4 ms·

I'm not sure it does. China can churn out all the behind the times models that it wants to and make them open source but what people are willing to pay for are

• verdverm 5mo ago
  > what people are willing to pay for are genuinely useful and incredible models at the high end I do not believe this to be true in the long run. I think American Ai companies understand this. I've already made the switch because the difference is increasingly small. Progress up to now shows us that the small models are about 1 year behind frontier, and at some point will become good enough for the majority of tasks, i.e. you don't always need the biggest or the best. This conversation is already happening, where people are choosing the smaller models from American companies, or moving to open weight models they can run themselves. Heck, Congress even has American companies coming in to testify about their usage of Chinese models because they do not understand the difference between downloading and running it yourself vs making API calls to servers in another country.
  • ericmay 5mo ago
    We'll find out but certainly in the software industry many companies pay for those services I mentioned even when there are cheaper alternatives. It's one thing to download some "small" model and hack around, but that does not translate to efficiency at scale. The "small" models and such haven't proven to be profitable and so you can wind up with some, certainly powerful, small models but they'll be far enough behind that the bleeding edge models will continue to compound games. It's no different than any other positive feedback loop - you see it in chip design and software in general. If all China is doing is releasing models that are 6 months or more behind for free, forget it. Game over. That's 6 months of run time for a better model to exploit vulnerabilities or whatever. I think there's plenty of room for lots of approaches. But similar to how Open Office is nice and all, Microsoft Office makes however many hundreds of millions. I'm not really sure why folks believe that what we're seeing today will be any different. Bleeding edge compounds gains and advantage. American tech companies are run by some of the smartest people on the planet and from all over the planet. They're not spending hundreds of billions of dollars because they're wrong and because some 1-year behind model is a big threat.
    • verdverm 5mo ago
      The big models have not shown to be profitable, likely the small models will first since it's on the order of 100x cheaper There is a likely world (imo) where Big AI produces mega models primarily to distill them down into economically viable sized models China also has mega models, US also has open models. Both groups are doing the same things. AllenAi is the most open but their models have not been competitive
      • ericmay 5mo ago
        The pathway for the big models to be profitable is much clearer though. Some of the lack of profitability is simply distilled into CapEx. Generally I agree though - I think there will be lots of models, lots of business models, &c - I just think the arguing point about China is wrong which is what I'm interested in pushing back on.
• bigbadfeline 5mo ago
  > So sure you can churn out free/cheap stuff, but that's not a business model, that's desperation. Framing it as "desperation" does have some dramatic effect but it says nothing about the potency of the counter-measures being deployed. > We're completely and demonstrably capable of dominating this space. That's the kind of blind faith mixed with self-deception that led to the recent war. Depending on who you ask, "we" are completely dominating "them" but the vast majority of "US" aren't dominating anything, we are being dominated by high gas prices and inflation. Kinky dominatrix games are full of risk and they aren't worth even 10% of their cost. > We are incredibly competitive, dynamic, innovative and operate with very deep capital markets. If you knew something about economics, you'd know that the presence of high inflation is a sign of depleted capital markets. Blind faith and reality aren't the same. > The risk factor is anti-American propaganda and leftist subversion convincing people that adoption of technology is a bad thing... or implementing other ass-backwards policies and we wind up behind. That's the usual war propaganda, full of meaningless generalities, sound bites and straw men. The value of technology doesn't exist outside of economics - it's the difference between what it provides and what it costs over the time frame of adoption. In other words, rushing a generally good technology can turn it into a monster - that's exactly what's happening here. It's similar to rushing into war while other means are neglected or deliberately ruined. In both cases the only results are market manipulation, enrichment of the very few and making life harder for the rest.
  • ericmay 5mo ago
    > Framing it as "desperation" does have some dramatic effect but it says nothing about the potency of the counter-measures being deployed. I don't think it's any less potent than other claims that have been made. When you're behind you tend to release stuff for free (Meta comes to mind). > That's the kind of blind faith mixed with self-deception that led to the recent war. I'm not sure why you're bringing Iran into this because I'm not too sure it's relevant, but even so the Iran war was a good idea. You need to free yourself from the short-term political oriented thinking and instead think about this more long-term, strategic, and historical. Iran is firmly in the camp of China and Russia. What better time than now to knock them down severely so that if war comes with one or both China and Russia we have a less capable Iran causing chaos in the Middle East and further disrupting global oil supplies? > Depending on who you ask, "we" are completely dominating "them" but the vast majority of "US" aren't dominating anything, I don't know what this means but I guess it sounds cool. Broadly speaking I did say we were capable of dominating in this space, it's not a sure thing which I would be among the first to admit. > we are being dominated by high gas prices and inflation. There's a lot to unpack here, but suffice to say it's worse for everyone else, including China. MAGA coal rollers pay more at the pump. Whatever. No big deal. > If you knew something about economics, you'd know that the presence of high inflation is a sign of depleted capital markets. Blind faith and reality aren't the same. Can you elaborate? I don't know anything about economics as you said so I'm struggling to understand how "high" inflation of a few percent means the US has depleted capital markets. When were they depleted? For how long will they be depleted? Are you able to answer these questions? > That's the usual war propaganda, full of meaningless generalities, sound bites and straw men. Well it's not really propaganda. There was a thread about it on the front page the other day about college students booing commencement speakers when they talk about artificial intelligence. > The value of technology doesn't exist outside of economics - it's the difference between what it provides and what it costs over the time frame of adoption. Can you be more elaborate? I'm not sure what you're talking about. I don't know much about economics. > In other words, rushing a generally good technology can turn it into a monster Sure! So make sure you are continuously clamoring from every corner that China must slow down its adoption of AI.