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I guess this is the end of OpenAI? No more dreaming of Universal Basic Compute for AI, Multi Trillion for Fabs and Semi? This is just like everything in China.
by ksec 2y ago
I guess this is the end of OpenAI? No more dreaming of Universal Basic Compute for AI, Multi Trillion for Fabs and Semi?
This is just like everything in China. They will find ways to drive down cost to below anyone previously imagined, subsidised or not. And even just competing among themselves with DeepSeek vs ERNIE and Open sourcing them meant there is very little to no space for most.
Both DRAM and NAND industry for Samsung / Micron may soon be gone, I thought this was going to happen sooner but it seems finally happening. GPU and CPU Designs are already in the pipelines with RISC-V, IMG and ARM-China. OLED is catching up, LCD is already taken over. Batteries we know. The only thing left is foundries.
Huawei may release its own Open Source PC OS soon. We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene.
- f6v 2y agoYou’re saying this as if you’ve seen their books and know the pricing is sustainable.
- InkCanon 2y agoBased on what Altman says and leaked reports, OpenAI is actually losing money on every new user. Unlike traditional software, maintaining a SOTA AI service doesn't scale. The conundrum he faces is he can either quantize models and slash R&D to try to turn a profit now but lose the SOTA race, or keep pumping money and hope the rest bleed out. He's opted for the second, having raised 10B in 2023, 6.6B in 2024 and reports of another raise in 2025. He's probably trying desperately for the middle ground where an explosion of high price subscriptions replacing workers massively boost his revenue. So he's also reportedly projecting revenue 4x to 13B this year.
- timerol 2y agoThis is an accurate summary of OpenAI, and makes it more likely that Baidu's model is being priced well below cost
- InkCanon 2y agoI wouldn't necessarily think so. There's still enormous room for quantization and hardware optimization, which China has proven to be world class at. And a lot of spend is really on R&D. For the same reason I believe if OpenAI waned to they could break even in a year
- cheschire 2y agoHardware tech, to be specific. Plenty of room left in software services still. The east can compete on price but user experience is incomparable.
- jampekka 2y agoA lot of consumer tech with very competitive UX is coming out of China. They are also getting very strongly into e.g. web frontend tech. I see no reason why the west would have any special advantage in this.
- csomar 2y agoThey are ahead of Europe (at least in car UX) but quite behind of the US. This is the last stronghold that the US has but given the recent layoffs and transition toward "AI everything", I am not sure if the US tech industry will survive this too. Time to start learning Chinese.
- uhhhhhhh 2y agoI would rate Europe over US by far for car UX. My north American vehicles universally have the worst interfaces. My European Cars typically the best and Japanese/others in between.
- Hikikomori 2y agoWhat US car UX is ahead of Europe?
- numpad0 2y agoI assume you have Tesla center screen and CarPlay/Android Auto in mind, but those aren't that highly regarded outside the US...
- vbezhenar 2y agoChinese hardware docs are very scarce if you don't know mandarin and don't have Chinese connections. So to compete on software West might encounter unexpected difficulties. You need good platform docs to develop good software. Probably not a problem for big companies.
- syntex 2y agocheaper hardware usually means more adoption of the software and then even more demand for hardware
- benjaminva 2y agoCorrect answer, never think about the future in terms of linear extrapolations. It's a non-linear differential equation with lots of variables and expect complex feedback loops. Systems react to change.
- nwellnhof 2y agoJevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- apwell23 2y agoyou are assuming that cost is stopping from ppl using these technologies. These things are not actually useful. They hyper optimzed it for coding usecase but it still sucks balls at it.
- david-gpu 2y agoWhen the cost of training a model goes down, it doesn't simply become cheaper to the end user. In addition to that, the provider will train even larger and more capable models.
- apwell23 2y ago> the provider will train even larger and more capable models. cost isn't the limiting factor in this though. 'even larger' models arn't 'more capable' . where did you get that from?
- ninetyninenine 2y ago> Huawei may release its own Open Source PC OS soon. We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene. The US has been so used to being number one that not being number one equates to “collapse”. No the US Will NOT collapse. They just won’t be number one in economic/military/technological might. Similar to how many countries like the UK, Japan, and more have not existed as the number one economic super power.
- jampekka 2y agoIt will be (arguably already is) societally rough though. The west has been riding the asian cheap labor for decades (and the cheap colonial labor before that). People are not gonna be happy falling down the "value chain".
- nebula8804 2y agoProbably explains Trump's moves: Force out all the illegal immigrants doing low value work, kill off as much fluff in the government as you can to cut the debt load, those unemployed people are forced to fill in the low value labor. You've solved all the problems and everyone except the capital owners are worse off..but at least the capital owners live to see another day.
- gitfan86 2y agoDoes China make cheap and fast DRAM?
- rapsey 2y agoChina is building an entirely independent semi conductor supply chain and if they are not competitive now, they will be in the near future. US sanctions forced them into turbo charging their efforts.
