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So Chinese labs are driving essentially towards commodotized intelligence. Even if its a few months behind the US. Is this a classic 'commoditize my compliment
by softwaredoug 3mo ago
So Chinese labs are driving essentially towards commodotized intelligence. Even if its a few months behind the US.
Is this a classic 'commoditize my compliment' situation? They want to sell the hardware and infrastructure behind AI and make the software part not the value driver / moat?
I can see it. But also even two Chinese labs sinking 100s of millions USD into training isn't exactly commoditization. It's still a ton of effort with dubious payoff.
- micromacrofoot 3mo agoit also undercuts American dominance, which is something China is always happy to invest in, even if it doesn't immediately mean Chinese dominance
- tomaskafka 3mo agoThis. More people should read Simon Wardley. Also China's silent but powerful support of Russia and its invasion.
- epolanski 3mo agoChina relies on Russia on energy. You can't expect them to start sanctioning Russia for ukraine, Israel/US for their middle east shenanigans, etc.
- tomaskafka 3mo agoChina also supports and helps maintain North Korea, and has ties with Iran.
- micromacrofoot 3mo agoIf North Korea were to collapse for any reason it would create a massive refugee issue for China.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- epolanski 3mo agoA welcome one, china is in a demographic crisis.
- handle584 3mo agoWhy not South Korea? Even ethnic Koreans in China go to South Korea en mass.
- micromacrofoot 3mo agosome would, but keep in mind they've been told that south korea is a hostile state controlled by evil americans for generations people fleeing north korea already often head towards china
- culi 3mo agoChina sanctioned and voted for UN resolutions to sanction Iran in the past. Then Trump baselessly abandoned the JCPOA. Even the US own DNI said it is the consensus of all 18 intelligence agencies that Iran was in compliance and not seeking nuclear weapons. China, correctly, called the renewed sanctions illegal and refused to follow them
- dopa42365 3mo agoWell, trying to isolate and bully a country into submission isn't normal. China wants to happily trade with the rest of the world (absolute horror, truly).
- sscaryterry 3mo agoAnd Trump wants to charge money to use the Strait?! Don't see the difference honestly.
- megous 3mo agoDifference is Trump wanted 20% and Iran like 2%.
- linzhangrun 3mo agoEnergy is not the main reason. China would still stand with Russia without energy. China could never support a pro-Western Ukraine in the first place. The same logic applies to Iran, North Korea, etc. Although China cannot directly express support because of foreign trade, things like the Communist Youth League playing "Katyusha" on the day Russia launched the invasion, and the information direction on social media, have already made their position very clear.
- big-and-small 3mo ago> Energy is not the main reason. China would still stand with Russia without energy. Of course it will because Russia also has cheap raw materials not just exclusively oil and gas. At the same time China does not invest into Russian economy because they don't want competition. Weak Russia is more beneficial for China to buy commodities for cheap and then sell Chinese products back. > China could never support a pro-Western Ukraine in the first place. China is one of largest Ukraine trade partners before and during the war. Ukraine even lobbied for ability to buy Chinese drone parts using EU funds when EU unable to fulfill. So nope - China dont care. They are trading with both Russia and Ukraine.
- linzhangrun 3mo agoHaving trade relations does not mean China supports a country. US has always been China’s largest trading partner, but China <-> US relations can hardly be called "friendly". The CCP government has absolute control over domestic public opinion. The pro-Russia direction on Chinese social media is very clear, although as the war became unfavorable for Putin, voices supporting Ukraine have been allowed a little more in recent years. What the US supports is what China opposes. From Iran to Venezuela, from Gaza to Ukraine, except for a very small amount of "human consensus", it is always and will be like this.
- big-and-small 3mo agoMy point stands: if China was "against" Ukraine they wouldn't sell to Ukraine because a lot of drone manufacturing depends on Chinese components. Of course China does not support Ukraine politically, but that's a different story.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- applicative 3mo agoFirst things first: the CCP must dominate China itself. For this job one is the global discrediting of democracy in favor of cults of personality. This is the single objective of the Putin-Xi-Khamenei information system. China global hegemony would merely be an instrument of CCP internal control. Similarly Khamenei supported Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthi, Iraq militias ... to control his own population.
- frabcus 3mo agoUmm, Fable only really came out 2 weeks ago, and GPT-5.6 Sol only 1 week ago. Yes, Kimi K3 appears a touch below them both, but above all other models. So I'd say a few weeks behind, not months now...
- avazhi 3mo agoI used fable more than a month ago, what are you talking about?
