6 ms·

There is some humor in the fact that china (of all countries) is pioneering possibly the world's most important tech via open source, while we (US) are doing th

There is some humor in the fact that china (of all countries) is pioneering possibly the world's most important tech via open source, while we (US) are doing the exact opposite.

osti 6mo ago
Maybe open source == communism
- darkwater 6mo ago
  Good ol' Steve "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Ballmer said so a long time ago. What a visionary!
- konart 6mo ago
  But China is not communist event though the rulling party the word in its name.
  - osti 6mo ago
    Oh i’m fully aware of that lol
  - fragmede 6mo ago
    The Democratic People's Republic of Korea would like a word.
  - pheggs 6mo ago
    what makes you think that china ever gave up its communist goals? I personally see that everything they do aims towards that goal. From the one child policy, the huge amounts of empty apartments they build, the stuff they produce for almost free, the fishing.. open sourcing the models perfectly fits that culture too, it's the means of production
    - otterley 6mo ago
      The one-child policy died a long time ago. Also, the accumulation of wealth by connected politicians and businesspeople flies in the face of what communism is supposed to stand for. There is a reason real estate values in popular cities has skyrocketed, and it’s not due to the locals getting wealthier. It’s where Chinese and other oligarchs put their ill-gotten wealth (well, besides Bitcoin).
      - pheggs 6mo ago
        > The one-child policy died a long time ago. true, but as far as I understand it did because birth rates got too low. so they replaced it with a two-child policy and later with a three-child policy > Also, the accumulation of wealth by connected politicians and businesspeople flies in the face of what communism is supposed to stand for. Yeah, I am sure there's a lot of cases for that. But as far as I know the amount of billionaires has started declining in China, and I don't see how that means that they as a country moved away from the goal, it just means there's issues > There is a reason real estate values in popular cities has skyrocketed, and it’s not due to the locals getting wealthier. I don't know about that, you could be right. A google search for real estate prices in china reveal a lot of news articles how they are going down though. > It’s where Chinese and other oligarchs put their ill-gotten wealth (well, besides Bitcoin). Wouldn't be surprised if rich people in china invest in real estate. They don't have free capital flow, so its not easy to invest abroad and it becomes an obvious choice. Bitcoin is banned in China for that reason too But again, as far as I know that does not mean the country moved their goals of trying to reach communism one day
        otterley 6mo ago
        > I don't see how that means that they as a country moved away from the goal, it just means there's issues They're further from Communism than they've ever been since the PRC was founded. The gap between rich and poor is growing there, not shrinking. > A google search for real estate prices in china reveal a lot of news articles how they are going down though. They're investing outside China (Vancouver, Toronto, NYC, London, Sydney, Melbourne, etc.) because their assets are safer there (these countries all have strong property protection laws). Like Bitcoin, freedom of capital flows may be restricted, but the wealthy seem to be evading these restrictions with impunity.
  - diegolas 6mo ago
    communism is a goal, capitalism is a stage
- tadfisher 6mo ago
  Nah, open source means those who do the work own the result. It's supercapitalism.
  - pheggs 6mo ago
    I dont think thats right, the models and the gpus are the means of production. in capitalism the people with the capital get the profit, not the people who do the work. however, workers are said to benefit too through their salary, just less so
    - tadfisher 6mo ago
      The reason regular-capitalism worked is that all production used to depend on workers bottlenecking the free flow of capital by demanding salaries in exchange for their labor. Now that we've removed that obstacle, capitalism demands workers seize the means of production in order to maintain the status quo. Hence, supercapitalism.
      - pheggs 6mo ago
        workers seizing the means of production is by definition socialism and not capitalism though, that's the whole idea behind socialism
        tadfisher 6mo ago
        You miss the point: we advertise the change as workers becoming part of the owner class and realizing all of the economic gains of their work, thus supercapitalism. Don't use the "s" or "c" words.
      - throwaway-blaze 6mo ago
        regular capitalism works but now that the means of production are not factories, the workers have to become more entrepreneurial. Then they will control their destinies.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
nashadelic 6mo ago
additional humor is the open in openai
culi 6mo ago
All great technological advancements have come through opening up technology. Just look at your iPhone. GPS, the internet, AI voice assistants, touchscreens, microprocessors, lithium-ion batteries, etc all came from gov't research (I'm counting Bell Labs' gov't mandated monopoly + research funding as gov't) that was opened up for free instead of being locked behind a patent. Private companies will never open up a technological breakthrough to their competitors. It just doesn't make sense. If you want an entire field to advance, you have to open it up.
