6 ms·

> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever Yes. I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that

by gpm 4mo ago

> Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever Yes. I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. And simultaneously that the only way they can actually get everyone to use their models is if it's possible for us to run them on our own hardware. (This isn't exactly a utopian view of the future)

tw1984 4mo ago
> I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. that doesn't require the model to be SOTA, it can be just a compact model capable of running on some inexpensive hardware. that is vastly different from SOTA models like Mythos which can potentially disrupt lots of things.
- strangegecko 4mo ago
  Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.
  - columnarx3 4mo ago
    People choose SOTA right now because of the heavily subsidised model subscriptions. People aren't going to pay 20x the price for a model that's maybe 10% better.
    - ezst 4mo ago
      And the fact that "better" is highly subjective and domain/task/vibe-specific
  - adrianN 4mo ago
    Why do I want the model I use for coding to know Shakespeare or vice versa?
    - Jare 4mo ago
      Because you communicate with it using natural language and real-world references and descriptions of what you want, you use emotion and emphasis (especially when re-prompting), you use examples and illustrative stories and common expressions. Understanding and interpreting all of that and replying in kind, to some degree, requires a large body of non-computation, cultural knowledge, or else the prompts are just meaningless words, and the replies will look like compiler output.
      - adrianN 4mo ago
        That sounds intuitively true, but I’m not convinced that it is actually the case. I don’t think we know enough about neural network training to say what training and how many parameters are necessary for what kind of performance on which tasks. To me it looks like we currently guess that more is better and try to throw as much compute and data at the problem as is economically feasible. There is little incentive for companies to invest into small model research since their moat is huge models that require special hardware to run.
    - Der_Einzige 4mo ago
      This is why: https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/ https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/
  - rjzzleep 4mo ago
    Small models are the future.
jychang 4mo ago
This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models. Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen versions would have open source releases, but Qwen 3.7 plus does not. The second best Chinese model, Minimax M3, is testing the waters by taking longer and longer between “model release” and open sourcing it. This time, they spent 2 weeks after release before open sourcing it. There’s also a lot of rumors of GLM and Deepseek not open sourcing future models. It’s pretty obvious that you cannot take Chinese models as open source for granted, they’ll be closed source soon.
- ls612 4mo ago
  The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.
  - londons_explore 4mo ago
    With nearly everyone using inference accelerators, the pool of hardware is no longer shared between training and use.
  - SubiculumCode 4mo ago
    No, they are open sourcing them because they don't have another play, being second/3rd tier lans
  - Slartie 4mo ago
    I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies. China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power. Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run. As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.
nine_k 4mo ago
The US administration restricting the use of US-trained models is one of the best gifts it could make to the Chinese LLM producers, and to the PRC government.
- dozerly 4mo ago
  This entire administration is a gift to everybody but the US. It’s either in service of Russia, China or whoever is willing to pay Trump the most.
  - rjzzleep 4mo ago
    Chinese have a nickname for Trump. 川建国. Trump the nation builder(meaning China). But Biden actually continued most of Trumps policies.
    - Der_Einzige 4mo ago
      I won’t forgive Biden for not reversing more of trumps policies, especially immigration Between RBJ refusing to step down, Biden not reversing immigration policy, and Biden refusing to step down in the primary until too late, he’s going to go down as a poor president in the history books - even if he wasn’t a bad dude or even bad in terms of policy.
      - FpUser 4mo ago
        He was getting senile. What did you expect. There must be age limit for rulers
        Der_Einzige 4mo ago
        Trump was also getting senile before they attempted to assassinate him. Hatred of his enemies gave him another 5 years of energy. Very frustrating, because he absolutly was doing word salad nonsense like this regularly before someone tried to shoot him: "Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible." - Donald Trump, 2016
close04 4mo ago
You don’t need the cutting edge to influence people’s opinion. “Export LLMs” to the rescue.
vintermann 4mo ago
There's also the Meta motivation, that even if you don't get the control you would like from releasing a model, it may still be worth it to at least deny others that control. I'm sure that matters even more to China vs. the US than it mattered to Facebook vs. Google.
baq 4mo ago
> > Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever > Yes. holy shit the naivete of HN nowadays.
spiralpolitik 4mo ago
There is no moat in the model and by making the them open, it’s hard for one to be established when the free models are “good enough”. OpenAI and Anthropic are both hamstrung by this. Anthropic does have the better chance of surviving.

