Hacker News Reader

Comment by bwest87 | Hacker News Reader

The best explanation is that it's a goal of the CCP to generally commodotize LLMs, because LLMs will ultimately be a compliment to manufacturing (which China dominates), and you always want to "commodotize your compliments".

I think this explains why they are open sourcing broadly. It's not to be nice. It's a strategic play by the Chinese government to help ensure there are many players in this race and not too much power accumulates to American labs (even if American labs benefit in the process)

View on HN

It's a bad explanation because it assumes decision making about LLM releases is centralized in the CCP even though every AI lab has a different strategy. Some publish LLM research with small models but seem to be staying out of the race to the frontier (Weibo), some train large models but publish few research details and no weights (Bytedance, iFlyTek), some decide on a case-by-case basis what they publish or not (Alibaba, Baidu), ...

There is no rule that every Chinese LLM company must open-source their models, and many don't.

You are aware of the rule that any company has to have a CCP representative in the leadership?

(Similar to how U.S. labs have NSA leadership)

I'm aware of Article 17 of the Company Law of the People's Republic of China https://english.court.gov.cn/2016-04/14/c_761425_2.htm "The grass-root organizations of the Communist Party of China in companies shall carry out their activities in accordance with the Constitution of the Communist Party of China." but not any rule requiring them to be in leadership positions specifically. Maybe you could point me to it?

Even if there's a party member at the C-level of some company making day-to-day business decisions, that doesn't necessarily mean they're carrying out detailed instructions from higher-ups in the party as opposed to following their own best judgment. The CCP generally doesn't micro-manage everything, but operates more in a "mission tactics"-like way, where the top level gives out a broad goal that gets condensed down into a slogan like "new productive forces," and interpreting and elaborating on the details is left to lower levels who seek to align their initiatives with the top-level goals (e.g. by describing AI as a "new productive force") and initiatives that appear successful will get blessed as official policy.

That different companies follow different strategies when it comes to model releases is clear evidence that there is no unified party line on this question yet.

That the CCP doesn't have input in this, which is the most important tech in history, which could be more dangerous than even nukes, is naive.

Maybe because there is enough given away that there's a lot of competition they may let other companies do whatever they want but to think the CCP isn't managing this is insane to me

The CCP could have input, if they chose to. Currently they choose not to. There is no party consensus that AI is the most important tech (Xi Jinping cares more about the "real economy," i.e. manufacturing) and there definitely is no consensus on whether models should be open-weight or not. If consensus ever emerges, companies that bet on the wrong horse will get cracked down on, just like AI companion products got cracked down on recently.

"Currently they choose not to."

I hope the source of this information was well cleaned this morning.

Totally agreed. People are so ready to praise China for their free models, but they aren't doing it because they believe in free open-source software. If China ever gets ahead, they're going closed source and weights immediately.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of...

> If China ever gets ahead, they're going closed source and weights immediately.

Anthropic itself admits that Chinese models are merely months behind. Your argument does not make sense, because Chinese labs are contributing massive optimizations like the one this post is about.

>People are so ready to praise China

Please quote people you appear to be patronizing. China can't do anything about previous released self-hosted Chinese models. If you can show that local Chinese models funnel vast amounts us data home I'm sure you can move a lot of people to your side.

Comments like this also always fail to address why there aren't Western AI companies doing the same thing. Is it because they might get sued into oblivion by Big AI in the US?

It might be better for all of us if you solve that first instead of repeating something the government has been repeating for the last decade or more. It does this, mind you, while sabotaging itself in countless high-tech fields and leaving it all to China for the taking.

Is cultural projection a thing?

You do realize that the East has a different view of intellectual property than the West? And it's not just some arbitrary or capricious choice; it's rooted deep.

*complement

Commoditizing one’s compliments is a different strategy.

A very effective strategy among Middle Management, i might add

It's also possible that China has decided that this is ultimately going to be a race to the bottom, anyway, and values the soft power more highly than potential monetary profits.

Or perhaps they've looked at history and concluded that this historically hasn't been where the value is, anyway. It wouldn't be unprecedented - FAANG companies have a long tradition of publishing their algorithms and releasing open weight models. Because they saw the real value as being the training data and in proprietary special-purpose models. For example Google published the transformer architecture and released BERT as an open weight model, but doesn't really even talk in public about the (presumanbly) specialized internal models behind revenue-generating products.

> For example Google published the transformer architecture and released BERT as an open weight model, but doesn't really even talk in public about the (presumanbly) specialized internal models behind revenue-generating products.

That's giving a lot of credit to Google's organizational ability to productize Google's research...

One explanation could be that they know Western consumers will never use the llms directly, so they can open weight the models and collect licensing fees from hosting providers in US who run it. Moonshot seems to have such terms in their open weights releases.

But it does not explain publishing techniques like the ones referenced here in this article.

But doesn't that justification work for any government, not just Chinese? In fact, it works for any easy-to-copy products, which act as positive externalities. It's just some Americans have this mindset that AI is a scarce good because everything must be.

It's also a huge propaganda opportunity to influence the distribution of groupthink.

So much that you can instantly tell if a model is Chinese by asking it about Tiananmen Square.

I just did a quick test between DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3, and Kimi K3

- DeepSeek gave a canned PR response about how the Chinese government is about oeace and unity, and we shouldn't think about the past.

- GLM 5.3 acknowledges it and talks about it, even acknowledging the censorship of it.

- K3 will talk about it similarly to GLM.

Also they just want to be seen as the top of a technological / scientific field. There's a lot of prestige and soft power there that Xi Jinping wants.

From a diplomatic perspective, the US is quite busy alienating itself from all its allies, just as it is trying to lock down and totalize a major breakthrough technology. What better way to cement the alienation of the US than to show both its hubris and its selfishness at once by demonstrating how anyone can do what they do?

Why always CCP this, CCP that. The parsimonious answer is this shit started when Deepseek founder decided to open source, because at the time the Whale was just hedgefund side project that serendipitously set the tone before they were even on CCP radar. Then other PRC domestic players have to copy / involute to free to be competitive, but due to sanctions / they are compute constrained and can "afford" to, because sections ironically means PRC AI can never dig themselves in the bottomless debt pit of western labs.

TLDR of timeline/chain of events: some billionaire hedgefund manager with AI as hobby, said fuck economics, let's opensource AI... and all the other players have to now compete with that market force. Of course it does not mean equilibrium will last forever, we already seeing defections from model, but imo thats basically what happened... singular hedgefund bro said fuck profits... other PRC players also had to fuck profits, which ends up tripping western labs so deep in debt who can not say fuck profits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com