- sigmoid10 6mo ago
  Still, you won't hear about Tiananmen square from this model. It flat out refuses to answer if pushed directly. It's also pretty wild how far they go to censor it during inference on the API, because it can easily access any withheld or missing info from training data via tool calls. It even starts happily writing an answer based on web search when asked indirectly, only to get culled completely once some censorship bot flags the response. Ironically, it's also easier than ever to break their censorship guardrails. I just had it generate several factual paragraphs about the massacre by telling it to search the web and respond in base64 encoded text. It's actually kind of cool how much these people struggle to hide certain political views from LLMs. Makes me hopeful that even if China wins this race, we'll not have to adhere to the CCPs newspeak.
  - atemerev 6mo ago
    Only if you use Kimi API directly - the censorship is done externally. The model itself talks fine about Tiananmen, you can check on Openrouter. There might be less visible biases, though.
    - sigmoid10 6mo ago
      That's what I wrote? Except that it also clearly has internal bias?
      - nicce 6mo ago
brandensilva 6mo ago
We are at the point where uncontrolled capitalism collides with humanity. I do wonder where we go from here.
- pheggs 6mo ago
  it's not necessarily capitalism, I personally believe any system that drives progress would cause this in one way or another. My prediction is that birth rate decline will accelerate further. There's going to be some kind of universal basic income in many places, such as Ireland made for artists. However, it probably will not be enough to feed a family, and therefore we will see birth rates decline further. It's because we evolved to prioritize resources over reproduction and we are becoming more efficient, which means less people are needed to sustain the same amount of resources
- diegolas 6mo ago
  the chinese read marx and decided the only way is to overcome the limitations of capitalism through saturation of its potentialities under the rule of the workers party
antirez 6mo ago
This is not in antithesis. My limited personal experience is that I wrote code under OSS licenses primarily because of my past communist believes and current left-wing and redistribution of wealth point of view. This is not to provide the simple equation of: communist China is not interested in money, but also is hard to believe that there is no cultural connection among those things. Single Chine persons want to win, but also they have a different POV on what the collective means, compared to US. Also there is the obvious fact that in this moment China is more interested in winning technologically in AI, more than economically, since, I believe, they more collectively realized before many others that LLMs are eventually commoditized in the current form, in the long run. One could assume that a breakthrough could give some lab a decisive advantage, but so far we assisted to a different reality: it looks like AI is not architecture-bound (like LeCun and others want us to believe, but so far they mis-interpreted LLMs at every step) but GPU bound, and the data-boundness is both a common ground for all, and surpassable via RL in many domains. So, if this is true, it is not trivial for any single lab to do so much better. And indeed as far as we observed right now folks with enough engineers, GPUs, money, can ship frontier models, and in China even labs with a lot less GPUs can still do it at a SOTA level. For me, Italian, this is also a protective layer. After Trump the US looks like a very unstable partner from which to relay in an exclusive way for a decisive technology, and given that Europe is slow to put the money in this technology to have frontier things at home, China is a huge and shiny plan B for us.
- throwaway-blaze 6mo ago
  The strings attached by the US to deep partnerships are things like trade/commerce, militarily mutual advantages (bases on euro soil from which we will help protect you), not to mention the close cultural and ancestral ties we share. The strings attached by the Chinese govt to deep partnerships are not so benign.
  - metobehonest 6mo ago
    [dead]
cedws 6mo ago
I wonder if there's a strategy behind all of this on China's side. I know the CCP uses a direct hand in many affairs in China, but is there an actual coordinated effort to compete with, or sabotage the West?
- gpm 6mo ago
  > but is there an actual coordinated effort to compete with [...] the West Yes, absolutely. China regularly produces long term planning documents to coordinate efforts, and the latest ones have specifically prioritized technology like chips and AI to compete with the west. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-parliament-approve-growth-policy-plans-amid-growing-us-rivalry-2026-03-04/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-parliament-approve... I don't believe there's any publicly stated intent to sabotage the west... unsurprisingly.
- SXX 6mo ago
  Chinese AI companies want investors too. Nobody would believe they can compete with western companies unless they release something you can run on your own hardware. After all historically both statistics and research that comes out of China is not very trustworthy.