by gpm 4mo ago

tw1984 4mo ago

> I think the Chinese government either already has, or will soon, grasp that if they train the models that people use they dictate what people believe (at least around the margins where that's malleable), and they will happily throw resources at that. that doesn't require the model to be SOTA, it can be just a compact model capable of running on some inexpensive hardware. that is vastly different from SOTA models like Mythos which can potentially disrupt lots of things.

strangegecko 4mo ago
Of course it requires SOTA, people will always choose better models over some compact thing that is obviously more limited. You can't control the truth with models nobody wants to use.
- columnarx3 4mo ago
  People choose SOTA right now because of the heavily subsidised model subscriptions. People aren't going to pay 20x the price for a model that's maybe 10% better.
  - ezst 4mo ago
    And the fact that "better" is highly subjective and domain/task/vibe-specific
- adrianN 4mo ago
  Why do I want the model I use for coding to know Shakespeare or vice versa?
  - Jare 4mo ago
    Because you communicate with it using natural language and real-world references and descriptions of what you want, you use emotion and emphasis (especially when re-prompting), you use examples and illustrative stories and common expressions. Understanding and interpreting all of that and replying in kind, to some degree, requires a large body of non-computation, cultural knowledge, or else the prompts are just meaningless words, and the replies will look like compiler output.
    - adrianN 4mo ago
      That sounds intuitively true, but I’m not convinced that it is actually the case. I don’t think we know enough about neural network training to say what training and how many parameters are necessary for what kind of performance on which tasks. To me it looks like we currently guess that more is better and try to throw as much compute and data at the problem as is economically feasible. There is little incentive for companies to invest into small model research since their moat is huge models that require special hardware to run.
  - Der_Einzige 4mo ago
    This is why: https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/ https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/
- rjzzleep 4mo ago
  Small models are the future.

jychang 4mo ago

This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models. Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen versions would have open source releases, but Qwen 3.7 plus does not. The second best Chinese model, Minimax M3, is testing the waters by taking longer and longer between “model release” and open sourcing it. This time, they spent 2 weeks after release before open sourcing it. There’s also a lot of rumors of GLM and Deepseek not open sourcing future models. It’s pretty obvious that you cannot take Chinese models as open source for granted, they’ll be closed source soon.

ls612 4mo ago
The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.
- londons_explore 4mo ago
  With nearly everyone using inference accelerators, the pool of hardware is no longer shared between training and use.
- SubiculumCode 4mo ago
  No, they are open sourcing them because they don't have another play, being second/3rd tier lans
- Slartie 4mo ago
  I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies. China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power. Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run. As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.

nine_k 4mo ago

The US administration restricting the use of US-trained models is one of the best gifts it could make to the Chinese LLM producers, and to the PRC government.

dozerly 4mo ago
This entire administration is a gift to everybody but the US. It’s either in service of Russia, China or whoever is willing to pay Trump the most.
- rjzzleep 4mo ago
  Chinese have a nickname for Trump. 川建国. Trump the nation builder(meaning China). But Biden actually continued most of Trumps policies.
  - Der_Einzige 4mo ago
    I won’t forgive Biden for not reversing more of trumps policies, especially immigration Between RBJ refusing to step down, Biden not reversing immigration policy, and Biden refusing to step down in the primary until too late, he’s going to go down as a poor president in the history books - even if he wasn’t a bad dude or even bad in terms of policy.
    - FpUser 4mo ago
      He was getting senile. What did you expect. There must be age limit for rulers
      - Der_Einzige 4mo ago
        Trump was also getting senile before they attempted to assassinate him. Hatred of his enemies gave him another 5 years of energy. Very frustrating, because he absolutly was doing word salad nonsense like this regularly before someone tried to shoot him: "Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible." - Donald Trump, 2016

close04 4mo ago

You don’t need the cutting edge to influence people’s opinion. “Export LLMs” to the rescue.

vintermann 4mo ago

There's also the Meta motivation, that even if you don't get the control you would like from releasing a model, it may still be worth it to at least deny others that control. I'm sure that matters even more to China vs. the US than it mattered to Facebook vs. Google.

baq 4mo ago

> > Do you think that Chinese labs will continue to release open models forever > Yes. holy shit the naivete of HN nowadays.

spiralpolitik 4mo ago

There is no moat in the model and by making the them open, it’s hard for one to be established when the free models are “good enough”. OpenAI and Anthropic are both hamstrung by this. Anthropic does have the better chance of surviving.