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Comment by motoboi

4 hours ago

What amazes me is why would someone spend millions to train this model and give it away for free. What is the business here?

10 comments

motoboi

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whizzter  4 hours ago

Chinese state that maybe sees open collaboration as the way to nullify any US lead in the field, concurrently if the next "search-winner" is built upon their model the Chinese worldview that Taiwan belongs to China and Tiamen Square massacre never happened.

Also their license says that if you have a big product you need to promote them, remember how Google "gave away" site searche widgets and that was perhaps one of the major ways they gained recognition for being the search leader.

OpenAI/NVidia is the Pets.com/Sun of our generation, insane valuations, stupid spend, expensive options, expensive hardware and so on.

Sun hardware bought for 50k USD to run websites in 2000 are less capable than perhaps 5 dollar/month VPS's today?

"Scaling to AGI/ASI" was always a fools errand, best case OpenAI should've squirreled away money to have a solid engineering department that could focus on algorithmic innovations but considering that Antrophic, Google and Chinese firms have caught up or surpassed them it seems they didn't.

Once things blows up, those closed options that had somewhat sane/solid model research that handles things better will be left and a ton of new competitors running modern/cheaper hardware and just using models are building blocks.

  • dev_l1x_be  2 hours ago

    > Taiwan belongs to China

    So they are on the same page as the UN and US?

    The One China policy refers to a United States policy of strategic ambiguity regarding Taiwan.[1] In a 1972 joint communiqué with the PRC, the United States "acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China" and "does not challenge that position."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_and_the_United_Nations

    • 9cb14c1ec0  44 minutes ago

      The One China policy is a fiction of foreign policy statecraft, designed to sideline the issue without having to actually deal with it. It is quite clear that apart from the official fiction there is a real policy that is not One China. This is made clear by the weapons sales to Taiwan that specifically calibrated to make a Chinese military action harder.

  • zozbot234  3 hours ago

    > "Scaling to AGI/ASI" was always a fools errand

    Scaling depends on hardware, so cheaper hardware on a compute-per-watt basis only makes scaling easier. There is no clear definition of AGI/ASI but AI has already scaled to be quite useful.

tokioyoyo  2 hours ago

Moonshot’s (Kimi’s owner) investors are Alibaba/Tencent et al. Chinese market is stupidly competitive, and there’s a general attitude of “household name will take it all”. However getting there requires having a WeChat-esque user base, through one way or another. If it’s paid, there’ll be friction and it won’t work. Plus, it undermines a lot of other companies, which is a win for a lot of people.

Balinares  3 hours ago

Speculating: there are two connected businesses here, creating the models, and serving the models. Outside of a few moneyed outliers, no one is going to run this at home. So at worst opening this model allows mid-sized competitors to serve it to customers from their own infra -- which helps Kimi gain mindshare, particularly against the large incumbents who are definitely not going to be serving Kimi and so don't benefit from its openness.

Given the shallowness of moats in the LLM market, optimizing for mindshare would not be the worst move.

WarmWash  1 hour ago

It's another state project funded at the discretion of the party.

If you look at past state projects, profitability wasn't really considered much. They are notorious for a "Money hose until a diamond is found in the mountains of waste"