5 ms·

They will be like Windows Server. Expensive, restricted and overall worse than the open stuff but somehow sill generate some sales

ericmay 2mo ago
No they won't. They'll offer far superior models at a premium price and they'll capture most of the profits similar to iPhone versus the Android manufacturers. US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options that will compete with any open source models released by any other country, except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government. Whenever I have these conversations it's like, ok do I believe the incredibly smart people running Google, Facebook, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, Amazon, and more who have careers, companies, and trillions of dollars at stake, or do I believe random people on the Internet who say "Open AI and Anthropic will be like Windows Server and open-source models will be better"? Without extremely strong evidence to the contrary, I'm going to go with what the smartest people in the room are doing. The model and economics make a lot more sense, and fears about Chinese open source models are overblown. When you're behind and frantic you release open source software. If American companies somehow fall behind they'll just release their own better open source software/models and undercut China using the exact same strategy. So either both sides get to employ this strategy and neither has an advantage, or the spend and research matter and America for now has an advantage.
- bryanlarsen 2mo ago
  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
  - ericmay 2mo ago
    This applies to open-source evangelists and developers too.
- platevoltage 2mo ago
  The incredibly smart people aren't the ones running those companies. They're the ones actually creating the products.
- bigyabai 2mo ago
  > They'll offer far superior models at a premium price > US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options This is wishcasting. People are raising the alarm because models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have already displaced demand for frontier models in highly demanding fields like security research. There's no amount of money that you can pay for "premium" access to Mythos, so those researchers are taking their money to inference providers that give them comparable models. It's okay if this is your prediction, but it's not particularly grounded in the present scenario. > ok do I believe the incredibly smart people running Google, Facebook, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, Amazon, and more Why do you conflate all of these businesses with vastly different business strategies to one another? Apple and Facebook do not have the same AI strategy, same for Amazon and Nvidia or Google and OpenAI. Many of these businesses made expressly terrible choices that hamstrung their ability to capitalize on AI profits. FAIR failed to scale their early Llama models into a service; Apple abandoned OpenCL too early and invested in a dark-silicon NPU coprocessor instead of supporting CUDA's multi-trillion dollar ARM rollout; Google went all-in on hardware research and failed to create a frontier model that moved significant tokens; OpenAI forfeit the frontier to Anthropic, and Anthropic bent over backwards to appease American censorship demands and push cringeworthy marketing campaigns to capture LLM mindshare with Claude. There is no "American companies" coalition. They're all reacting in drastically different ways and your eagerness to conflate them suggests that you don't have any real position outside tribalist "us vs them" pugilism.
  - ericmay 2mo ago
    > This is wishcasting. People are raising the alarm because models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have already displaced demand for frontier models in highly demanding fields like security research. There's no amount of money that you can pay for "premium" access to Mythos, so those researchers are taking their money to inference providers that give them comparable models. It's not wish casting whatever that means. The crux of the argument isn't as much of a capability one as it is an economic one. If China can release open source models like these to displace demand for frontier models so can American companies. It's just that it's not profitable enough for them to do so at this time. The point about Mythos doesn't strengthen your argument, it weakens it. > Why do you conflate all of these businesses with vastly different business strategies to one another? They have different business strategies, but at the end of the day they are all directionally aligned. Even if you wanted to extract a few of these companies and say they're not relevant, you can grab a handful and just make the same legitimate argument. Do I believe you, or do I believe the people with trillions at stake. I believe the folks actually doing the work and with money at stake. I have yet to find a convincing argument otherwise. > There is no "American companies" coalition. They're all reacting in drastically different ways and your eagerness to conflate them suggests that you don't have any real position outside tribalist "us vs them" pugilism. Sure but there's an American government coalition which American companies will have to accommodate whether that's regulation, economic schemes, or otherwise. See? You just proved it right here: > Anthropic bent over backwards to appease American censorship demands and push cringeworthy marketing campaigns to capture LLM mindshare with Claude.