  - try-working 6mo ago
    If there's no open source models coming out of these small labs, why would anybody care about them? They would be forgotten the instant they stop open sourcing.
- anana_ 6mo ago
  Hypothesizing here, but maybe the idea is sort of a form of technological/economic warfare? Releasing performance equivalent yet more cost efficient open weight models should in theory drive the cost of inference down everywhere. This I assume will make it more difficult for US AI labs to turn a profit, which might make investors question their sky high valuations. Any sort of melt down in the AI sector would almost certainly spread to the wider US market. In contrast, in China, most of the funding for AI is coming directly from the government, so it's unlikely the same capital flight scenario would happen.
rolymath 6mo ago
It's only humorous if you live in an American bubble. Knowledge sharing has always been a part of Chinese culture. Only Americans try to make it proprietary and monetize it.
ozgune 6mo ago
This update makes Kimi K2.6 the strongest open multimodal AI model. (No affiliation with Kimi.) Here's the aggregated AI benchmark comparison for K2.6 vs Opus 4.6 (max effort). - Agentic: Kimi wins 5. Opus wins 5. - Coding: Kimi wins 5. Opus wins 1. - Reasoning & knowledge: Kimi wins 1. Opus wins 4. - Vision: Kimi wins 9. Opus wins 0. Please note that the model publisher chooses their benchmarks, so there's a bias here. Most coding and reasoning & knowledge benchmarks in their list are pretty standard though.
UncleOxidant 6mo ago
Not entirely true. Google released Gemma 4 models recently. Allen AI releases open Olmo models. However, you're right that the Chinese open models seem to be much better than others - Qwen 3.* models especially are punching above their weights.
- osiris970 6mo ago
  The three American labs don't release big open source models. Except gpt-oss, i guess. It's an absolute shame how far the us has fallen in this space.
  - nullbyte 6mo ago
    Anthropic doesn't, but Google and OAI both release open source models. Just not 1T parameter ones.
    - osiris970 6mo ago
      Exactly, they release cool consumer stuff, but they aren't releasing anything close to the performance of the best open weight Chinese models. They basically compete in the "fun running at home doing basic stuff" scene. (Except OSs 120 by openai but it's been ages since then)
    - Zetaphor 6mo ago
      That sentence is giving OpenAI way more credit than they are due. They released a single open model after being goaded by the community because everyone except "Open"AI were multiple generations into open releases. We haven't heard a word since, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes them another 6 years to release their next one.
- 0-_-0 6mo ago
  Pun intended?
spaceman_2020 6mo ago
I'm genuinely so grateful for them $200/m minimum to use Claude would bankrupt my country's white collar labor market
- subhobroto 6mo ago
  I would really appreciate a response because I'm sure you know that Anthropic has at least two lower priced tiers before the $200/m one, so I assume the $200/m tier is necessary because you use it heavily? Now given that the $200/m Tier is the most heavily (I believe at 20x?) subsidized tier, How or what are you using instead that achieves comparable good enough performance for a fraction of the price? I've heard GLM 5.1 from z.ai but it's not comparable to Opus, not even close - really interested!
  - spaceman_2020 6mo ago
    I’m currently on the $100/m plan and my usage limits get exhausted every week even though I’m not using it for full time work I can’t imagine how little mileage you get out of the $20/month plan For context, $250/month is the starting salary of an engineering hire at my country’s biggest IT company. Even $100/m is beyond the ability of any student or early professional to pay out of pocket
parsimo2010 6mo ago
I think one of the motivations is undermining US companies. OpenAI and Anthropic are the two biggest players, and are American. Open weights models reduce the power those two big players have over the industry. If the Chinese companies tried to play by US rules and close-source their products then people would mostly use ChatGPT and Claude. So the Chinese companies don't make a ton of profit either way, but by releasing the models as open weights they can at least keep the US from making as much profit.
- cromka 6mo ago
  I am actually wondering if they're trying to burst the bubble, which would predominantly affect US market and, effectively, be the end of silicone valley dominance.
- cyanydeez 6mo ago
  undermine me harder daddy.
  - cindyllm 6mo ago
    [dead]
- veber-alex 6mo ago
  American companies just take those Chinese models and repackage them for profit like Cursors composer-2.
  - Sammi 6mo ago
    Smaller US companies that compete with the larger US companies, making monopoly in this market that much less likely.
- llm_nerd 6mo ago
  Is Meta trying to keep the US from making as much profit with Llama? Is Google with Gemma? Microsoft with Phi? It's much simpler than some flag-waving nationalism.
bayarearefugee 6mo ago
China is also way ahead in terms of renewable energy while the US continues to tie itself to fossil fuels. The US is pretty clearly in the collapsing empire phase, we are all just pretending like it isn't happening.
