Comment by mikestorrent
16 hours ago
I am still trying to figure out the business model of open weights. Like... it's wonderful that there are open LLMs, super happy about it, good for everyone, but why are there these? What is the advantage to their companies to release them?
IMHO this is only temporary, china buying themselves some time and want to make sure none of US models get entrenched in their position in the next few years (also putting pressure on US AI companies bleeding them)
The same way like Windows got entrenched everywhere even though linux desktop is pretty good even for non-tech savvy people and free.
> even though linux desktop is pretty good even for non-tech savvy people
Let's not get carried away.
A stock Fedora install has more UI consistency and cleanliness than Windows these days.
Non-technical people are easier to please in this regard than moderate-technical people: a good browser and safe, gui "app store" are enough.
My grandma just clicks on the red fox and does whatever online. A lot of people don't use any software outside of the browser, so it's pretty good-enough I guess.
Seems like people don't like this comment, but I chuckled. Nice one.
1 reply →
[dead]
Downward pressure on proprietary model pricing until a lab can catch up. Also good for hiring talent (who love OSS).
Cultural influence is another benefit. China is securing its sphere of influence as well as keeping us ai in check.
It's analogous to open-source software, which never had an obvious economic incentive either, although training an LLM necessary costs money whereas developing an OSS project might only cost time, which people are probably more likely to give up.
Yeah, but open-source software could have been me in the garage banging away on some program I submit to Debian or whatever... it didn't require millions of dollars to train, a lot of it was just side hobbies for a long time. Corporations sponsor it and contribute work because they need it to do more than what it does for free, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
https://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-rem...
Big AI labs are losing money. Open Models is making the pricing equation a lot trickier for them.
They are making the hardware and commoditizing the complement.
Balaji's "AI OVERPRODUCTION" post is the most compelling thesis that I've come across
Right now it’s so the Chinese can undermine the frontier models in the US. In areas they’re doing well like video generation (ie seedance) they won’t open source anything.
There are some short term ones but I doubt this will continue, especially for the more powerful models.
I mean, this is straight out of chinas playbook, it should not be surprising that China is making an inferior derivative product at an artificially lower price point: state subsidies to massively drive up internal scale and supply chains leading to artificially lower priced goods which then suffocate the competition has lead to *gestures vaguely at everything* being made in china.
People use their model otherwise they would not.
> What is the advantage to their companies to release them?
It's a distribution strategy. It costs something to serve the models - let's say $5/1M tokens.
If Qwen required $5 from anyone who was curious so you could even begin to test it out, a lot of people just wouldn't.
Now Qwen could offer a "free" tier, but it's infinitely cheaper to provide the weights and let people run it themselves including opening up the ability for anyone else on the planet to test it against other (open weight) models.
The costs to build the open weight models are sunk, but the costs to serve them, get them tested are not.
It's also precisely why the .NET SDK is free or the ESP32 SDK is free - they sell more Microsoft or ESP32 products.
The majority are released by socialists, and by socialist I mean the People's Republic of China. Which everyone seems to forget is a socialist country working towards world communism.
They are a prestige propaganda tool on par with the space race. On top of that they insert a subtle pro-socialist bias in everything they touch.
Ask deepseek about the US economic system for a blatant example.
Now think what something as innocent seeming as the qwen retrieval models are doing in the background of every request.
You're talking to a Canadian, and I'm not scared of the "red menace". You should be more scared - those guys can build bullet trains while you Yanks are finding it hard to even keep the old ones you have running. The solution here isn't going to be some kind of ideological force that protects people from different ideas, and that's an unAmerican way to fix things anyway. Embrace other ideas; central planning doesn't have to be evil, you just have to find a way to stop putting evil people in charge.
> those guys can build bullet trains while you Yanks are finding it hard to even keep the old ones you have running
This is an argument in the lane of "at least he built the Autobahn".
Speaking as a German.
1 reply →
The US can’t build bullet trains because property rights and local regulations make it prohibitively expensive. Not due to capability.
6 replies →
>you just have to find a way to stop putting evil people in charge.
Of course, why did no one think of that?
Xi is an obviously more capable and effective leader than Trump, but the US actually does have ways to boot people out of office when they do a bad job, and clear methods to choose successors, and China has neither. That matters more than who happens to be in charge right now.
The so-called inability to build trains is precisely because of a socialist/leftist style view that prevents this. I think you may not be aware that China has what's called a command economy. There is no one that is going to tell the Party that they cannot build a train in some area is because of ancient bush species or some kind of heirloom fruit and certainly not some awkward looking endangered species of fish.
Literal Trump Derangement Syndrome. America has a comically horrendous president but remains fundamentally a liberal democracy… and Canada concludes “literal Nazis are a better choice”. It’s uncanny how much can be taken for granted :(
(American talking, who’s had multiple Canadian friends make this mind boggling overcorrection)
2 replies →
> Which everyone seems to forget is a socialist country working towards world communism.
It's easy to forget because they actually built an incredibly vibrant capitalist economy.
They build an incredibly vibrant _market_ economy with no property rights and very little due process.
Imagine if Musk was disappeared during the Biden presidency into a diversity camp and came out looking like Dr. Frank-N-Furter and instituted mandatory LGBT struggle sessions at twitter.
This is what they did to Jack Ma: https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2021/06/24/what-r...
11 replies →
Is China even really communist? If anything they seem to be fairly on the Capitalist side but just a bit opposite on the spectrum of the US. And much more authoritarian
Just nationalist with focus on community?
The usual thing to say is state capitalist but honestly they do keep a market around too. A little hybrid of everything, I guess? Just with the state ready to jump in and intervene if anything happens they don't like.
1 reply →
From what I understand their one hundred year plan is right on schedule.