- lern_too_spel 2mo ago
  The limiting input in an AI future is energy. China understands this. Any hardware disadvantages are temporary. China will build frontier models, and it will even open the weights, but it will win on running the models due to energy infrastructure buildout.
- jorvi 2mo ago
  > except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government. The Chinese models already do that with the absolute minimum of coaxing.
  - PaulHoule 2mo ago
    That's like asking what happened at the National Mall! In addition to the incident you were thinking about there was a large protest in 1976 that the current regime would rather you don't know about, Mao announced the formation of "The New China" there, there were important events in the Boxer rebellion, and many more!
    - oliculipolicula 2mo ago
      Thanks to your-- if I may say so as a fellow schiz--- Writing style. It's hard even for me to tell whether you're trying to look hipcat here.. (Is it even possible to exude "political" cool? Mamdani. Not Garry Tan.) [Now now. I have not fully absolved myself of a narcissistic and/or stalker profile, but please do bear with me] The red-line between the mods and we seems to be this: Cool deeds or cool needs (ie, lifestyle/personality) first? It feels like you align with me on the idea that "coolness" should be a universal metric of social status. Right? For example, Elon is far from being a cool person, but he has seen or done cool things, so if he were to write a comment (anon or not) about his experiences building PayPal, it would instantly make highlights.. I ("violently") disagree with that, but am working on the counter-argument!! Where this is relevant to the China question. The Chinese people(?) think so too!! In fact they aspire to purely USian cool-needs (they seem to perceive a cool-gap, and bully for them(?), cool is the opposite of something to strive loudly for) In contrast to Japanese (or Thai, or HKers [labubu?]), who have their own native honest to goodness cool. (Related to the fact the USian center-right are in love with them.?.?.) To the Chinese (or Vietnamese, or Korean) in the street, is Elon cool? Yes. I think so.
- theplumber 2mo ago
  They already offer “superior models at a premium price” but the issue is that they are not that much superior than the open models and in some cases are even worse(I.e Anthropic Fable refuses to fix a login/signup page, not to mention any kind of actual opsec work). You already can do more with open models than with proprietary models because you can’t tweak the proprietary models to your liking. Just as OpenAI and Anthropic went from 0 to a trillion they can go back just as fast.
  - ericmay 2mo ago
    Well that's a bad example because a UI isn't a model. But if you hold that it's true that returns compound and that they do so for intelligence/performance for AI models, then having the lead matters quite a bit and eventually you'll just get into an iPhone vs Android Dollar General situation where sure they do the same thing and one is even substantially cheaper but all the profits go to the iPhone. If you hold that the lead doesn't matter, then the buildout of data centers and compute capacity which is also what the Chinese are doing will just go to make money for American companies serving whatever open-source models come into being for the rest of however long the world itself lasts. Then China can take the lead and spend a trillion dollars, we'll copy their models (which according to you is a great strategy), and release them open source. You can't have it both ways.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - theplumber 2mo ago
      I am not sure what you mean by this `Well that's a bad example because a UI isn't a model.`. OpenAI and Anthropic simply refuse to work on signup/login applications, tell you more about cancer or other "biology" or AI stuff. That makes them just a crappy product. I think China's strategy is to sell you products with AI embedded (i.e. robots, washing machines etc) not chat subscriptions like OpenAI and Anthropic. China sees AI as infrastructure (i.e. internet bandwidth speed) not necessary a product. Being the best matters but what you fail to see is that the open models are just sooo close and on some tasks (i.e cyber) they are better. And if you like analogies you should compare VHS vs Betamax. VHS won due the porn stuff...The history is full with example where OPEN and convenience wins over the closed stuff. That aside I wouldn't be surprised if china releases a better open model than OpenAI and Anthropic. I would very much like to see that after (if) OpenAI and Anthropic IPO...
- mackeye 2mo ago
  > except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government. do you think the average american could estimate the order of magnitude of the number of koreans we killed in the korean war? or the fact we continually bombed cuba, installed N military dictatorships across the world (and when), etc.? america isn't less guilty of censorship, we were just arguably smarter about it
  - HWR_14 2mo ago
    I think the average person in America could look up the answers to those questions and get accurate answers.