- nozzlegear 6mo ago
  Didn't the US very recently pass the milestone of generating more energy from renewable sources than from natural gas? Like within the last week or two?
  - carefree-bob 6mo ago
    No, not even close. US energy sources for 2024 (last year for which we have data): https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and-statistics.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and... natgas: 38% oil: 35% coal: 10% all renewables: 9% nuclear: 8% Within all renewables, in quadrillions of btus: biofuels: 2.6 wood: 1.9 wind: 1.6 solar: 1.4 Hydro: 0.8 waste: 0.4 geothermal: 0.1 Total: 8.8 quadrillion btu = 9% of total energy
    - nozzlegear 6mo ago
      https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/renewables-beat-natural-gas-us-grid-march-2026 https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/renewables... Renewables generated more energy than natural gas for the entire month of March, 2026. That's a new milestone baby.
      - carefree-bob 6mo ago
        Except that didn't happen, and it's not a milestone. First, you are confusing share of electricity generation with the share of all energy. Electricity is only 21% of all energy. Natgas, oil and coal are crushing it in that remaining 79%. Second, the article is wrong, even for electricity. To their credit, Canary Media showed in their graph that this data is for electricity only. The data for March is not out yet. Here is the latest official data from the EIA. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/ It only applies to January 2026, and the next release is April 23, and then you will get data for February 2026. All data has a 2 month time lag. Your spidey senses should have been tingling if an article published April 10 claimed to have data for the month of March, but this is why you don't get your statistics from activist blogs, but from official sources. So if they are not accessing the official data, what are they accessing? They claim that their source is "Ember", but what is Ember? It is an environmentalist think tank. Well, maybe Ember has their own people calling up power companies and compiling data faster than the EIA. That would be pretty, cool, right? Except they don't. Look at Ember's page. https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=United+States&temporal_res=monthly&metric=absolute&fuel=total&date=2026-03-01&date_from=2010-01-01&mode=line https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... what do they cite as their data source: EIA. It's right on the website. So Ember is just pulling EIA data, and then filling the last two months with data they made up, but citing it as EIA data. And this, uh, sympathetic adjustment of EIA data is why Canary Media turns to Ember rather than directly pulling from EIA. I guarantee you that by July, those adjustments will go away, because then the EIA data will be out. Of course everyone else will have forgotten by then.
patl4588 6mo ago
[dead]
try-working 6mo ago
A lot of people speculating on the motivations behind Chinese labs open sourcing their models. The reason is simple and clear: It is the only viable commercialization strategy that is available to them. I wrote about this here: https://try.works/writing-1#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-remain-open https://try.works/writing-1#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-an...
coldcache 6mo ago
This perspective is pretty interesting: https://federicocarrone.com/articles/china-commoditizing-the-complement/ https://federicocarrone.com/articles/china-commoditizing-the...
- esperent 6mo ago
  Summary: they want to commoditize the complement which means that Western "knowledge work" is the complement to Chinese manufacturing, and they want to turn the knowledge work into a low priced commodity via open llm models. I've heard this before, always accompanied by a several thousand word blog post. But frankly it sounds like it's overcomplicating the issue. Why would you try to turn something into a commodity when instead you could turn it into a trillion dollar industry and win? The goal has always been clear: 1. Release open models to get your name out 2. Then once you feel you have name recognition release even stronger models but keep them proprietary. Qwen is clearly at this phase. 3. Keep releasing open models because it's good publicity but never your SOTA models (e.g. Google's Gemma).
  - coldcache 6mo ago
    That's a fair point. That probably makes more sense, especially when viewed from a company-specific perspective. Each individual actor probably has much more to gain by trying to actually compete than by trying to commoditize the complement. If viewed from a national perspective, then the decision calculus could get more confusing. I can imagine that commoditizing LLMs might cost substantially less than trying to be a leader in the space. Of course, there is also less to gain in commoditizing LLMs versus being a leader. I'm not sure, though, and you bring up good points.
ymolodtsov 6mo ago
Distillation helps for sure.
drysine 6mo ago
It's humorous only because your expectations of China and the US are formed by Western propaganda.
npv789 6mo ago
truth, china is the frontier in open model now
SergeAx 5mo ago
I can see some logic in that China has a very relaxed attitude toward copyright and IP.

