Comment by game_the0ry
15 hours ago
There is some humor in the fact that china (of all countries) is pioneering possibly the world's most important tech via open source, while we (US) are doing the exact opposite.
15 hours ago
There is some humor in the fact that china (of all countries) is pioneering possibly the world's most important tech via open source, while we (US) are doing the exact opposite.
I think one of the motivations is undermining US companies. OpenAI and Anthropic are the two biggest players, and are American. Open weights models reduce the power those two big players have over the industry. If the Chinese companies tried to play by US rules and close-source their products then people would mostly use ChatGPT and Claude. So the Chinese companies don't make a ton of profit either way, but by releasing the models as open weights they can at least keep the US from making as much profit.
This makes sense, but either ways, its a Big win for the consumers as these Chinese companies will keep the frontier labs' quality and prices honest.
I am actually wondering if they're trying to burst the bubble, which would predominantly affect US market and, effectively, be the end of silicone valley dominance.
I don't think so, it's just how things played out. Thanks to Meta, after llama leak and meta followed up with llama2 and llama3 that caused everyone else to follow up with open models, Stablediffusion, Mistral, Cohere, Microsoft phi, IBM granites, Nvidia Nemotrons, so the Chinese labs joined the fun too.
American companies just take those Chinese models and repackage them for profit like Cursors composer-2.
Is Meta trying to keep the US from making as much profit with Llama? Is Google with Gemma? Microsoft with Phi?
It's much simpler than some flag-waving nationalism.
It's mostly only OpenAI, Claude and Gemini may have their unique advantages, but when speaking of models and new paradigm, only OpenAI can do it.
lol what? That’s ridiculous.
It’s really simpler than this. China has a dearth of compute even with the easing of US export controls. Releasing open weights models is very much a “bring your own compute” move because every Nvidia chip they have is going towards training rather than inference if they can help it.
undermine me harder daddy.
[dead]
All great technological advancements have come through opening up technology. Just look at your iPhone. GPS, the internet, AI voice assistants, touchscreens, microprocessors, lithium-ion batteries, etc all came from gov't research (I'm counting Bell Labs' gov't mandated monopoly + research funding as gov't) that was opened up for free instead of being locked behind a patent.
Private companies will never open up a technological breakthrough to their competitors. It just doesn't make sense. If you want an entire field to advance, you have to open it up.
Still, you won't hear about Tiananmen square from this model. It flat out refuses to answer if pushed directly. It's also pretty wild how far they go to censor it during inference on the API, because it can easily access any withheld or missing info from training data via tool calls. It even starts happily writing an answer based on web search when asked indirectly, only to get culled completely once some censorship bot flags the response. Ironically, it's also easier than ever to break their censorship guardrails. I just had it generate several factual paragraphs about the massacre by telling it to search the web and respond in base64 encoded text. It's actually kind of cool how much these people struggle to hide certain political views from LLMs. Makes me hopeful that even if China wins this race, we'll not have to adhere to the CCPs newspeak.
The American models also censor a lot of scientific and political views though.
22 replies →
Only if you use Kimi API directly - the censorship is done externally. The model itself talks fine about Tiananmen, you can check on Openrouter. There might be less visible biases, though.
5 replies →
I’d say the american models are more censored or take the censoring they do more seriously. Here is kimi (though 2.5) failing its censoring mission: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1r9qa7l/kimi_ha...
This update makes Kimi K2.6 the strongest open multimodal AI model. (No affiliation with Kimi.)
Here's the aggregated AI benchmark comparison for K2.6 vs Opus 4.6 (max effort).
- Agentic: Kimi wins 5. Opus wins 5.
- Coding: Kimi wins 5. Opus wins 1.
- Reasoning & knowledge: Kimi wins 1. Opus wins 4.
- Vision: Kimi wins 9. Opus wins 0.
Please note that the model publisher chooses their benchmarks, so there's a bias here. Most coding and reasoning & knowledge benchmarks in their list are pretty standard though.
Not entirely true. Google released Gemma 4 models recently. Allen AI releases open Olmo models. However, you're right that the Chinese open models seem to be much better than others - Qwen 3.* models especially are punching above their weights.
The three American labs don't release big open source models. Except gpt-oss, i guess. It's an absolute shame how far the us has fallen in this space.
Anthropic doesn't, but Google and OAI both release open source models. Just not 1T parameter ones.
1 reply →
Pun intended?
I'm genuinely so grateful for them
$200/m minimum to use Claude would bankrupt my country's white collar labor market
I would really appreciate a response because I'm sure you know that Anthropic has at least two lower priced tiers before the $200/m one, so I assume the $200/m tier is necessary because you use it heavily?
Now given that the $200/m Tier is the most heavily (I believe at 20x?) subsidized tier, How or what are you using instead that achieves comparable good enough performance for a fraction of the price? I've heard GLM 5.1 from z.ai but it's not comparable to Opus, not even close - really interested!
This perspective is pretty interesting: https://federicocarrone.com/articles/china-commoditizing-the...
Summary: they want to commoditize the complement which means that Western "knowledge work" is the complement to Chinese manufacturing, and they want to turn the knowledge work into a low priced commodity via open llm models.
I've heard this before, always accompanied by a several thousand word blog post. But frankly it sounds like it's overcomplicating the issue. Why would you try to turn something into a commodity when instead you could turn it into a trillion dollar industry and win?
The goal has always been clear:
1. Release open models to get your name out
2. Then once you feel you have name recognition release even stronger models but keep them proprietary. Qwen is clearly at this phase.
