4 ms·

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?

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
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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]