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What's even crazier is that China are the good guys when it comes to open source AI.

_heimdall 1y ago
We would have to know their intent to really know if they fit a general understanding "the good guys." Its very possible that China is open sourcing LLMs because its currently in their best interest to do so, not because of some moral or principled stance.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  I don't think the intent really matters once the thing is out in the open. I want open source AI i can run myself without any creepy surveillance capitalist or state agency using it to slurp up my data. Chinese companies are giving me that - I don't really care about what their grand plan is. Grand plans have a habit of not working out, but open source software is open source software nonetheless.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    > I want open source AI i can run myself What are you running? > Chinese companies are giving me that I have not become aware of anything other than DeepSeek. Can you recommend a few others that are worth looking into?
    - saubeidl 1y ago
      Alibaba's Qwen is pretty good, and it looks like Baidu just open sourced Ernie!
- wraptile 1y ago
  The country ruled by "people's party" has almost no open source culture while capitalism is leading the entire free software movement. I'm not sure what that says about our society and politics but the absurdist in me is having a good laugh every time I think about this :D
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. The government just doesn’t fund it. Not directly anyway, but there’s a ton of Chinese companies that do.
    - hollerith 1y ago
      >There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. If that is true and the software is any good, you should be able to name an open-source project that we've heard of started by people living in China. DeepSeek released some models as open weights and some software for running the models. That's the only example I can think of.
      - wraptile 1y ago
        China does have their own Github as gitee.com¹ which runs a fork of Gitea but it's basically dead because it's impossible to have anything like Github with the current censorship aparatus. Here's the excerpt from wiki: > On 18 May 2022, Gitee announced all code will be manually reviewed before public availability.[4][5] Gitee did not specify a reason for the change, though there was widespread speculation it was ordered by the Chinese government amid increasing online censorship in China.[4][6] 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitee
      - Fade_Dance 1y ago
        I've recently been exploring PKM/knowledge management programs, and the best open source one is a Chinese project - SiYuan. I have a feeling that their collaborative hacker culture is more hardware oriented, which would be a natural extension from the tech zones where 500 companies are within a few miles of each other and engineers are rapidly popping in and out and prototyping parts sometimes within a day. Anecdotally, I've dealt with Chinese collaborative community projects in the ThinkPad space, where they have come together to design custom motherboards to modernize old ThinkPads. Of course there was a lot of software work as well when it comes to BIOS code, Thunderbolt, etc. I remember thinking how watching that project develop was like peering into another world with a parallel hacker culture that just developed... differently. Oh there's also a Chinese project that's going to modernize old Blackberries with 5G internals. Cool stuff!
- llm_nerd 1y ago
  But that's precisely why Meta are the "good guys". They specifically called China the good guys in the same way that Meta is the good guys, though in this case many of the Chinese models are extremely good. Meta has open sourced all of their offerings purely to try to commoditize the industry to the greatest extent possible, hoping to avoid their competitors getting a leg up. There is zero altruism or good intentions. If Meta had actually competitive AI offering, there is zero chance they would be releasing any of it.
  - echelon 1y ago
    China nor Meta are the good guys, and they are not stewards of open source AI. China has stopped releasing frontier models, and Meta doesn't release anything that isn't in the llama family. - Hunyuan Image 2.0 (200 millisecond flux) is not released - Hunyuan 3D 2.5, the top performing 3D model and an order of magnitude improvement over 2.1, is not released - Seedream Video, which outperforms Google Veo 3 on ELO rankings, is not released - Qwen VLo, an instructive autoregressive model, is not released The list is much larger than this.
tim333 1y ago
One private company in China, funded by running a quant hedge fund. I'm not sure China as in Xi is good.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  Alibaba and Baidu both open source their models as well.
  - echelon 1y ago
    None of the big tech companies in China are releasing their frontier models anymore. - Hunyuan Image 2.0 (200 millisecond flux) is not released - Hunyuan 3D 2.5, the top performing 3D model and an order of magnitude improvement over 2.1, is not released - Seedream Video, which outperforms Google Veo 3 on ELO rankings, is not released - Qwen VLo, an instructive autoregressive model, is not released
- kevinventullo 1y ago
  I mean in some sense the Chinese domestic policy (“as in Xi”) made the conditions possible for companies like DeepSeek to rise up, via a multi-decade emphasis on STEM education and providing the right entrepreneurial conditions. But yeah by analogy with the US, it’s not as if the W. Bush administration can be credited with the creation of Google.
qwertox 1y ago
It's really hard to tell. If instructions like the current extreme trend of "What a great question!" and all the crap that forces one to put * Do not use emotional reinforcement (e.g., "Excellent," "Perfect," "Unfortunately"). * Do not use metaphors or hyperbole (e.g., "smoking gun," "major turning point"). * Do not express confidence or certainty in potential solutions. into the instructions, so that it doesn't treat you like a child, teenager or narcissistic individual who is craving for flattery, can really affect the mood and way of thinking of an individual, those Chinese models might as well have baked in something similar but targeted at reducing the productivity of certain individuals or weakening their beliefs in western culture. I am not saying they are doing that, but they could be doing it sometime down the road without us noticing.

