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Four independent Chinese companies released extremely good open source models in the past few months (DeepSeek, Qwen/Alibaba, Kimi/Moonshot, GLM/Z.ai). No Ameri
by pu_pe 1y ago
Four independent Chinese companies released extremely good open source models in the past few months (DeepSeek, Qwen/Alibaba, Kimi/Moonshot, GLM/Z.ai). No American or European companies are doing that, including titans like Meta. What gives?
- seunosewa 1y agoThe Chinese are doing it because they don't have access to enough of the latest GPUs to run their own models. Americans aren't doing this because they need to recoup the cost of their massive GPU investments.
- the_mitsuhiko 1y agoAnd Europeans don't it because quite frankly, we're not really doing anything particularly impressive with AI sadly.
- speedgoose 1y agoTo misquote the French president, "Who could have predicted?". https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_aurait_pu_pr%C3%A9dire https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_aurait_pu_pr%C3%A9dire
- embedding-shape 1y agoHe didn't coin that expression did he? I'm 99% sure I've heard people say that before 2022, but now you made me unsure.
- Sharlin 1y ago"Who could've predicted?" as a sarcastic response to someone's stupid actions leading to entirely predictable consequences is probably as old as sarcasm itself.
- speedgoose 1y agoPeople said it before, but he said it without sarcasm about things that many people could in fact predict.
- uvaursi 1y ago[flagged]
- saubeidl 1y agoI'm tired of this ol' propaganda trope. * We're leading the world in fusion research. https://www.pppl.gov/news/2025/wendelstein-7-x-sets-new-performance-records-fusion-research https://www.pppl.gov/news/2025/wendelstein-7-x-sets-new-perf... * Our satellites are giving us by far the best understanding of our universe, capturing one third of the visible sky in incredible detail - just check out this mission update video if you want your mind blown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ * Not only that, the Copernicus mission is the world's leading source for open data geoobservation: https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/ https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/ * We've given the world mRNA vaccines to solve the Covid crisis and GLP-1 antagonists to solve the obesity crisis. * CERN and is figuring out questions about the fundamental nature of the universe, with the LHC being by far the largest particle accelerator in the world, an engineering precision feat that couldn't have been accomplished anywhere else. Pioneering, innovation and drive forward isn't just about the latest tech fad. It's about fundamental research on how our universe works. Everyone else is downstream of us.
- CamperBob2 1y agoDon't worry, we in the US are hot on your heels in the own-goal game ( https://www.space.com/space-exploration/nasa-is-sinking-its-flagship-science-center-during-the-government-shutdown-and-may-be-breaking-the-law-in-the-process https://www.space.com/space-exploration/nasa-is-sinking-its-... ). All you have to do is wait by the Trump River and wait for our body to come floating by.
- uvaursi 1y agoI’m confused. Who is this “We”? Do you realize how behind in many respects most of Europe is? How it’s been parceled up and destroyed by the EU? Science projects led by a few countries doesn’t cut it. It’s not propaganda at all. The standards of living there are shit. But enjoy the particle collider, I guess?
- seydor 1y agoWe could add cookie warnings to AI, everybody loves those
- DrNosferatu 1y agoEurope should act and make its own, literal, Moonshot: https://ifiwaspolitical.substack.com/p/euroai-europes-path-to-ai-sovereignty https://ifiwaspolitical.substack.com/p/euroai-europes-path-t...
- imtringued 1y ago>Moonshot 1: GPT-4 Parity (2027) >Objective: 100B parameter model matching GPT-4 benchmarks, proving European technical viability This feels like a joke... Parity with a 2024 model in 2027? The Chinese didn't wait, they just did it. The timeline for #1 LLM is also so far into the future that it is entirely plausible that by 2031, nobody uses transformer based LLMs as we know them today anymore. For reference: The attention paper is only 8 years old. Some wild new architecture could come out in that time that makes catching up meaningless.
- DrNosferatu 1y agoNote the EU-Moonshot project is based on own silicon / compute sovereignty. GPT4 parity on a own silicon trained indigenous model is just an early goal. Indeed, the ultimate goal is EU LLM supremacy - which means under democratic control.
- saubeidl 1y agoHonestly, do we need to? If the Chinese release SOTA open source models, why should we invest a ton just to have another one? We can just use theirs, that's the beauty of open source.
- hex4def6 1y agoFor the vast majority, they're not "open source" they're "open weights". They don't release the training data or training code / configs. It's kind of like releasing a 3d scene rendered to a JPG vs actually providing someone with the assets. You can still use it, and it's possible to fine-tune it, but it's not really the same. There's tremendous soft power in deciding LLM alignment and material emphasis. As these things become more incorporated into education, for instance, the ability to frame "we don't talk about ba sing se" issues are going to be tremendously powerful.
- alpineman 1y agoactually Mistral is pretty good and catching up as the other leading models stagnate - the coding and OCR is particularly good
- utopiah 1y ago> we're not really doing anything particularly impressive with AI sadly. Well, that's true... but also nobody else is. Making something popular isn't particularly impressive.
- abecode 1y agoAt ECAI conference last week there was a panel discussion and someone had a great quote, "in Europe we are in the golden age of AI regulation, while the US and China are in the actual golden age of AI".
- toephu2 1y agoEurope gave us cookie popups on every single website.
- Gigachad 1y agoOnly ones with invasive spyware cookies. Essential site function cookies do not require a consent banner.
