Comment by jubilanti
1 day ago
You're treating open weight inference providers the same as proprietary ones. They're fundamentally different business models. Proprietary companies have an incentive to subsidize actual inference and training costs in order to gain market share. The few dozen or so companies selling Qwen models by the token on openrouter are in a commodities market.
If suddenly the CCP declared a total digital embargo on Alibaba's Qwen models or even if for some reason all of mainland China (and Singapore) was completely unreachable from the rest of the world, the dozen or so companies selling Qwen by the token elsewhere in the world could continue business as usual.
I don’t know anything about the open weight host business model. Do we know for certain that the folks selling inference by the token are really selling them in an upfront and profitable way? No subsidies from harvesting the info, to sell to the model trainers or anything like that?
Or subsidies from hopeful investors sweet-talked into not understanding the commodity nature of the business they are investing in. But that does not change much about the general assessment.
Chances are the typical story goes founders start fully believing that they would succeed with their own innovation but slip down a gradient towards commodity provider without really noticing themselves.
I was thinking of user-side regulations as well, not only provider-side ones. I could imagine a world where a government rules that you may not use LLMs for anything, which would be much easier to get around if you have local means.