ericmay 2mo ago

No they won't. They'll offer far superior models at a premium price and they'll capture most of the profits similar to iPhone versus the Android manufacturers. US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options that will compete with any open source models released by any other country, except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government. Whenever I have these conversations it's like, ok do I believe the incredibly smart people running Google, Facebook, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, Amazon, and more who have careers, companies, and trillions of dollars at stake, or do I believe random people on the Internet who say "Open AI and Anthropic will be like Windows Server and open-source models will be better"? Without extremely strong evidence to the contrary, I'm going to go with what the smartest people in the room are doing. The model and economics make a lot more sense, and fears about Chinese open source models are overblown. When you're behind and frantic you release open source software. If American companies somehow fall behind they'll just release their own better open source software/models and undercut China using the exact same strategy. So either both sides get to employ this strategy and neither has an advantage, or the spend and research matter and America for now has an advantage.

bryanlarsen 2mo ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
- ericmay 2mo ago
  This applies to open-source evangelists and developers too.
platevoltage 2mo ago
The incredibly smart people aren't the ones running those companies. They're the ones actually creating the products.
bigyabai 2mo ago
> They'll offer far superior models at a premium price > US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options This is wishcasting. People are raising the alarm because models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have already displaced demand for frontier models in highly demanding fields like security research. There's no amount of money that you can pay for "premium" access to Mythos, so those researchers are taking their money to inference providers that give them comparable models. It's okay if this is your prediction, but it's not particularly grounded in the present scenario. > ok do I believe the incredibly smart people running Google, Facebook, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, Amazon, and more Why do you conflate all of these businesses with vastly different business strategies to one another? Apple and Facebook do not have the same AI strategy, same for Amazon and Nvidia or Google and OpenAI. Many of these businesses made expressly terrible choices that hamstrung their ability to capitalize on AI profits. FAIR failed to scale their early Llama models into a service; Apple abandoned OpenCL too early and invested in a dark-silicon NPU coprocessor instead of supporting CUDA's multi-trillion dollar ARM rollout; Google went all-in on hardware research and failed to create a frontier model that moved significant tokens; OpenAI forfeit the frontier to Anthropic, and Anthropic bent over backwards to appease American censorship demands and push cringeworthy marketing campaigns to capture LLM mindshare with Claude. There is no "American companies" coalition. They're all reacting in drastically different ways and your eagerness to conflate them suggests that you don't have any real position outside tribalist "us vs them" pugilism.
- ericmay 2mo ago
  > This is wishcasting. People are raising the alarm because models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have already displaced demand for frontier models in highly demanding fields like security research. There's no amount of money that you can pay for "premium" access to Mythos, so those researchers are taking their money to inference providers that give them comparable models. It's not wish casting whatever that means. The crux of the argument isn't as much of a capability one as it is an economic one. If China can release open source models like these to displace demand for frontier models so can American companies. It's just that it's not profitable enough for them to do so at this time. The point about Mythos doesn't strengthen your argument, it weakens it. > Why do you conflate all of these businesses with vastly different business strategies to one another? They have different business strategies, but at the end of the day they are all directionally aligned. Even if you wanted to extract a few of these companies and say they're not relevant, you can grab a handful and just make the same legitimate argument. Do I believe you, or do I believe the people with trillions at stake. I believe the folks actually doing the work and with money at stake. I have yet to find a convincing argument otherwise. > There is no "American companies" coalition. They're all reacting in drastically different ways and your eagerness to conflate them suggests that you don't have any real position outside tribalist "us vs them" pugilism. Sure but there's an American government coalition which American companies will have to accommodate whether that's regulation, economic schemes, or otherwise. See? You just proved it right here: > Anthropic bent over backwards to appease American censorship demands and push cringeworthy marketing campaigns to capture LLM mindshare with Claude.
lern_too_spel 2mo ago
The limiting input in an AI future is energy. China understands this. Any hardware disadvantages are temporary. China will build frontier models, and it will even open the weights, but it will win on running the models due to energy infrastructure buildout.
jorvi 2mo ago
> except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government. The Chinese models already do that with the absolute minimum of coaxing.
