was nothing to undercut, it was just geeks putting out their toys and saying, "Look, I built something cool". That became the culture and led to were we are now. All this idea that they are trying to undercut the monopoly is speculation. Google still releases open models, Cohere releases command-a, Mistral releases their model too, Arcee and Thinking Machine have released models too. It's just that Chinese models have gotten good and are also leading in the open weight category and USA has a very strong paranoia of Chinese models hence this talk. Plus every time they release something, some of the labs cry, "they copied us, distillation, the bad guys have done it again!"

So what we are seeing is nothing more but geeks doing geeky stuff, the only one that has serious demonstrated that there are possibly be had is Anthropic and the Chinese labs are beginning to copying them in terms of user plans, coding tools, etc. They are giving away the model to show it's great. Once they have the compute to serve the world and they have a model just as good or better than top model, they will go close to keep all the profit.

You are ignoring the US and EU politics about regulating access to and distribution of and legal use of models. From my admittedly slightly limited perspective, it looks like China is politically more laid back about those developments than the western nations are.

This is true, but when we compare them to OpenAI's repeated feints at altruism and nonprofit structure, the irony is plentiful.

They wanted capitalism, no? Here's the competition in the market.

Yes, hah. Historically, the US got its moment to define for everyone what the rules of capitalism and globalization are, and China then played to win.

Is kimi making a profit? How subsidized is it by the Chinese government?

Is that any worse than being subsidized by VC? They're playing the same game as the western labs, just with slightly different players.

Chinese government vs American VCs doesn't equate to "slight different players."

True. The Chinese Communist Party's motto is "Serve the People". [0]

They might not always live up to that, but at least the aspiration is there.

No such pretense from American VCs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serve_the_People

This is the most naive comment I've read in a long time.

American VCs and American Government mingle at the deepest levels. Yes, slightly different is correct.

This isn't true unless you're limiting your reference point to Trump's second term.

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