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Comment by throwaw12 | Hacker News Reader

> Only China can release good, open weight models and American companies can’t compete. Oh by the way all the spend is for nothing because China alone can release open-weight models thus destroying American AI.

Let me be blunt and let me say: you don't understand why we people support Chinese models.

1. Chinese labs started with open weight models, US labs started with dooms day narrative

2. US VC based companies must become greedy to win and return the money, Chinese companies can make 1/10 of that revenue and still be happy

3. Meta in this case, started nicely with Llama, then switched to closed models, kicked out researchers to build data labeler CEO empire inside Meta. Now opening again, what's next? closing again?

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US companies published their research on transformers. The only reason Chinese companies have any models at all is open US research...

Add distillation to that, and the entire Chinese AI sphere is really just an offshoot of public US AI information...

Science doesn't work this way, someone could claim only reason World is successful because Chinese invented paper, so please don't go there.

Regarding distillation, you can also say Anthropic and OpenAI stole /distilled books, articles, blogs from everyone who published things without knowing their work might be used against them

> Science doesn't work this way, someone could claim only reason World is successful because Chinese invented paper, so please don't go there.

Perfectly valid claim. It could be debated though, since you are talking about a centuries long diaspora of processes.

I'm talking about an architecture that was invented, published, and pioneered by US companies just a few years ago. Not really the same argument IMO.

> Regarding distillation, you can also say Anthropic and OpenAI stole /distilled books, articles, blogs from everyone who published things without knowing their work might be used against them

Yes. I would argue that anthropic et al are only able to exist because of the massive body of work in the anglosphere, both in books and online. That goes hand-in-hand with my view of the Chinese AI sphere.

All LLM’s are distillation of stolen copyrighted materials, some of which are the outputs of other LLM’s.

US companies started by publishing their research, but then they have stopped abruptly, seduced by the mirage of heaps of money that could be obtained by having a monopoly on AI.

During the last few years, the published research from USA was only a small fraction from that published from China.

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