- PaulHoule 2mo ago
  That's like asking what happened at the National Mall! In addition to the incident you were thinking about there was a large protest in 1976 that the current regime would rather you don't know about, Mao announced the formation of "The New China" there, there were important events in the Boxer rebellion, and many more!
  - oliculipolicula 2mo ago
    Thanks to your-- if I may say so as a fellow schiz--- Writing style. It's hard even for me to tell whether you're trying to look hipcat here.. (Is it even possible to exude "political" cool? Mamdani. Not Garry Tan.) [Now now. I have not fully absolved myself of a narcissistic and/or stalker profile, but please do bear with me] The red-line between the mods and we seems to be this: Cool deeds or cool needs (ie, lifestyle/personality) first? It feels like you align with me on the idea that "coolness" should be a universal metric of social status. Right? For example, Elon is far from being a cool person, but he has seen or done cool things, so if he were to write a comment (anon or not) about his experiences building PayPal, it would instantly make highlights.. I ("violently") disagree with that, but am working on the counter-argument!! Where this is relevant to the China question. The Chinese people(?) think so too!! In fact they aspire to purely USian cool-needs (they seem to perceive a cool-gap, and bully for them(?), cool is the opposite of something to strive loudly for) In contrast to Japanese (or Thai, or HKers [labubu?]), who have their own native honest to goodness cool. (Related to the fact the USian center-right are in love with them.?.?.) To the Chinese (or Vietnamese, or Korean) in the street, is Elon cool? Yes. I think so.
theplumber 2mo ago
They already offer “superior models at a premium price” but the issue is that they are not that much superior than the open models and in some cases are even worse(I.e Anthropic Fable refuses to fix a login/signup page, not to mention any kind of actual opsec work). You already can do more with open models than with proprietary models because you can’t tweak the proprietary models to your liking. Just as OpenAI and Anthropic went from 0 to a trillion they can go back just as fast.
- ericmay 2mo ago
  Well that's a bad example because a UI isn't a model. But if you hold that it's true that returns compound and that they do so for intelligence/performance for AI models, then having the lead matters quite a bit and eventually you'll just get into an iPhone vs Android Dollar General situation where sure they do the same thing and one is even substantially cheaper but all the profits go to the iPhone. If you hold that the lead doesn't matter, then the buildout of data centers and compute capacity which is also what the Chinese are doing will just go to make money for American companies serving whatever open-source models come into being for the rest of however long the world itself lasts. Then China can take the lead and spend a trillion dollars, we'll copy their models (which according to you is a great strategy), and release them open source. You can't have it both ways.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - theplumber 2mo ago
    I am not sure what you mean by this `Well that's a bad example because a UI isn't a model.`. OpenAI and Anthropic simply refuse to work on signup/login applications, tell you more about cancer or other "biology" or AI stuff. That makes them just a crappy product. I think China's strategy is to sell you products with AI embedded (i.e. robots, washing machines etc) not chat subscriptions like OpenAI and Anthropic. China sees AI as infrastructure (i.e. internet bandwidth speed) not necessary a product. Being the best matters but what you fail to see is that the open models are just sooo close and on some tasks (i.e cyber) they are better. And if you like analogies you should compare VHS vs Betamax. VHS won due the porn stuff...The history is full with example where OPEN and convenience wins over the closed stuff. That aside I wouldn't be surprised if china releases a better open model than OpenAI and Anthropic. I would very much like to see that after (if) OpenAI and Anthropic IPO...
mackeye 2mo ago
> except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government. do you think the average american could estimate the order of magnitude of the number of koreans we killed in the korean war? or the fact we continually bombed cuba, installed N military dictatorships across the world (and when), etc.? america isn't less guilty of censorship, we were just arguably smarter about it
- HWR_14 2mo ago
  I think the average person in America could look up the answers to those questions and get accurate answers.