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> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Feels pretty easy to me. They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn. There
by kelnos 3mo ago
> It's hard to say what their motivation is.
Feels pretty easy to me.
They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn.
There will still be plenty of customers who will pay them to host the models and run inference, even if the weights are open and others can offer competing products. (If necessary, the Chinese government can ban use of foreign inference services by Chinese citizens and businesses to give their own companies a domestic monopoly.)
When their models equal or surpass those from the Western AI labs, they can even stop releasing weights for new models, and keep all the inference revenue for themselves.
Meanwhile, they're still manufacturing much of the hardware that everyone in the world needs in order to run datacenters (see also: Spolsky's "commoditize your complement" essay).
Beyond that, it's a soft-power play. As the world keeps looking at the US more and more skeptically as an ally and superpower, Chinese companies releasing weights for competitive models is a way for China to look better and more world-minded.
- TheDong 3mo agoI feel like there could also be a simpler explanation. Why does a debian contributor make debian free, why do they work on this thing anyone can use? Is it because linux and debian hate windows and iOS and want to see american fail? No, it's because most debian contributors believe software source code, information, should be free, users should be free to modify the code they use, and that they're building a thing they want to share with the world. Maybe the chinese AI labs believe AI is powerful and useful, are proud of what they're doing, and want to share it as broadly as they can so everyone can use it. There doesn't have to be any weird "chinese government" or "they hate the west" type vibes, it could just be the same thing as OSS, they're trying to do what they think is best for the world.
- drschwabe 3mo agoWhere's the drama in that !?
- mceachen 3mo agoPlease don't conflate a volunteer effort with no expected economic gain with a very well funded company (or fleet of companies). With the CCP's highly successful track record with subsuming other markets, Occam's razor applies to why they're doing this.
- Der_Einzige 3mo ago[flagged]
- jchw 3mo agoWell of course nobody believes that, there are a large number of great Chinese open source projects, and plenty of great Chinese contributors to open source projects. I have zero doubts that Chinese people are at least equally as capable of embracing open source as anyone else. It would be strange to suggest otherwise. That said, though, I do have trouble believing the long-term story for open weights, anywhere. We do not need an evil government for open weight to "make sense", but I do think we need some government involvement for open weight to make sense in the long run. Otherwise, it's not 100% clear how they could be sustainable, and I don't think massive companies really can be trusted to just be philanthropic with no incentives indefinitely (or really, much at all to begin with.) Chinese models being open weight does help them gain some Western mindshare, whereas for obvious reasons Americans would be very suspicious of running their source code and prompts through Chinese providers. (And I think that's justified, I just also think that American providers aren't really that much better in the long run, and you should prefer to not have to go through any provider for true privacy.)
- nylonstrung 3mo agoThe CCP encourages open source contributions from companies, you can see this in how much Alibaba open sources across their entire stack Chinese tech leans much more heavily towards build vs. buy than the SaaS dominated West (where programmers are more expensive) so the positive externalities on their tech industry are more pronounced
- edm0nd 3mo agoYeah the Chinese totally have a really good history with being completely open and giving lol. The Chinese government totally has not been hacking into American and Western fortune 500 companies for the past few decades stealing R&D and tech to use for themselves. The Chinese also totally do not steal hundreds of billions of dollars of IP from America annually. Totally not something they would do!
- pegasus 3mo agoI don't see how stealing IP is inconsistent with a sympathy for openness. If anything, it's the opposite. "Information wants to be free" and all that. They were just liberating those secrets ;)
- freehorse 3mo agoIndustrial espionage is neither a chinese invention nor (specifically) chinese practice. American companies do it to each other even.
- applicative 3mo agoAgents of American companies who don't mind 15 years in the federal pen do it to American companies. So it must be right.
- mullingitover 3mo agoThe U.S. was openly a pirate nation for most of the 1800s. Like with the ICC, the US respects or doesn’t respect international law strictly when it’s beneficial to the state’s interests. China really can’t be held to a different standard. This activity is grade school level geopolitics: the global system of government is anarchy.
- gf000 3mo agoYeah, I love how people assume large powers have to do something. They are at most expected to do certain reasonable stuff (most of the time, a war is not beneficial to anyone so they try not to escalate that far), but there is not really global "law enforcement".
- elmer2 3mo agoThe Chinese government is so nice and giving. In fact, they have so much love in their hearts for the Uyghur people, they created a special mobile app for them, just to make sure nothing bad happens to them.
- throwaway-11-1 3mo agoYou do realize the US was fighting Uyghur terrorists alongside China 20 years ago in ago in Pakistan’s and Afghanistan for their support and cooperation with Al Queda? Like I know everyone is supposed to hate China now or whatever but can you guys show a little consistency?
- breezybottom 3mo agoThe only way that's an inconsistency is if you think all Uyghurs are terrorists.
- chews 3mo agoDeepseek spun out of a hedgefund that took a huge short position on Nvidia. China is actively looking to switch to chips made by huawai and ween themselves off of the difficulty of sourcing nvidia.
