Comment by khalic
10 hours ago
The point I’m making is that this has become a strategic resource. The Chinese government allows wide sharing of their models because is weakens the US position.
If Chinese models become better than Americans, do you believe the CCP will allow the free distribution of their flagship models?
Think again if it’s the case.
Why wouldn't they? It keeps strengthening their position. It's an incredible source of soft power if they're seen as the place to look for good AI, and what's more, you can self-host it or hire a local provider if you're worried about data sovereignty.
I guess it's a possibility, but I don't have that kind of expectations from major world powers. It's not like the CCP is a beacon of human rights either.
‘Why wouldn’t anyone give away frontier AI?’ sounds like ‘why wouldn’t anyone give away uranium enrichment?’ i.e. I can’t comprehend the state of mind and the world model of anyone asking a question like that, which is apparently quite a few folks here on HN!
> Why wouldn’t anyone give away frontier AI?
They already are, to an extent. If we believe Amodei's nutjob take that Mythos/Fable are the end of the world in the wrong hands, we should have an open source Chinese model within 6-12 months that's already end-of-world level, so the cat is going to be way out of the bag long before the US labs go out of business.
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They would still be at a significant compute disadvantage and deploying them worldwide seems to be how they work around that currently as they put together a homegrown alternative.
Oh i don't expect this to happen any time soon, but they are making progress on the UV lithography side, so it's just a matter of time until it becomes a TW race, and they have the advantage on that terrain.
And I think we're at human-level intelligence for restricted tasks now. it's not the big bad AGI* we were promised, it's more like Rainman that needs a handler, but that doesn't make it any less useful. So I'm not sure what this future event will signify.
*And the ASI IMO doesn't happen without robots going full von Neumann replicator. Something I don't expect to happen any time soon.
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Maybe, but it could aöso be that they’re looking closeöy at the risks and negative externalities of the way things are currently being done in the US. I.e. bu and for the disproportionate benefit of a tiny elite, allied with a veru polarizing and unpredictaböe political leadership, while the vast majoruty are incredibly anxious and resentful about it all. China is currently ahead in all aspects pf ”AI” other than the specific niche of frontier LLMs, and for all their faults seem more interested in maintaining social cohesion (which has its own dystopian aspects, obv) and disseminating the technology and its presumed benefits throughout society, rather than ”beating the US”.
Not necessarily, commoditize your complement is a common strategy USA & Europe are more services heavy than China which seems to have advantage at manufacturing these days if AI trained on everybody data can replace some of it than it reduce China depend on others, increase demands from other countries to china's manufacturing and reduce their dependence on USA & Europe and reduce USA & Europe bargaining chip in any future negotiate.