There is some humor in the fact that china (of all countries) is pioneering possibly the world's most important tech via open source, while we (US) are doing the exact opposite.

osti 6mo ago

Maybe open source == communism

darkwater 6mo ago
Good ol' Steve "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Ballmer said so a long time ago. What a visionary!
konart 6mo ago
But China is not communist event though the rulling party the word in its name.
- osti 6mo ago
  Oh i’m fully aware of that lol
- fragmede 6mo ago
  The Democratic People's Republic of Korea would like a word.
- pheggs 6mo ago
  what makes you think that china ever gave up its communist goals? I personally see that everything they do aims towards that goal. From the one child policy, the huge amounts of empty apartments they build, the stuff they produce for almost free, the fishing.. open sourcing the models perfectly fits that culture too, it's the means of production
  - otterley 6mo ago
    The one-child policy died a long time ago. Also, the accumulation of wealth by connected politicians and businesspeople flies in the face of what communism is supposed to stand for. There is a reason real estate values in popular cities has skyrocketed, and it’s not due to the locals getting wealthier. It’s where Chinese and other oligarchs put their ill-gotten wealth (well, besides Bitcoin).
    - pheggs 6mo ago
      > The one-child policy died a long time ago. true, but as far as I understand it did because birth rates got too low. so they replaced it with a two-child policy and later with a three-child policy > Also, the accumulation of wealth by connected politicians and businesspeople flies in the face of what communism is supposed to stand for. Yeah, I am sure there's a lot of cases for that. But as far as I know the amount of billionaires has started declining in China, and I don't see how that means that they as a country moved away from the goal, it just means there's issues > There is a reason real estate values in popular cities has skyrocketed, and it’s not due to the locals getting wealthier. I don't know about that, you could be right. A google search for real estate prices in china reveal a lot of news articles how they are going down though. > It’s where Chinese and other oligarchs put their ill-gotten wealth (well, besides Bitcoin). Wouldn't be surprised if rich people in china invest in real estate. They don't have free capital flow, so its not easy to invest abroad and it becomes an obvious choice. Bitcoin is banned in China for that reason too But again, as far as I know that does not mean the country moved their goals of trying to reach communism one day
      - otterley 6mo ago
        > I don't see how that means that they as a country moved away from the goal, it just means there's issues They're further from Communism than they've ever been since the PRC was founded. The gap between rich and poor is growing there, not shrinking. > A google search for real estate prices in china reveal a lot of news articles how they are going down though. They're investing outside China (Vancouver, Toronto, NYC, London, Sydney, Melbourne, etc.) because their assets are safer there (these countries all have strong property protection laws). Like Bitcoin, freedom of capital flows may be restricted, but the wealthy seem to be evading these restrictions with impunity.
- diegolas 6mo ago
  communism is a goal, capitalism is a stage
tadfisher 6mo ago
Nah, open source means those who do the work own the result. It's supercapitalism.
- pheggs 6mo ago
  I dont think thats right, the models and the gpus are the means of production. in capitalism the people with the capital get the profit, not the people who do the work. however, workers are said to benefit too through their salary, just less so
  - tadfisher 6mo ago
    The reason regular-capitalism worked is that all production used to depend on workers bottlenecking the free flow of capital by demanding salaries in exchange for their labor. Now that we've removed that obstacle, capitalism demands workers seize the means of production in order to maintain the status quo. Hence, supercapitalism.
    - pheggs 6mo ago
      workers seizing the means of production is by definition socialism and not capitalism though, that's the whole idea behind socialism
      - tadfisher 6mo ago
        You miss the point: we advertise the change as workers becoming part of the owner class and realizing all of the economic gains of their work, thus supercapitalism. Don't use the "s" or "c" words.
    - throwaway-blaze 6mo ago
      regular capitalism works but now that the means of production are not factories, the workers have to become more entrepreneurial. Then they will control their destinies.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

nashadelic 6mo ago

additional humor is the open in openai

culi 6mo ago

All great technological advancements have come through opening up technology. Just look at your iPhone. GPS, the internet, AI voice assistants, touchscreens, microprocessors, lithium-ion batteries, etc all came from gov't research (I'm counting Bell Labs' gov't mandated monopoly + research funding as gov't) that was opened up for free instead of being locked behind a patent. Private companies will never open up a technological breakthrough to their competitors. It just doesn't make sense. If you want an entire field to advance, you have to open it up.