- throwa356262 3mo agoBoth mythos and fable were available in a preview version first. The preview models were not as good as the final release. Thus training must have continued after the initial announcement
- avazhi 3mo agoNah that’s not how that works. There are literally an endless stream of examples of the model providers tweaking backend stuff and improving prompt responses without using new or retrained data. And even if they added new training data to an existing model, it isn’t true to say that model ‘just came out’. But even then, when providers release better models based on new training data they release it as a new dot version, which boosts their sales from the announcement. Fable has been out for more than a month - I didn’t have the preview version and I was using it around June 10th, when my Claude subscription expired. Saying “Fable only really came out 2 weeks ago” is just factually incorrect all around.
- andxor 3mo agoMythos/Fable was trained 6 months ago.
- verdverm 3mo agoAll three models were quite likely undergoing training at the same time, with Ant a couple of months ahead. Glasswing was announced 3 months ago, Sol and Kimi were already being trained at that point. They are taking snapshots and doing experiments the whole way through anyway and all models will continue to be trained after release. Kimi 3.1 could be better than Fable 5.1
- energy123 3mo agoIt's the same reason Meta open sourced Llama and AMD open sourced FSR. When you're behind it is a prudent strategy because it undermines investment in the private frontier. Once you're on top you pull the rug and go closed source. There are no morals in this anywhere to be found. > 100s of Millions That is utter peanuts given the stakes. This is competition between two super powers for the most important technology in human history.
- verdverm 3mo agoGoogle on it's own is spending 1000x that in a single year $280B in '26 alone iirc I could also argue with GP's comment that some US companies are driving towards commoditization as well. One released a model this week and another announced their series d today.
- tjwebbnorfolk 3mo agoAre you saying if someone gives you something for free, it's immoral if they don't continue giving it to you for free forever? The children's book "if you give a mouse a cookie" was about exactly this phenomenon
- monsieurbanana 3mo agoNobody isn't giving anything to you for free
- kasey_junk 3mo agoA more charitable reading of this comment is that you can make a game theoretical argument for these behaviors that doesn’t require altruism. And that argument therefore doesn’t preclude going closed at a later date.
- weitendorf 3mo ago“He’s only being good because he likes how it feels, or values goodness, or exists in a social context where doing the right thing is socially rewarded! That has no bearing on whether he, intrinsically, is good!” Not to get all philosophical but this makes no sense outside of the context of a very specific post-Protestant, engagement/outrage-driven social media context. If people are “only being good because it’s in their best interest” the last thing you should be doing is arguing against valuing good things, or making it impossibly difficult for someone capable of doing good to be trusted. Also literally the basis for Western (Plato, good as attractor state, res publica) and Eastern (kongzi, filial piety, social harmony) civilization btw.
- x313 3mo agoIf there was some grand strategy for all Chinese labs, surely it'd have leaked by now. I think its more likely that: - Companies can still make money from commodities - Chinese labs only have 5-10% the valuation of OpenAI/Anthropic, so massive monopoly profits aren't necessary. Profit expectations for tech companies in China are really low in general, complete opposite of the US. - Open weighting is a great way to get talent/attention/reputation
- verdverm 3mo agoThere is definitely strategy and direction coming from the top. CEOs have been summoned for conversations. There are new rules like no Ai lovers that certainly show they are thinking about things. The AI CTO from The Linux Foundation, Matt White, spoke about his recent trip to talk to the Chinese Ai labs ~month ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHi0jy4MK4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHi0jy4MK4c https://www.economist.com/china/2026/07/16/china-wants-to-end-ai-romances https://www.economist.com/china/2026/07/16/china-wants-to-en...
- zwu-var 3mo ago> Companies can still make money from commodities Especially Chinese companies. Just think about all the other industries where Chinese companies dominate by extremely low cost.
- wilg 3mo agoIsn't that typically because they have lower labor costs? Not sure that applies as much to AI.
- weird-eye-issue 3mo agoThere are other factors too, for example I can't imagine that there are many protests in China against building data centers.
- hnynf 3mo ago
- try-working 3mo agoIt's a GTM strategy: https://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-remain-open https://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-rem...
- everythingfine9 3mo agoIt also allows companies to get broad, global exposure while satisfying both wary end users and host government policies & restrictions.
- jeron 3mo ago>Open sourcing models is not a commercial risk because barely anyone can run them locally there are dozens of us!
- ignoramous 3mo agoOpen weights are indeed a commercial risk because there's no shortage of companies that'll make a business out of running MaaS (model as a service), close & resell a fine-tuned or distilled variant (DeepSeeking of Llama / Cursorification of Kimi, for example).
- specialist 3mo agoIt's an attack on USA's AI tech giants. Destroy any hope of profitability, prevent further capitalization, ultimately bankrupt them. Hasten the popping of the AI bubble. Drag down the stock market. Put a dent in the GDP (alleged growth). Cause investors to pull back, further depressing economy. Devalue the dollar. Kicking off an interest rate doom loop. Challenge USA's hegemonic role in the emergent multi-polar (post neoliberal) world order. (Gleefully supported by the ruling coalition's anti-globalist America First faction.) It all makes perfect sense.
