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To push back on naivety I'm sensing here I think it's a little silly to see Chinese Communist Party backed enterprise as somehow magnanimous and without ulterio

by catigula 11mo ago

To push back on naivety I'm sensing here I think it's a little silly to see Chinese Communist Party backed enterprise as somehow magnanimous and without ulterior, very harmful motive.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
jascha_eng 11mo ago
Oh they need control of models to be able to censor and ensure whatever happens inside the country with AI stays under their control. But the open-source part? Idk I think they do it to mess with the US investment and for the typical open source reasons of companies: community, marketing, etc. But tbh especially the messing with the US, as a european with no serious competitor, I can get behind.
- catigula 11mo ago
  They're pouring money to disrupt American AI markets and efforts. They do this in countless other fields. It's a model of massive state funding -> give it away for cut-rate -> dominate the market -> reap the rewards. It's a very transparent, consistent strategy. AI is a little different because it has geopolitical implications.
  - ForceBru 11mo ago
    When it's a competition among individual producers, we call it "a free market" and praise Hal Varian. When it's a competition among countries, it's suddenly threatening to "disrupt American AI markets and efforts". The obvious solution here is to pour money into LLM research too. Massive state funding -> provide SOTA models for free -> dominate the market -> reap the rewards (from the free models).
    - catigula 11mo ago
      We don't do that.
    - fragmede 11mo ago
      It's not like the US doesn't face similar accusations. One such case is the WTO accusing Boeing of receiving illegal subsidies from the US government. https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-gave-illegal-aid-boeing https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-ga...
  - tokioyoyo 11mo ago
    I can’t believe I’m shilling for China in these comments, but how different it is for company A getting blank check investments from VCs and wink-wink support from the government in the west? And AI-labs in China has been getting funding internally in the companies for a while now, before the LLM-era.
- ptsneves 11mo ago
  This is the rare earth minerals dumping all over again. Devalue to such a price as to make the market participants quit, so they can later have a strategic stranglehold on the supply. This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it. It is a kind of cheat on the fair market but at the same time it is also costly to China and its capital costs may become unsustainable before the last players fold.
  - jsiepkes 11mo ago
    The way we fund the AI bubble in the west could also be described as: "kind of cheat on the fair market". OpenAI has never made a single dime of profit.
    - nylonstrung 11mo ago
      Yeah and OpenAI's CPO was artificially commissioned as a Lt. Colonel in the US Army in conjunction with a $200M contract Absurd to say Deepseek is CCP controlled while ignoring the govt connection here
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    > This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it. It's a bit early to have any sort of feelings about it, isn't it? You're speaking in absolutes, but none of this is necessarily 100% true as we don't know their intentions. And judging a group of individuals intention based on what their country seems to want, from the lens of a foreign country, usually doesn't land you with the right interpretation.
  - CamperBob2 11mo ago
    Good luck making OpenAI and Google cry uncle. They have the US government on their side. They will not be allowed to fail, and they know it. What I appreciate about the Chinese efforts is that they are being forced to get more intelligence from less hardware, and they are not only releasing their work products but documenting the R&D behind them at least as well as our own closed-source companies do. A good reason to stir up dumping accusations and anti-China bias would be if they stopped publishing not just the open-source models, but the technical papers that go with them. Until that happens, I think it's better to prefer more charitable explanations for their posture.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
gazaim 11mo ago
*Communist Party of China (CPC)
- v0y4g3r 11mo ago
  You nailed it
amunozo 11mo ago
The motive is to destroy the American supremacy on AI, it's not that deep. This is much easier to do open sourcing the models than competing directly, and this can have good ramifications for everybody, even if the motive is "bad".
tehjoker 11mo ago
the motive is to prevent us dominance of this space, which is a good thing
- mac-attack 11mo ago
  And the next question is what have they some with power historically, and what are they liable to do in the future with said power. Limiting scope to AI is shortsighted and doesn't speak to the concerns people have beyond an Ai Race
  - tehjoker 11mo ago
    It's a fair question, but my view of America's influence on world affairs has been dismal. China by contrast has not had a history of invading its neighbors, though I strongly criticize their involvement in the American attack on Cambodia and Vietnam (China supported the Khmer Rouge and briefly invaded Vietnam but was quickly pushed back, a reason Mao is sometimes criticized as having a good early period and a bad late period). Meanwhile, America has been causing death and destruction around the world. It's easy to make lists: Vietnam, Iraq, Gaza, Cuba, South and Central America etc etc.
    - mac-attack 11mo ago
      I am an American and can appreciate the shortcomings of my country. I also have the ability to see the shortcomings of China as well. Do you see the irony that I asked to reflect on China's history and you instead list things you don't like about the US?
stared 11mo ago
Do you think it is from goodness of their heart that corporates support open source? E.g. Microsoft - VSCode and Typescript, Meta - PyTorch and React, Google - Chromium and Go. Yet, we (developers, users, human civilization), benefit from that. So yes, I cherish when Chinese companies release open source LLMs. Be it as it fits their business model (the same way as US companies) or from grants (the same way as a lot of EU-backed projects, e.g. Python, DuckDB, scikit-learn).

