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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
by 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.
- Barbing 4mo agoYa. You know enough about China to know: would they be willing to sell users outside of China models that aren't fully pro-China (and won't deflect on tough questions)? Or would that be dirty money that they wouldn't want anyone to make? Like if they could release Ch-ythos 6 tomorrow BUT it had Western ideals, would they take the fame, clout, attention, & profit, or stick to the party line? (hope the monolithic brush is appropriate, considering, I mean it's an impressive system/country even if I have my own strong preferences - also I've taken as true reporting about their models deflecting etc. on sensitive topics)
- rvnx 4mo agoSounds perfect, sell it to me. I use LLMs for health, design and programming. If you want to make a political or religious pamphlet it’s not a single LLM that you should base yourself on. No matter where it comes from.
- Al-Khwarizmi 4mo agoI'm European and I don't see sending my data to China as more risky than sending it to the US. Rather the opposite. I think your vision of how the rest of the US sees the world is tinted by a massive bias.
- wongarsu 4mo agoAs a private citizen, yes. But at work the calculus is entirely different. There is already lots of exposure to US companies (guess where our emails and tickets life), so the increase in espionage risk from adding another American company is small. Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited. But adding the first Chinese company to send data to would be a major risk. One nobody would sign off on, given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information
- rvnx 4mo ago> given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information Quite funny because if you use that phrase verbatim except swapping China with the US it could actually fit. Good governments try to do things that are in the interest of their population, and yes it could mean opposite interests to your/someone else governments. No reason to blame US, Israel, China, Russia, etc. They just defend their piece of cake.
- 59nadir 4mo agoAnthropic and OpenAI are not just "another American company", their entire business (and industry) was created based on stealing data and using it for profit. You make this point about "another company" so casually that you'd think you added a SaaS bill for generating thumbnails or whatever. The exact same point you make about China can be made much more confidently and with stronger evidence for the entire modern LLM lab industry. Again I have to echo the previous poster's point: Most people outside of the US really do not see the US as some much better alternative than China. If anything, in the specific area of LLMs, China are the ones doing work benefitting the everyman whereas almost everything the US labs do does not.
- wongarsu 4mo agoThat's why I added "Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited". Reaching the decision that adding one single US-based LLM provider had more benefits than risks took months. And we were selective about who that would be (hint: not OpenAI). And I know companies who are not willing to go that step, using open-weight models on their own infra instead. But outsourcing inference to China was never even a serious suggestion. The notion is absurd to us That said, I imagine e.g. South Americans thinking very differently on this front
- dariosalvi78 4mo agowas going to say this.. open sourcing Chinese models will enforce Chinese dominance instead of reducing it. When an open Chinese model becomes the best alternative to inaccessible closed US models guess what everybody will start to use. And that same open model may embed certain narratives and values that please the Chinese government.
- throwa356262 4mo agoSerious question: why would sending data to China be worse then the US?