- epolanski 3mo agoSuch narratives are always so US centric, as if every country in the world is obsessed by us. That's not the case. There might be foreign policy implications but the biggest reason is really nurturing their own tech independence and entrepreneurship.
- matthest 3mo agoNot US-centric, top dog-centric. The US is just the current top dog. The US is a barrier to a number of key Chinese goals, like reunification with Taiwan. So of course most of what they do will take the US into consideration.
- codemog 3mo agoNot everything is an 8D chess conspiracy mate. If they wanted to do this, they’d wait until OpenAI and Anthropic were at their absolute peaks of investment and then release an open source model that was as good. That’s not what they’ve done at all.
- hnfong 3mo agoI agree, but you think OpenAI and Anthropic are not already at their absolute peaks of hype and investment? At valuations of about trillion each, I don't know where else they'd go..
- 3mo ago
- fragmede 3mo agoWhatever you want to attribute it to, the Chinese labs would get zero attention if it weren't for their models being downloadable, so it's a marketing play. You can't run their largest models on consumer hardware, it needs a hosted service/professionagrade equipment. Which means using their service becomes an option, especially at their pricing. So that's the play.
- vl 3mo agoThis is strategy by Chinese government, so much of US economy is invested in AI. Releasing free or cheap versions of the models undermines US economic growth. It’s asymmetric strategy that makes sense if you are close second in AI race. If situation is reversed, US would do the same.
- zkmon 3mo agoIt's exactly the same strategy followed by the Silicon Valley for the past 3 decades to beat the IBM-era companies. Google gave everything free. Social media stuff was free. Video calls are free. Bloggers gave content for free. A lot ot open-source product developers did managed offerings of the free products.
- weitendorf 3mo agoFree + Open is simply how you earn credibility and user trust when you don’t already have it. That doesn’t mean the trust is unearned once gained, or a bait and switch, or purely Machiavellian either btw. Consumers and businesses need credible branding to feel like they can trust vendors who provide them with the products they value or deem mission-critical, because it creates accountability and makes it less risky to depend on. Open source addresses the credibility/accountability/branding/counterparty problems simultaneously, and adds to a permanent intellectual commons we all benefit from. It’s legitimately just Good
- oceanplexian 3mo ago> Releasing free or cheap versions of the models undermines US economic growth. This would be like saying that the creation of the PC undermined the 1980s economy because it hurt IBM's profits. Instead the consequences of cheap, ubiquitous personal computers grew the economy 10-fold. There is an entire class of wholesale model providers that stand to gain from open source models. Then there are companies building platforms on top of LLMs that would otherwise be impossible with closed models due to cost. And there are entire enterprise use cases that would simply be non-viable at $50/million tokens, like OpenClaw, Hermes, etc.
- anon373839 3mo ago
- lenocinor 3mo agoCan we start calling AI sycophancy “commoditizing your compliments”?
- moconnor 3mo agoNational strategy. Thanks to smart investments, China's energy costs are far lower than everybody else's. If intelligence becomes a commodity, then China will be providing it for the world. Incredible leverage.
- c0rruptbytes 3mo agofew months behind? 5.6 came out last week and kimi is benching around the same right now
- seydor 3mo agosomething without a moat can only be a commodity. i think US money knows that, and waiting for the business which will be built on top of them.
- phorkyas82 3mo ago>It's still a ton of effort with dubious payoff. Isn't that valid for _any_ AI training? Let alone the "frontier stuff".
- baq 3mo agoThey want to bankrupt the US AI industry and lock down the future development (and the substantial financial gains from more capable models). Essentially the China car manufacturer playbook, but for LLMs which are ~software, so much faster to execute.
- binary132 3mo agoIt’s a nationally-sponsored arms race with Western proprietary AI, so as long as the capital sponsors of Western AI lose their shirts and Chinese LLMs become ubiquitous, I think that qualifies as a win condition. Individual labs are no different than running a local restaurant — yeah, it would be great if you land a massive success story, but just making a bunch of money before moving on to the next thing is cool too, even if it’s just via state-sponsored venture capital.
- mordymoop 3mo agoTo your last point, it can’t possibly be sustainable, so it reads to me more as a short term FUD attack on American dominance in this space. It might have cost them half a billion dollars to train this model, and they’re going to make nothing off it. How many more times can they afford to do that? It’s going to get more expensive to train AI going forward, not less. I also have a suspicion that the benchmark numbers are not real.
- drob518 3mo agoI think there are two things happening here. 1. There is a “space race” mentality happening at the national level with respect to AI. So, China is committing to the race. 2. Even if the race turns out to be a dud, China is hoovering up massive amounts of data as customers throw everything into their prompts. This is useful for all sorts of national objectives. Why hack when you can just put up a shingle that says “Artificial Intelligence” and customers hand over their data willingly? Either way, China wins.