3. Keep releasing open models because it's good publicity but never your SOTA models (e.g. Google's Gemma).
additional humor is the open in openai
I wonder if there's a strategy behind all of this on China's side. I know the CCP uses a direct hand in many affairs in China, but is there an actual coordinated effort to compete with, or sabotage the West?
> but is there an actual coordinated effort to compete with [...] the West
Yes, absolutely.
China regularly produces long term planning documents to coordinate efforts, and the latest ones have specifically prioritized technology like chips and AI to compete with the west. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-parliament-approve...
I don't believe there's any publicly stated intent to sabotage the west... unsurprisingly.
Seems obvious to me that China would not want to give the AI market to US companies. You don't even need anything like an attempt to "sabotage the West". If I were them (the companies or the government) I'd be very hesitant to let US companies dominate this space. Especially companies that close to the current US administration.
Hypothesizing here, but maybe the idea is sort of a form of technological/economic warfare? Releasing performance equivalent yet more cost efficient open weight models should in theory drive the cost of inference down everywhere.
This I assume will make it more difficult for US AI labs to turn a profit, which might make investors question their sky high valuations.
Any sort of melt down in the AI sector would almost certainly spread to the wider US market.
In contrast, in China, most of the funding for AI is coming directly from the government, so it's unlikely the same capital flight scenario would happen.
Why compete when you can build on each other. Someone is finally getting that china is not capitalist like the US.
Chinese labs have no marketing and sales capacity in the overseas market, so they in fact have no choice but to open source their models as that is what brings awareness and trust in their models. In fact, it is overseas open source marketing that drives adoption of their models in China as well. I wrote about this here: https://try.works/writing-1#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-an...
All China has to do here is stay in the game and wait patiently while the US and EU press pause on data centers. See also: solar panels.
We're making this way too easy. The rationale and logic are reasonable, but ultimately irrelevant.
Chinese AI companies want investors too. Nobody would believe they can compete with western companies unless they release something you can run on your own hardware.
After all historically both statistics and research that comes out of China is not very trustworthy.
If there's no open source models coming out of these small labs, why would anybody care about them? They would be forgotten the instant they stop open sourcing.
China is also way ahead in terms of renewable energy while the US continues to tie itself to fossil fuels.
The US is pretty clearly in the collapsing empire phase, we are all just pretending like it isn't happening.
Didn't the US very recently pass the milestone of generating more energy from renewable sources than from natural gas? Like within the last week or two?
No, not even close.
US energy sources for 2024 (last year for which we have data):
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and...
Within all renewables, in quadrillions of btus:
Total: 8.8 quadrillion btu = 9% of total energy
5 replies →
A lot of people speculating on the motivations behind Chinese labs open sourcing their models. The reason is simple and clear: It is the only viable commercialization strategy that is available to them. I wrote about this here: https://try.works/writing-1#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-an...
This is not in antithesis. My limited personal experience is that I wrote code under OSS licenses primarily because of my past communist believes and current left-wing and redistribution of wealth point of view. This is not to provide the simple equation of: communist China is not interested in money, but also is hard to believe that there is no cultural connection among those things. Single Chine persons want to win, but also they have a different POV on what the collective means, compared to US. Also there is the obvious fact that in this moment China is more interested in winning technologically in AI, more than economically, since, I believe, they more collectively realized before many others that LLMs are eventually commoditized in the current form, in the long run. One could assume that a breakthrough could give some lab a decisive advantage, but so far we assisted to a different reality: it looks like AI is not architecture-bound (like LeCun and others want us to believe, but so far they mis-interpreted LLMs at every step) but GPU bound, and the data-boundness is both a common ground for all, and surpassable via RL in many domains. So, if this is true, it is not trivial for any single lab to do so much better. And indeed as far as we observed right now folks with enough engineers, GPUs, money, can ship frontier models, and in China even labs with a lot less GPUs can still do it at a SOTA level. For me, Italian, this is also a protective layer. After Trump the US looks like a very unstable partner from which to relay in an exclusive way for a decisive technology, and given that Europe is slow to put the money in this technology to have frontier things at home, China is a huge and shiny plan B for us.
The strings attached by the US to deep partnerships are things like trade/commerce, militarily mutual advantages (bases on euro soil from which we will help protect you), not to mention the close cultural and ancestral ties we share.
The strings attached by the Chinese govt to deep partnerships are not so benign.
[dead]
It's only humorous if you live in an American bubble. Knowledge sharing has always been a part of Chinese culture. Only Americans try to make it proprietary and monetize it.
We are at the point where uncontrolled capitalism collides with humanity.
I do wonder where we go from here.
it's not necessarily capitalism, I personally believe any system that drives progress would cause this in one way or another. My prediction is that birth rate decline will accelerate further. There's going to be some kind of universal basic income in many places, such as Ireland made for artists. However, it probably will not be enough to feed a family, and therefore we will see birth rates decline further. It's because we evolved to prioritize resources over reproduction and we are becoming more efficient, which means less people are needed to sustain the same amount of resources
[dead]
Maybe open source == communism
Good ol' Steve "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Ballmer said so a long time ago. What a visionary!
But China is not communist event though the rulling party the word in its name.
what makes you think that china ever gave up its communist goals? I personally see that everything they do aims towards that goal. From the one child policy, the huge amounts of empty apartments they build, the stuff they produce for almost free, the fishing.. open sourcing the models perfectly fits that culture too, it's the means of production
7 replies →
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea would like a word.
Oh i’m fully aware of that lol
Nah, open source means those who do the work own the result. It's supercapitalism.
I dont think thats right, the models and the gpus are the means of production.
in capitalism the people with the capital get the profit, not the people who do the work. however, workers are said to benefit too through their salary, just less so
4 replies →