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China is taking every venture-funded AI startup and shitting on them. Almost all of them. Tencent's Hunyuan 3D - Tripo, etc. Tencent's Hunyuan Video - Sora, R

China is taking every venture-funded AI startup and shitting on them. Almost all of them. Tencent's Hunyuan 3D - Tripo, etc. Tencent's Hunyuan Video - Sora, Runway, Pika, etc. ByteDance's Trae - Cursor, etc. DeepSeek R1 - GPT, etc. Unitree - Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, etc. And a ton of this stuff is completely open source. All of the Tencent stuff is. This destroys the moat of so many companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars training and building their tech. It's just out there for free for anyone to build with. And has anyone been checking the volume of Chinese AI research papers? Almost every impactful paper I've read in the last month has mostly Chinese names. And a lot of those papers come with code. Usually permissively licensed. China is absolutely killing at the AI game. They've fast followed (or in many cases led) into a position of strength. I wouldn't want to be RunwayML, Pika, Luma, or Tripo right now. Any "foundation model" company with a single use case is getting cloned and commoditized. edit: Please don't downvote me because you don't like the message. I'm actually fine with you shooting the messenger, but this is absolutely worth talking about. It's pretty surreal to watch this all start to unfold over the last quarter or so. I want to read what others think about it.

whatever1 2y ago
Slightly relevant but they are also in the game of commercial mathematical optimization solvers and this year they reached parity with the sota American ones (ibm cplex, gurobi, Fico Xpress). It is that bad that all the American companies withrew from the public benchmark library. You can only see there Chinese commercial solvers and open source ones. https://plato.asu.edu/bench.html https://plato.asu.edu/bench.html
- adamsiem 2y ago
  What are the solvers?
  - whatever1 2y ago
    COPT cardinal optimizer, Optverse from Huawei, MindOpt from Alibaba
- coalteddy 2y ago
  Any blogs or other writing about this topic you can recommend? I worked with gurobi in the past but haven't been keeping up with the trends and performance gains. Love this field of CS!
- coliveira 2y ago
  Yes, I checked the recent solvers in the MIP space and it seems they're blowing out the existing American solvers. Huawei has invested a lot of money in this area. But in my opinion this was completely expected, most research in this area is now done in China, American universities have in comparison stopped in time.
xnx 2y ago
ByteDance's UI-TARS - Skyvern, ec.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Maybe they think it's in their national interest that a generation of Americans stops practicing their reading skills because of the tl;dr machine and stops building job skills that aren't reliant on the job-doing machine.
- DoctorOW 2y ago
  I'm okay with the software being made open to the public. I think ultimately it's good for society as a whole. The US is welcome to do the same (I.E. actually opening OpenAI) but I don't think the drawbacks of AI are mitigated by making it more profitable to the American establishment.
lsllc 2y ago
Interesting theory -- maybe trying to diluting/confusing the technology market with alternatives that phone home [to the LLM] with your content. I just had to talk someone I know out of using RedNote as the TikTok shutdown loomed last week -- they had ZERO IDEA about its provenance. Unless you're paying attention, it's actually not clear what's what.
- Yeri 2y ago
  While I definitely wouldn't trust this tech, we've also normalised phoning home with all western tech. How many products keep sending all kind of unknown telemetry, have a ton of trackers, etc? Can't really blame them doing the same.
- wruza 2y ago
  Maybe they just be them, being a second economy and a 4x bigger population that is a few iq points smarter on average.
segmondy 2y ago
Trae doesn't look opensource, from their site looks like you download the binary (osx only for now) and install it. You can't configure it to use your own AI or another provider. You need to use their own API, all your prompts and code are go to bytedance.
pzo 2y ago
Yeah I have similar feeling: 1) They try similar like Zuck with LLama make sure GPT or Claude or Gemini is not the real winner in the West world like Android/iOS was for smartphone, Facebook/Whatsapp for social media/IM, Google Search for search, Windows for desktop OS. Majority people get used to to single product and they don't switch often. 2) Trying to kickstart community similar like LLama kickstarted big community around it that helped with tooling, testing, etc. 3) Slowing down development of ai companies in the west - giving them less data for training (after all midjourney, elevenlabs, llama kickstarted training on copyrighted content, it's pretty sure they using user data at least from e.g. free version of GPTo-mini) and bleeding their budget kind of war of attrition. 4) Familiarise the west audience with their ai models - after all still not many people using models like DeepkSeek since not many providers host them and majority of people don't have fast enough computer to run full models fast enough - Trae helps with that
- suraci 2y ago
  They did what they did because everything they want to buy is banned or is to be banned by your government. Or are you being sarcastic? You must be being sarcastic.
  - pzo 2y ago
    I'm not being sarcastic. If that would be the only reason you said then they wouldn't open source it or didn't market for english speaking audience.
coliveira 2y ago
Well, this is apparent if you follow the releases, but Silicon Valley doesn't want you to know that. The strategy of making this open source has a clear goal: to make it easier for other Chinese startups to use it.
whoevercares 2y ago
Computer vision and deep learning conferences have been overwhelmed with Chinese authors since many years ago. No surprises. However the quality of the work skyrocketed recently
dr_kiszonka 2y ago
If these AI efforts are funded by the Chinese government, it makes perfect sense as a strategy. The more successful they are, the more risky it becomes to invest in US AI companies, leading to fewer investments (and less know-how in the long term), and China getting even more ahead. (I am not in AI, so please correct me if this is inaccurate.)
- whoevercares 2y ago
  Good news is the system in China frequently get in the way - people with connections wins the government or state owned businesses contract, making it tougher for many innovators to strive with a shrinking private-owned/consumer-demand environment (Source: frustrated friends who lose the government contract to someone with inferior technology)
fspeech 2y ago
How could more competition be bad? Sure some startups' business plans no longer work and have to pivot but many more startups now have access to better products at lower cost.