- 3x3m3 3mo agoThey believe that information should be so free so much so that they are completely censoring Tiananmen Square answers.
- yieldcrv 3mo agoThis interpretation of the Chinese constitution is nearly 40 years old, companies comply with it, what do you expect? Despite have a free speech clause, it also has a national security clause that is used to control all facets of life and override all other rights in the constitution. Anything deemed to slightly alter China/the Party’s unity is reprimanded and illegal. Multi party states can fall into the same trapping if they give their national security law constitutional force, always one court ruling away. Yes, China is a single party system making the constitution redundant and any nominally marxist regime would find a way to do the same out of necessity. Follow your Chinese AI in thinking mode to watch its opinion of Tianamen Square references, it will be candid enough for your sensibilities and show how it operates around guardrails
- harshreality 3mo ago> Is it because linux and debian hate windows and iOS and want to see american [closed-source duopoly] fail? maybe a little?
- Agingcoder 3mo agoModels are treated as weapons with export controls - if they can do this it’s with the blessing of the Chinese government who’s getting something out of it. It’s fairly obviously about being a nuisance to the US.
- marcus_holmes 3mo agoNot everything that happens in the world is about the USA
- Agingcoder 3mo agoIndeed and I’m not American, and don’t work in the US. It is however fairly obvious to me. We agree to disagree.
- try-working 3mo agoNo, open models is a marketing strategy
- NickNaraghi 3mo agoI think your reasoning is actually more complex than the person you are responding to, unfortunately. (As someone who as published broadly used open source software)
- jwarden 3mo agoThat’s a lovely thought but that’s not how China works. China is not a democracy, the geopolitical goals of the Chinese government are clear, and no large strategic company acts without approval and heavy influence from the CCP.
- AYBABTME 3mo agoThe better parallel is "why did Google make Kubernetes open-source" or "why do large for profit entities engaged in competition, use open-source as a strategy against their competitors"? "Commoditize your complement" -> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- jknoepfler 3mo agoThe capital required to train Qwen at scale is enormous. The capital required to patch a linux distro is near zero. Any scale model coming out of China should be viewed as advancing a geopolitical agenda. The same skepticism should be applied to any model trained in the states, but that should be viewed through the lens of short-term business profits. There are earnest nerds everywhere, in every society. No doubt. But "Chinese AI Labs" operate at the whim of the Chinese government, in the same way "American AI Labs" operate at the whim of billionaire investors. Inferring good will from either is naive at best at this scale.
- bee_rider 3mo agoThe comment you replied to implies a lot of over-complicated motivations and grand coordination. But I think “commoditize your complement” explains a lot here and is probably even simpler than your explanation.
- wood_spirit 3mo agoAs soon as the competition is bankrupted they no longer need to release for free? It’s like how big players enter markets by launching at a loss to destroy competitors?
- jasondigitized 3mo agoOr it could be good for humanity.
- watwut 3mo ago> They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn. I want to watch that too. If they take Meta and Musk with them, all the better, but that is just dreaming I am afraid.
- hypfer 3mo ago> They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn. Man, imagine Darios face when suddenly, he cannot decide anymore what other people consensually do with their own hardware in their free time. Rumpelstilzchen.
- esafak 3mo agoThey're selling the robots that use these models. The rest of the world just hasn't got round to embodiment yet.
- alightsoul 3mo ago>When their models equal or surpass those from the Western AI labs, that moment is now. They are not doing it at least not yet.
- seizethecheese 3mo agoThere’s a simpler explanation, which is that this is how Chinese business operates. When I was in China earlier this year the big topic of conversation was “overproduction”. The big example was electric cars, where there were too many companies making too many cars and making revenue but no profit. It was explained to me that generally Chinese firms will compete hard and maximize revenue above all, whereas western firms tend to focus on profit. (And of course this is clustered around industrial sectors that the government favors, so there is some high level strategy in going after AI, but maybe not the commoditization.)
- g42gregory 3mo agoAs I recall, in 2023/24 OpenAI told US Gov that AGI will be achieved in 2026 and we will use this AGI to “dominate” China. Based on this, US Gov cut off China from all AI hardware. It looks like China got the message and this is the response. Also, a little competition is good for everybody (especially US consumers), no?
- nicman23 3mo agoto be honest i think this is a open source vs close source software. some companies chose to have the benefits of one or the other
- ClumsyPilot 3mo ago> They want to… watch the US AI labs crash and burn. I don’t think dozens of large independent companies and thousands of researchers are working just to spite Sam Altman. Ad much as I don’t like him, I have other things to do and I am sure so do they.
- kelnos 3mo agoAgreed, but the Chinese government has much more of a say in what their companies do than is common in the West. It seems perfectly plausible to me that the Chinese government wants US AI labs to fail, and might direct some/all of their own AI companies to release their model weights.
- jpfromlondon 3mo ago>They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn. You can say that, but they are at least better at democratizing AI than the American labs, and on seeing the US labs crash and burn we are at least aligned.