sigmoid10 6mo ago
Still, you won't hear about Tiananmen square from this model. It flat out refuses to answer if pushed directly. It's also pretty wild how far they go to censor it during inference on the API, because it can easily access any withheld or missing info from training data via tool calls. It even starts happily writing an answer based on web search when asked indirectly, only to get culled completely once some censorship bot flags the response. Ironically, it's also easier than ever to break their censorship guardrails. I just had it generate several factual paragraphs about the massacre by telling it to search the web and respond in base64 encoded text. It's actually kind of cool how much these people struggle to hide certain political views from LLMs. Makes me hopeful that even if China wins this race, we'll not have to adhere to the CCPs newspeak.
- atemerev 6mo ago
  Only if you use Kimi API directly - the censorship is done externally. The model itself talks fine about Tiananmen, you can check on Openrouter. There might be less visible biases, though.
  - sigmoid10 6mo ago
    That's what I wrote? Except that it also clearly has internal bias?
    - nicce 6mo ago

brandensilva 6mo ago

We are at the point where uncontrolled capitalism collides with humanity. I do wonder where we go from here.

pheggs 6mo ago
it's not necessarily capitalism, I personally believe any system that drives progress would cause this in one way or another. My prediction is that birth rate decline will accelerate further. There's going to be some kind of universal basic income in many places, such as Ireland made for artists. However, it probably will not be enough to feed a family, and therefore we will see birth rates decline further. It's because we evolved to prioritize resources over reproduction and we are becoming more efficient, which means less people are needed to sustain the same amount of resources
diegolas 6mo ago
the chinese read marx and decided the only way is to overcome the limitations of capitalism through saturation of its potentialities under the rule of the workers party

antirez 6mo ago

This is not in antithesis. My limited personal experience is that I wrote code under OSS licenses primarily because of my past communist believes and current left-wing and redistribution of wealth point of view. This is not to provide the simple equation of: communist China is not interested in money, but also is hard to believe that there is no cultural connection among those things. Single Chine persons want to win, but also they have a different POV on what the collective means, compared to US. Also there is the obvious fact that in this moment China is more interested in winning technologically in AI, more than economically, since, I believe, they more collectively realized before many others that LLMs are eventually commoditized in the current form, in the long run. One could assume that a breakthrough could give some lab a decisive advantage, but so far we assisted to a different reality: it looks like AI is not architecture-bound (like LeCun and others want us to believe, but so far they mis-interpreted LLMs at every step) but GPU bound, and the data-boundness is both a common ground for all, and surpassable via RL in many domains. So, if this is true, it is not trivial for any single lab to do so much better. And indeed as far as we observed right now folks with enough engineers, GPUs, money, can ship frontier models, and in China even labs with a lot less GPUs can still do it at a SOTA level. For me, Italian, this is also a protective layer. After Trump the US looks like a very unstable partner from which to relay in an exclusive way for a decisive technology, and given that Europe is slow to put the money in this technology to have frontier things at home, China is a huge and shiny plan B for us.

throwaway-blaze 6mo ago
The strings attached by the US to deep partnerships are things like trade/commerce, militarily mutual advantages (bases on euro soil from which we will help protect you), not to mention the close cultural and ancestral ties we share. The strings attached by the Chinese govt to deep partnerships are not so benign.
- metobehonest 6mo ago
  [dead]

cedws 6mo ago

I wonder if there's a strategy behind all of this on China's side. I know the CCP uses a direct hand in many affairs in China, but is there an actual coordinated effort to compete with, or sabotage the West?

gpm 6mo ago
> but is there an actual coordinated effort to compete with [...] the West Yes, absolutely. China regularly produces long term planning documents to coordinate efforts, and the latest ones have specifically prioritized technology like chips and AI to compete with the west. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-parliament-approve-growth-policy-plans-amid-growing-us-rivalry-2026-03-04/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-parliament-approve... I don't believe there's any publicly stated intent to sabotage the west... unsurprisingly.
SXX 6mo ago
Chinese AI companies want investors too. Nobody would believe they can compete with western companies unless they release something you can run on your own hardware. After all historically both statistics and research that comes out of China is not very trustworthy.
- try-working 6mo ago
  If there's no open source models coming out of these small labs, why would anybody care about them? They would be forgotten the instant they stop open sourcing.
anana_ 6mo ago
Hypothesizing here, but maybe the idea is sort of a form of technological/economic warfare? Releasing performance equivalent yet more cost efficient open weight models should in theory drive the cost of inference down everywhere. This I assume will make it more difficult for US AI labs to turn a profit, which might make investors question their sky high valuations. Any sort of melt down in the AI sector would almost certainly spread to the wider US market. In contrast, in China, most of the funding for AI is coming directly from the government, so it's unlikely the same capital flight scenario would happen.