whatever1 2y ago

Slightly relevant but they are also in the game of commercial mathematical optimization solvers and this year they reached parity with the sota American ones (ibm cplex, gurobi, Fico Xpress). It is that bad that all the American companies withrew from the public benchmark library. You can only see there Chinese commercial solvers and open source ones. https://plato.asu.edu/bench.html https://plato.asu.edu/bench.html

adamsiem 2y ago
What are the solvers?
- whatever1 2y ago
  COPT cardinal optimizer, Optverse from Huawei, MindOpt from Alibaba
coalteddy 2y ago
Any blogs or other writing about this topic you can recommend? I worked with gurobi in the past but haven't been keeping up with the trends and performance gains. Love this field of CS!
coliveira 2y ago
Yes, I checked the recent solvers in the MIP space and it seems they're blowing out the existing American solvers. Huawei has invested a lot of money in this area. But in my opinion this was completely expected, most research in this area is now done in China, American universities have in comparison stopped in time.

xnx 2y ago

ByteDance's UI-TARS - Skyvern, ec.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

Maybe they think it's in their national interest that a generation of Americans stops practicing their reading skills because of the tl;dr machine and stops building job skills that aren't reliant on the job-doing machine.

DoctorOW 2y ago
I'm okay with the software being made open to the public. I think ultimately it's good for society as a whole. The US is welcome to do the same (I.E. actually opening OpenAI) but I don't think the drawbacks of AI are mitigated by making it more profitable to the American establishment.

lsllc 2y ago

Interesting theory -- maybe trying to diluting/confusing the technology market with alternatives that phone home [to the LLM] with your content. I just had to talk someone I know out of using RedNote as the TikTok shutdown loomed last week -- they had ZERO IDEA about its provenance. Unless you're paying attention, it's actually not clear what's what.

Yeri 2y ago
While I definitely wouldn't trust this tech, we've also normalised phoning home with all western tech. How many products keep sending all kind of unknown telemetry, have a ton of trackers, etc? Can't really blame them doing the same.
wruza 2y ago
Maybe they just be them, being a second economy and a 4x bigger population that is a few iq points smarter on average.

segmondy 2y ago

Trae doesn't look opensource, from their site looks like you download the binary (osx only for now) and install it. You can't configure it to use your own AI or another provider. You need to use their own API, all your prompts and code are go to bytedance.

pzo 2y ago

Yeah I have similar feeling: 1) They try similar like Zuck with LLama make sure GPT or Claude or Gemini is not the real winner in the West world like Android/iOS was for smartphone, Facebook/Whatsapp for social media/IM, Google Search for search, Windows for desktop OS. Majority people get used to to single product and they don't switch often. 2) Trying to kickstart community similar like LLama kickstarted big community around it that helped with tooling, testing, etc. 3) Slowing down development of ai companies in the west - giving them less data for training (after all midjourney, elevenlabs, llama kickstarted training on copyrighted content, it's pretty sure they using user data at least from e.g. free version of GPTo-mini) and bleeding their budget kind of war of attrition. 4) Familiarise the west audience with their ai models - after all still not many people using models like DeepkSeek since not many providers host them and majority of people don't have fast enough computer to run full models fast enough - Trae helps with that

suraci 2y ago
They did what they did because everything they want to buy is banned or is to be banned by your government. Or are you being sarcastic? You must be being sarcastic.
- pzo 2y ago
  I'm not being sarcastic. If that would be the only reason you said then they wouldn't open source it or didn't market for english speaking audience.

coliveira 2y ago

Well, this is apparent if you follow the releases, but Silicon Valley doesn't want you to know that. The strategy of making this open source has a clear goal: to make it easier for other Chinese startups to use it.

whoevercares 2y ago

Computer vision and deep learning conferences have been overwhelmed with Chinese authors since many years ago. No surprises. However the quality of the work skyrocketed recently

dr_kiszonka 2y ago

If these AI efforts are funded by the Chinese government, it makes perfect sense as a strategy. The more successful they are, the more risky it becomes to invest in US AI companies, leading to fewer investments (and less know-how in the long term), and China getting even more ahead. (I am not in AI, so please correct me if this is inaccurate.)

whoevercares 2y ago
Good news is the system in China frequently get in the way - people with connections wins the government or state owned businesses contract, making it tougher for many innovators to strive with a shrinking private-owned/consumer-demand environment (Source: frustrated friends who lose the government contract to someone with inferior technology)

fspeech 2y ago

How could more competition be bad? Sure some startups' business plans no longer work and have to pivot but many more startups now have access to better products at lower cost.