- daneel_w 2y agoI have two SO-DIMM sticks of a domestically produced Chinese brand named FASPEED, with chips bearing logos and markings that I don't recognize from anywhere else. These sticks' mfg. datestamp is "44-24" and from what I've learned they cost little in China but come with a salted price tag when sold through channels aimed at Western customers. I'm not sure if they come in fast-enough variants to compete, and not sure about the quality or longevity otherwise. FASPEED makes SSDs, too, but I have no data on those. I also have an M.2 SSD from another Chinese brand called XINCUU which I previously had never heard about. The label of that SSD is in parity with expectations of Chinese business morals - it claims to be PCIe NVMe with "1000 MB/s speed" but is in reality a SATA device, and it does not perform even close to the ~550 MB/s limit of SATA 3.0. Both of these run unusually warm for DDR4 memory and M.2 flash storage, leading me to believe they are wholly designed and produced in China.
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- sim7c00 2y ago[flagged]
- rvba 2y agoAI is not only price. I bet the Chinese AI will tell you the "chinese point of view" just like the one from USA tells the US one. Also who knows what was censored or added there.
- buyucu 2y agoThis is also true of OpenAI and Anthropic. There is a disturbing level of censorship there.
- mirekrusin 2y agoThe funny thing is that you'll hit the wall sooner or later with reasoning if you don't give up bias, which applies on both/any ends.
- viraptor 2y agoYou can't "give up bias". You can choose what you prefer, but an "unbiased" model doesn't exist. If you put in information, you're adding bias.
- buyucu 2y agowhat people mean by an "unbiased" model is a model that just reflects the underlying distribution in the data.
- viraptor 2y agoSo biased by both the choice of the sources and the information contained in the sources.
- milesrout 2y agoBut crucially not biased by RLHF being applied afterwards to stop the models from making basic biological observations, telling jokes about left wing politics, or saying anything nonnegative about European historical impact on the world, and so on.
- pera 2y agoI guess the majority in here would agree that without strong market intervention OpenAI will soon implode. They urgently need: - WIPO copyright exemption - Anti-China protectionist measures - Hard-line hardware export control - Multi-billion dollar government contracts
- maxglute 2y agoThat one weird trick. x4.
- gdiamos 2y agoGold
- viraptor 2y agoA copyright exemption would just put them at the level of deepseek officially, but they've been working around that anyway in practice. I'm not sure that change would make any difference.
- rustc 2y ago> but they've been working around that anyway in practice Working around how?
- gre 2y agoFlagrantly violating Edit: Facebook torrented 81.7TB of books. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-over-81-7tb-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-authors-say/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
- rajman187 2y agoWell there was the case of an employee leaving due to his perceived moral issues around the use of copyrighted material in the training dataset [1] [1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/openai-whistleblower-who-raised-legal-concerns-about-chatgpts-datasets-has-died https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/openai-whistleblower-who...
- TacticalCoder 2y ago[dead]
- fulafel 2y agoHow interesting a question is OpenAI's corporate fate in the context of future of AI now that it's just another for-profit?
- batata_frita 2y agoWhat's happening to DRAM and NAND?
- bayarearefugee 2y agoOr (speaking as an American) we could just criminalize the use of Chinese LLMs. /s ... but... maybe not? Wherever you sit on the political spectrum the fact that this idea will almost certainly be seriously discussed in the coming months should be concerning to you.
- infecto 2y agoThey effectively are banned for a lot of the commercial world already. I cannot imagine most businesses American or European would be willing to use Chinese services.
- ffsm8 2y agoThey might be officially banned by the employers, but I guarantee you they'll get lots of usage anyway
- infecto 2y agoThen you should bet on it if you are so confident. Even if casual usage happens with employees which is questionable already, the real money would be from corporate adoption which is highly unlikely even from a European country, the risks are too high for data leaks.
- prng2021 2y agoWhen it comes to hardware who pioneered all those technologies? Definitely not China. They’ve stolen unimaginable amounts of IP and will continue to do so. But yes you’re right, they surprise everyone with how well they can scale the stolen innovation.
- rapsey 2y agoIt is entirely irrelevant who pioneered the tech. This is why no one gives a crap about xerox anymore. Dismissing Chinese tech is foolish. They are tech leaders in many areas and moving to new ones every day. Solar, Nuclear, Batteries, EVs, Drones, Robotics etc. They have no one to copy in those fields because they have left the rest of the world behind.
- j_maffe 2y agoAll developing markets "steal" until they've caught up with the competition. Just look at the US and how they "stole" innovations and tech from Europe.
- rixed 2y ago> We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene Is economy a zero sum game now? Isn't economic development supposed to be a good thing? Can the West only exist in a world of poverty and underdevelopment?
- jampekka 2y agoThe current western lifestyle of dirt cheap foreign goods exists only in a world of relative poverty and underdevelopment.
- milesrout 2y agoThat doesn't make sense. Consumer goods have become cheaper and more accessible because the third world has become more productive and richer. If they become richer still it will be because they become more productive still, which will mean their exports will be more competitive (cheaper).
- jononor 2y agoWith high degrees of automation that need not be the case. Consumer electronics is highly automated right now, where-as clothing production is currently not.