- 0xjmp 1y agoI must be missing something important here. How do the Chinese train these models if they don't have access to the GPUs to train them?
- barrell 1y agoI believe they mean distribution (inference). The Chinese model is currently B.Y.O.GPU. The American model is GPUaaS
- 0xjmp 1y agoWhy is inference less attainable when it technically requires less GPU processing to run? Kimi has a chat app on their page using K2 so they must have figured out inference to some extent.
- throwaway314155 1y agotl;dr the person you originally responded too is wrong.
- root_axis 1y ago> it technically requires less GPU processing to run Not when you have to scale. There's a reason why every LLM SaaS aggressively rate limits and even then still experiences regular outages.
- jychang 1y agoThat entirely depends on the number of users. Inference is usually less gpu-compute heavy, but much more gpu-vram heavy pound-for-pound compared to training. General rule of thumb is that you need 20x more vram for training a model with X params, than for inference for that same size model. So assuming batch size b, then serving more than 20*b users would tilt vram use on the side of inference. This isn't really accurate; it's an extremely rough rule of thumb and ignores a lot of stuff. But it's important to point out that inference is quickly adding to costs for all AI companies. Deepseek claims that they used $5.6mil to train Deepseek R1; that's about 10-20 trillion tokens at their current pricing- or 1 million users sending just 100 requests at full context size.
- lossolo 1y agoThis is false. You can buy whole H100 clusters in China and Alibaba, Bytedance, Tencent etc have enough cards for training and inference. Shenzhen 2025 https://imgur.com/a/r6tBkN3 https://imgur.com/a/r6tBkN3
- sampton 1y agoMeta gave up on open weight path after DeepSeek.
- gordonhart 1y agoIt’s more fair to say they gave up after the Llama 4 disaster.
- RIMR 1y agoLove their nonsense excuse they they are trying to protect us from misuse of "superintelligence". >“We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible. That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source.” -Mark Zuckerberg Meta has shown us daily that they have no interest in protecting anything but their profits. They certainly don't intend to protect people from the harm their technology may do. They just know that saying "this is profitable enough for us to keep it proprietary and restrict it to our own paid ecosystem" will make the enthusiasts running local Llama models mad at them.
- brandall10 1y agoAlso, the Meta AI 'team' is currently retooling so they can put something together with a handful of Zuck-picked experts making $100m+ each rather than hundreds making ~$1m each.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoToo bad those experts are not worth their 300 million packages. I've seen the google scholars of the confirmed crazy comp hires and it's not Yann Lecun tier that's for sure.
- lvl155 1y agoThe answer is simply that no one would pay to use them for a number of reasons including privacy. They have to give them away and put up some semblance of openness. No option really.
- tokioyoyo 1y agoI know first hand companies paying them. Chinese internal software market is gigantic. Full of companies and startups that have barely made into a single publication in the west.
- lvl155 1y agoOf course they are paying them. That’s not my point. My point is this is the only way for them to gain market share and they need Western users to train future models. They have to give them away. I’d be shocked if compute costs are not heavily subsidized by CCP.
- overfeed 1y ago> My point is this is the only way for them to gain market share and they need Western users to train future models. And how would releasing open-weight models help with that? Open-weights invite self-hosting, or worse, hosting by werstern GPUaaS companies.
- spwa4 1y agoBut the CCP only has access to the US market because they joined the WTO, but when they joined the WTO they signed a treaty that they wouldn't do things like that.
- nylonstrung 1y agoThere are plenty of people paying, the price/performance is vastly better than the Western models Deepseek 3.2 is 1% the cost of Claude and 90% of the quality
- janalsncm 1y agoI don’t think there’s any privacy that OpenAI or Anthropic are giving you that DeepSeek isn’t giving you. ChatGPT usage logs were held by court order at one point. It’s true that DeepSeek won’t give you reliable info on Tiananmen Square but I would argue that’s a very rare use case in practice. Most people will be writing boilerplate code or summarizing mundane emails.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jjice 1y agoI get what you mean, but OpenAI did release the gpt-oss in August, just three months ago. I've had a very good experience with those models. https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ (August 5th) I like Qwen 235 quite a bit too, and I generally agree with your sentiment, but this was a very large American open source model. Unless we're getting into the complications on what "open source" model actually means, in which case I have no clue if these are just open weight or what.
- pu_pe 1y agoYou're totally right. Ironically I am using gpt-oss for a project right now, I think its quality is comparable to the ones I mentioned.
- raincole 1y agoDo you think which one has the higher market share: 1) The four models you mentioned, combined or 2) ChatGPT ? What gives? Because if people are willing to pay you, you don't say "ok I don't want your money I'll provide my service for free."
- pphysch 1y agoOpen-weight (Chinese) models have infinitely more market share in domains where giving your data to OpenAI is not acceptable Like research labs and so on. Even at US universities
- raincole 1y agoCool, and? If these models were hosted in China, the labs you mentioned wouldn't be paying them, right? Now you have the answer to "what gives" above.
- pphysch 1y ago"And" therefore OpenAI has little to offer when it comes to serious applications of AI. Best they can hope for is getting acquired by MS for pennies when this scheme collapses.
- fungi 1y agomicrosofts phi models are very good smaller models under MIT license.
- fspeech 1y agoThere is also Minimax M2 https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2 https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2
- zbyforgotp 1y agoThe American labs are paranoid. The secrecy kills innovation. Open Source means ideas can meet and have sex and produce offsprings.