Comment by lorecore
3 days ago
There are no switching costs for users to move to a new model.
> Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies
This is simply not true?
3 days ago
There are no switching costs for users to move to a new model.
> Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies
This is simply not true?
Do not have any empirical evidence, but reality is that China's semiconductor capabilities are not at par with Taiwan yet and the US is able to influence Nvidia's sales to China as well as access to other vendors (TSMC) and technologies, giving the West an unfair advantage.
Just like Chinese EVs and Chinese renewables eventually beat the West, I have no doubt that China can probably eventually pull ahead, but I think it is probably accurate to say that China is currently still behind (how far is hard to say) because they have a slight technology handicap imposed by the US.
Your comment is responding to an issue that is different from what GP said. GP was talking about Chinese open source particularly, i.e. their open source models, which AFAIK have consistently been keeping up with (albeit a few steps behind) the closed source OpenAI and Anthropic models.
Hardware capacity is a separate issue entirely.
I mean, this sentence is self contradictory, no?
It seems like hardware capabilities are at the very heart of both training and inference which is why Nvidia, TSMC are hitting record income and capitalization. Feels like divorcing hardware from the equation is discounting a big part of winning this race.
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China would probably be very confused that you're asserting they're not on par with Taiwan.
In semiconductors.
Otherwise, no one would need to buy from Nvidia or contract with TSMC.
2 replies →
This is absolutely false as a recent study from Stanford clearly states https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeawa...
> There are no switching costs for users to move to a new model.
This depends on how many proprietary APIs are in the way of the model itself.
Or whether the model still works the way you want. For example, a lot of people were pretty unhappy with Claude 4.7 and preferred the way Claude 4.6 worked. If you're relying on a service, then you're stuck with whatever changes the provider decides to make. And the provider is chasing a demographic that's profitable, if you happen to fall out of that demographic then tough luck.
But if you run your own models then you're not subject to anybody's whims anymore. You have full control of how your software works and what it does.
That’s absolutely a reason to just use a web chat interface. Zero cost switching between providers when one isn’t performing. Second, your data are spread between providers which reduces surveillance effectiveness.
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> This is simply not true?
Yes, this is purely delusional.