- qwertox 2y agoLet's just hope they contribute back as much as the west has contributed to spreading knowledge and knowledge-tools to the world instead of just free-riding on it and then pretending it wasn't foundational. Linux, Wikipedia, RISC-V, ... It's not just the Chinese who are lacking the acknowledgment of these contributions.
- j_maffe 2y agoMy man literally the best open source model (that happens to be excellently documented) is Chinese.
- rakejake 2y agoThat is because they want to undercut the US and prevent them from making money. It remains to be seen if they'll be as benevolent in making tech open-source if they are the clear winners. Frankly, I don't see why they will.
- smilebot 2y agoClassic. If doing good makes someone feel good, then they must be selfish! And their doing good is in fact not good! /s
- j_maffe 2y agoI'm sorry but your comment comes off as racist. You've given no reason as to why they wouldn't do the same and your opinion seems entirely coming from assumption of ill-will. Why would you think the West have shared their knowledge while China won't? I suggest you reevaluate your biases.
- tacitusarc 2y agoThe CCP strictly controls knowledge and information access within China through rigorous censorship. It would be surprising if Chinese companies were allowed to just make their advancements open source without review, if those advancements would have a meaningful impact on the state of technology. It is strange and inappropriate to call that observation racist.
- SirensOfTitan 2y ago> We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene Generally, I’ve found that almost no founders or friends I speak with have any vision for the future anymore. They care only about making money and do not care how. It’s a spectacular collapse of vision and purpose—these people have always existed but it feels incredibly pervasive now. With that, I realize your comment is much broader than AI so below is too domain specific but… VC has been investing in AI as-if it were a winner takes all market, but it has been obvious that isn’t the case. Not only that, but the massive amount of cash thrown to anyone with even marginal credentials has undermined the constraints that often lead to innovation. There is 0 reason that Safe Superintelligence should be raising for the second time at a 30 B valuation with no product.
- Imustaskforhelp 2y agocan I say something. This is one of the most finest and most accurate things that I have read in a long time. This really could be a blog post which I encourage you to make! (I would prefer github pages but if you really want , I have a domain name on cloudflare and I am more than willing to host the static page of such blog on my own domain name for absolutely free (lets go , cloudflare!) Its just facts. Pure facts. "" Generally, I’ve found that almost no founders or friends I speak with have any vision for the future anymore. They care only about making money and do not care how. It’s a spectacular collapse of vision and purpose—these people have always existed but it feels incredibly pervasive now. "" Why did I read it in a monotonous way as if a student from the future understands the current scenario. I felt as if it was the same level of sadness in my heart as that when you listen to some video which has raining background and he reads the dark comedy (something like burialgoods oats shitposting but this time more serious and real!) Currently saving this on wayback machine just for this comment. Internet needs to preserve this comment , no matter what.
- Imustaskforhelp 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20250316121222/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43377962 https://web.archive.org/web/20250316121222/https://news.ycom... May archive never go down!
- wruza 2y agoWe are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene. I think you're witnessing it rather getting back in touch with reality than collapsing. Multi-trillion out of jsx generator was too much from the beginning. You folks just don't know what to do with too much money you have.
- Imustaskforhelp 2y agoIts a collapse from fictional reality to real reality , but a collapse nonetheless. Sometimes reality acts more weird than fiction itself. I have just now decided to call this "fictional reality" Like yesterday when I realized that nuclear bombs weren't that far away from the creation of chemical resonance & they happened after world war I and I think , just really 5-6 years before nuclear bombs but still! It actually gave me a lot of hope because I felt that a lot of people were focusing on AI , so I can use AI (sometimes , if I want) to focus on a passion project that I want , to maybe earn some money. I have also thought of creating AI projects but that too for fun. I don't know two shits but I just want to know what the hype is about from a theoretical standpoint.
- rstuart4133 2y ago> I think you're witnessing it rather getting back in touch with reality than collapsing. You're witnessing the USA tech scene getting in back to reality. Software engineers in other western countries looked at the salaries the Tech scene was paying in the USA, and scratched their heads.
- adam_arthur 2y agoIt's similar to how China dominated manufacturing in prior decades. They have massive amounts of low cost labor and, unfortunately, the US has pretty large walls up preventing mass in-migration of white collar workers. H1B is capped and also more of a lottery than a points based system. If the US allowed mass white collar immigration, wages would decline materially which would make our industries more competitive for the next generation of software. Right now the system is geared around protectionism (intended or not) and wage inflation for US local workers. The current market wages in software are far far above what a global equilibrium would be. Though myself and I'm sure most others here have benefited from it in the short term. To be clear, established companies with an existing market are fine for now and can do well with high wages. But the next generation of companies that are chasing smaller markets and margins, ones that require more elbow grease to out-compete are underserved. e.g. the entire DeepSeek team was paid less than a few Meta engineers (with 7 figure comp each) "The firm offers 14-month pay for various positions and the highest offer is for deep learning researchers for artificial general intelligence (AGI), with a monthly salary between 80,000 yuan ($10,983) and 110,000 yuan, which could mean an annual income of up to 1.54 million yuan, the report said."