We would have to know their intent to really know if they fit a general understanding "the good guys." Its very possible that China is open sourcing LLMs because its currently in their best interest to do so, not because of some moral or principled stance.

saubeidl 1y ago
I don't think the intent really matters once the thing is out in the open. I want open source AI i can run myself without any creepy surveillance capitalist or state agency using it to slurp up my data. Chinese companies are giving me that - I don't really care about what their grand plan is. Grand plans have a habit of not working out, but open source software is open source software nonetheless.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > I want open source AI i can run myself What are you running? > Chinese companies are giving me that I have not become aware of anything other than DeepSeek. Can you recommend a few others that are worth looking into?
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    Alibaba's Qwen is pretty good, and it looks like Baidu just open sourced Ernie!
wraptile 1y ago
The country ruled by "people's party" has almost no open source culture while capitalism is leading the entire free software movement. I'm not sure what that says about our society and politics but the absurdist in me is having a good laugh every time I think about this :D
- Aeolun 1y ago
  There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. The government just doesn’t fund it. Not directly anyway, but there’s a ton of Chinese companies that do.
  - hollerith 1y ago
    >There’s actually a lot of open source software made by Chinese people. If that is true and the software is any good, you should be able to name an open-source project that we've heard of started by people living in China. DeepSeek released some models as open weights and some software for running the models. That's the only example I can think of.
    - wraptile 1y ago
      China does have their own Github as gitee.com¹ which runs a fork of Gitea but it's basically dead because it's impossible to have anything like Github with the current censorship aparatus. Here's the excerpt from wiki: > On 18 May 2022, Gitee announced all code will be manually reviewed before public availability.[4][5] Gitee did not specify a reason for the change, though there was widespread speculation it was ordered by the Chinese government amid increasing online censorship in China.[4][6] 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitee
    - Fade_Dance 1y ago
      I've recently been exploring PKM/knowledge management programs, and the best open source one is a Chinese project - SiYuan. I have a feeling that their collaborative hacker culture is more hardware oriented, which would be a natural extension from the tech zones where 500 companies are within a few miles of each other and engineers are rapidly popping in and out and prototyping parts sometimes within a day. Anecdotally, I've dealt with Chinese collaborative community projects in the ThinkPad space, where they have come together to design custom motherboards to modernize old ThinkPads. Of course there was a lot of software work as well when it comes to BIOS code, Thunderbolt, etc. I remember thinking how watching that project develop was like peering into another world with a parallel hacker culture that just developed... differently. Oh there's also a Chinese project that's going to modernize old Blackberries with 5G internals. Cool stuff!
llm_nerd 1y ago
But that's precisely why Meta are the "good guys". They specifically called China the good guys in the same way that Meta is the good guys, though in this case many of the Chinese models are extremely good. Meta has open sourced all of their offerings purely to try to commoditize the industry to the greatest extent possible, hoping to avoid their competitors getting a leg up. There is zero altruism or good intentions. If Meta had actually competitive AI offering, there is zero chance they would be releasing any of it.
- echelon 1y ago
  China nor Meta are the good guys, and they are not stewards of open source AI. China has stopped releasing frontier models, and Meta doesn't release anything that isn't in the llama family. - Hunyuan Image 2.0 (200 millisecond flux) is not released - Hunyuan 3D 2.5, the top performing 3D model and an order of magnitude improvement over 2.1, is not released - Seedream Video, which outperforms Google Veo 3 on ELO rankings, is not released - Qwen VLo, an instructive autoregressive model, is not released The list is much larger than this.

tim333 1y ago

One private company in China, funded by running a quant hedge fund. I'm not sure China as in Xi is good.

saubeidl 1y ago
Alibaba and Baidu both open source their models as well.
- echelon 1y ago
  None of the big tech companies in China are releasing their frontier models anymore. - Hunyuan Image 2.0 (200 millisecond flux) is not released - Hunyuan 3D 2.5, the top performing 3D model and an order of magnitude improvement over 2.1, is not released - Seedream Video, which outperforms Google Veo 3 on ELO rankings, is not released - Qwen VLo, an instructive autoregressive model, is not released
kevinventullo 1y ago
I mean in some sense the Chinese domestic policy (“as in Xi”) made the conditions possible for companies like DeepSeek to rise up, via a multi-decade emphasis on STEM education and providing the right entrepreneurial conditions. But yeah by analogy with the US, it’s not as if the W. Bush administration can be credited with the creation of Google.

qwertox 1y ago

It's really hard to tell. If instructions like the current extreme trend of "What a great question!" and all the crap that forces one to put * Do not use emotional reinforcement (e.g., "Excellent," "Perfect," "Unfortunately"). * Do not use metaphors or hyperbole (e.g., "smoking gun," "major turning point"). * Do not express confidence or certainty in potential solutions. into the instructions, so that it doesn't treat you like a child, teenager or narcissistic individual who is craving for flattery, can really affect the mood and way of thinking of an individual, those Chinese models might as well have baked in something similar but targeted at reducing the productivity of certain individuals or weakening their beliefs in western culture. I am not saying they are doing that, but they could be doing it sometime down the road without us noticing.