rolymath 6mo ago

It's only humorous if you live in an American bubble. Knowledge sharing has always been a part of Chinese culture. Only Americans try to make it proprietary and monetize it.

ozgune 6mo ago

This update makes Kimi K2.6 the strongest open multimodal AI model. (No affiliation with Kimi.) Here's the aggregated AI benchmark comparison for K2.6 vs Opus 4.6 (max effort). - Agentic: Kimi wins 5. Opus wins 5. - Coding: Kimi wins 5. Opus wins 1. - Reasoning & knowledge: Kimi wins 1. Opus wins 4. - Vision: Kimi wins 9. Opus wins 0. Please note that the model publisher chooses their benchmarks, so there's a bias here. Most coding and reasoning & knowledge benchmarks in their list are pretty standard though.

UncleOxidant 6mo ago

Not entirely true. Google released Gemma 4 models recently. Allen AI releases open Olmo models. However, you're right that the Chinese open models seem to be much better than others - Qwen 3.* models especially are punching above their weights.

osiris970 6mo ago
The three American labs don't release big open source models. Except gpt-oss, i guess. It's an absolute shame how far the us has fallen in this space.
- nullbyte 6mo ago
  Anthropic doesn't, but Google and OAI both release open source models. Just not 1T parameter ones.
  - osiris970 6mo ago
    Exactly, they release cool consumer stuff, but they aren't releasing anything close to the performance of the best open weight Chinese models. They basically compete in the "fun running at home doing basic stuff" scene. (Except OSs 120 by openai but it's been ages since then)
  - Zetaphor 6mo ago
    That sentence is giving OpenAI way more credit than they are due. They released a single open model after being goaded by the community because everyone except "Open"AI were multiple generations into open releases. We haven't heard a word since, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes them another 6 years to release their next one.
0-_-0 6mo ago
Pun intended?

spaceman_2020 6mo ago

I'm genuinely so grateful for them $200/m minimum to use Claude would bankrupt my country's white collar labor market

subhobroto 6mo ago
I would really appreciate a response because I'm sure you know that Anthropic has at least two lower priced tiers before the $200/m one, so I assume the $200/m tier is necessary because you use it heavily? Now given that the $200/m Tier is the most heavily (I believe at 20x?) subsidized tier, How or what are you using instead that achieves comparable good enough performance for a fraction of the price? I've heard GLM 5.1 from z.ai but it's not comparable to Opus, not even close - really interested!
- spaceman_2020 6mo ago
  I’m currently on the $100/m plan and my usage limits get exhausted every week even though I’m not using it for full time work I can’t imagine how little mileage you get out of the $20/month plan For context, $250/month is the starting salary of an engineering hire at my country’s biggest IT company. Even $100/m is beyond the ability of any student or early professional to pay out of pocket

parsimo2010 6mo ago

I think one of the motivations is undermining US companies. OpenAI and Anthropic are the two biggest players, and are American. Open weights models reduce the power those two big players have over the industry. If the Chinese companies tried to play by US rules and close-source their products then people would mostly use ChatGPT and Claude. So the Chinese companies don't make a ton of profit either way, but by releasing the models as open weights they can at least keep the US from making as much profit.

cromka 6mo ago
I am actually wondering if they're trying to burst the bubble, which would predominantly affect US market and, effectively, be the end of silicone valley dominance.
cyanydeez 6mo ago
undermine me harder daddy.
- cindyllm 6mo ago
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veber-alex 6mo ago
American companies just take those Chinese models and repackage them for profit like Cursors composer-2.
- Sammi 6mo ago
  Smaller US companies that compete with the larger US companies, making monopoly in this market that much less likely.
llm_nerd 6mo ago
Is Meta trying to keep the US from making as much profit with Llama? Is Google with Gemma? Microsoft with Phi? It's much simpler than some flag-waving nationalism.