To push back on naivety I'm sensing here I think it's a little silly to see Chinese Communist Party backed enterprise as somehow magnanimous and without ulterior, very harmful motive.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

jascha_eng 11mo ago

Oh they need control of models to be able to censor and ensure whatever happens inside the country with AI stays under their control. But the open-source part? Idk I think they do it to mess with the US investment and for the typical open source reasons of companies: community, marketing, etc. But tbh especially the messing with the US, as a european with no serious competitor, I can get behind.

catigula 11mo ago
They're pouring money to disrupt American AI markets and efforts. They do this in countless other fields. It's a model of massive state funding -> give it away for cut-rate -> dominate the market -> reap the rewards. It's a very transparent, consistent strategy. AI is a little different because it has geopolitical implications.
- ForceBru 11mo ago
  When it's a competition among individual producers, we call it "a free market" and praise Hal Varian. When it's a competition among countries, it's suddenly threatening to "disrupt American AI markets and efforts". The obvious solution here is to pour money into LLM research too. Massive state funding -> provide SOTA models for free -> dominate the market -> reap the rewards (from the free models).
  - catigula 11mo ago
    We don't do that.
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    It's not like the US doesn't face similar accusations. One such case is the WTO accusing Boeing of receiving illegal subsidies from the US government. https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-gave-illegal-aid-boeing https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-ga...
- tokioyoyo 11mo ago
  I can’t believe I’m shilling for China in these comments, but how different it is for company A getting blank check investments from VCs and wink-wink support from the government in the west? And AI-labs in China has been getting funding internally in the companies for a while now, before the LLM-era.
ptsneves 11mo ago
This is the rare earth minerals dumping all over again. Devalue to such a price as to make the market participants quit, so they can later have a strategic stranglehold on the supply. This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it. It is a kind of cheat on the fair market but at the same time it is also costly to China and its capital costs may become unsustainable before the last players fold.
- jsiepkes 11mo ago
  The way we fund the AI bubble in the west could also be described as: "kind of cheat on the fair market". OpenAI has never made a single dime of profit.
  - nylonstrung 11mo ago
    Yeah and OpenAI's CPO was artificially commissioned as a Lt. Colonel in the US Army in conjunction with a $200M contract Absurd to say Deepseek is CCP controlled while ignoring the govt connection here
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it. It's a bit early to have any sort of feelings about it, isn't it? You're speaking in absolutes, but none of this is necessarily 100% true as we don't know their intentions. And judging a group of individuals intention based on what their country seems to want, from the lens of a foreign country, usually doesn't land you with the right interpretation.
- CamperBob2 11mo ago
  Good luck making OpenAI and Google cry uncle. They have the US government on their side. They will not be allowed to fail, and they know it. What I appreciate about the Chinese efforts is that they are being forced to get more intelligence from less hardware, and they are not only releasing their work products but documenting the R&D behind them at least as well as our own closed-source companies do. A good reason to stir up dumping accusations and anti-China bias would be if they stopped publishing not just the open-source models, but the technical papers that go with them. Until that happens, I think it's better to prefer more charitable explanations for their posture.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

gazaim 11mo ago

*Communist Party of China (CPC)

v0y4g3r 11mo ago
You nailed it

amunozo 11mo ago

The motive is to destroy the American supremacy on AI, it's not that deep. This is much easier to do open sourcing the models than competing directly, and this can have good ramifications for everybody, even if the motive is "bad".

tehjoker 11mo ago

the motive is to prevent us dominance of this space, which is a good thing

mac-attack 11mo ago
And the next question is what have they some with power historically, and what are they liable to do in the future with said power. Limiting scope to AI is shortsighted and doesn't speak to the concerns people have beyond an Ai Race
- tehjoker 11mo ago
  It's a fair question, but my view of America's influence on world affairs has been dismal. China by contrast has not had a history of invading its neighbors, though I strongly criticize their involvement in the American attack on Cambodia and Vietnam (China supported the Khmer Rouge and briefly invaded Vietnam but was quickly pushed back, a reason Mao is sometimes criticized as having a good early period and a bad late period). Meanwhile, America has been causing death and destruction around the world. It's easy to make lists: Vietnam, Iraq, Gaza, Cuba, South and Central America etc etc.
  - mac-attack 11mo ago
    I am an American and can appreciate the shortcomings of my country. I also have the ability to see the shortcomings of China as well. Do you see the irony that I asked to reflect on China's history and you instead list things you don't like about the US?

stared 11mo ago

Do you think it is from goodness of their heart that corporates support open source? E.g. Microsoft - VSCode and Typescript, Meta - PyTorch and React, Google - Chromium and Go. Yet, we (developers, users, human civilization), benefit from that. So yes, I cherish when Chinese companies release open source LLMs. Be it as it fits their business model (the same way as US companies) or from grants (the same way as a lot of EU-backed projects, e.g. Python, DuckDB, scikit-learn).