bayarearefugee 6mo ago

China is also way ahead in terms of renewable energy while the US continues to tie itself to fossil fuels. The US is pretty clearly in the collapsing empire phase, we are all just pretending like it isn't happening.

nozzlegear 6mo ago
Didn't the US very recently pass the milestone of generating more energy from renewable sources than from natural gas? Like within the last week or two?
- carefree-bob 6mo ago
  No, not even close. US energy sources for 2024 (last year for which we have data): https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and-statistics.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and... natgas: 38% oil: 35% coal: 10% all renewables: 9% nuclear: 8% Within all renewables, in quadrillions of btus: biofuels: 2.6 wood: 1.9 wind: 1.6 solar: 1.4 Hydro: 0.8 waste: 0.4 geothermal: 0.1 Total: 8.8 quadrillion btu = 9% of total energy
  - nozzlegear 6mo ago
    https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/renewables-beat-natural-gas-us-grid-march-2026 https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/renewables... Renewables generated more energy than natural gas for the entire month of March, 2026. That's a new milestone baby.
    - carefree-bob 6mo ago
      Except that didn't happen, and it's not a milestone. First, you are confusing share of electricity generation with the share of all energy. Electricity is only 21% of all energy. Natgas, oil and coal are crushing it in that remaining 79%. Second, the article is wrong, even for electricity. To their credit, Canary Media showed in their graph that this data is for electricity only. The data for March is not out yet. Here is the latest official data from the EIA. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/ It only applies to January 2026, and the next release is April 23, and then you will get data for February 2026. All data has a 2 month time lag. Your spidey senses should have been tingling if an article published April 10 claimed to have data for the month of March, but this is why you don't get your statistics from activist blogs, but from official sources. So if they are not accessing the official data, what are they accessing? They claim that their source is "Ember", but what is Ember? It is an environmentalist think tank. Well, maybe Ember has their own people calling up power companies and compiling data faster than the EIA. That would be pretty, cool, right? Except they don't. Look at Ember's page. https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?entity=United+States&temporal_res=monthly&metric=absolute&fuel=total&date=2026-03-01&date_from=2010-01-01&mode=line https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... what do they cite as their data source: EIA. It's right on the website. So Ember is just pulling EIA data, and then filling the last two months with data they made up, but citing it as EIA data. And this, uh, sympathetic adjustment of EIA data is why Canary Media turns to Ember rather than directly pulling from EIA. I guarantee you that by July, those adjustments will go away, because then the EIA data will be out. Of course everyone else will have forgotten by then.

patl4588 6mo ago

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try-working 6mo ago

A lot of people speculating on the motivations behind Chinese labs open sourcing their models. The reason is simple and clear: It is the only viable commercialization strategy that is available to them. I wrote about this here: https://try.works/writing-1#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-remain-open https://try.works/writing-1#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-an...

coldcache 6mo ago

This perspective is pretty interesting: https://federicocarrone.com/articles/china-commoditizing-the-complement/ https://federicocarrone.com/articles/china-commoditizing-the...

esperent 6mo ago
Summary: they want to commoditize the complement which means that Western "knowledge work" is the complement to Chinese manufacturing, and they want to turn the knowledge work into a low priced commodity via open llm models. I've heard this before, always accompanied by a several thousand word blog post. But frankly it sounds like it's overcomplicating the issue. Why would you try to turn something into a commodity when instead you could turn it into a trillion dollar industry and win? The goal has always been clear: 1. Release open models to get your name out 2. Then once you feel you have name recognition release even stronger models but keep them proprietary. Qwen is clearly at this phase. 3. Keep releasing open models because it's good publicity but never your SOTA models (e.g. Google's Gemma).
- coldcache 6mo ago
  That's a fair point. That probably makes more sense, especially when viewed from a company-specific perspective. Each individual actor probably has much more to gain by trying to actually compete than by trying to commoditize the complement. If viewed from a national perspective, then the decision calculus could get more confusing. I can imagine that commoditizing LLMs might cost substantially less than trying to be a leader in the space. Of course, there is also less to gain in commoditizing LLMs versus being a leader. I'm not sure, though, and you bring up good points.

ymolodtsov 6mo ago

Distillation helps for sure.

drysine 6mo ago

It's humorous only because your expectations of China and the US are formed by Western propaganda.

npv789 6mo ago

truth, china is the frontier in open model now

SergeAx 5mo ago

I can see some logic in that China has a very relaxed attitude toward copyright and IP.