Comment by lwansbrough
3 days ago
Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.
I suspect their tune will change if they ever take the lead..
3 days ago
Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.
I suspect their tune will change if they ever take the lead..
The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.
Destroying the growth story of overvalued stocks is an interesting investment strategy. It's not even new. Shortsellers understandably get terrible rep from execs, but their actions are more often in the public interest than you'd think. Normally it's exposing fraud, but here we get the really fortunate side benefit of what could eventually amount to the most significant contribution to the general software community since Linux.
> The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.
Its revealing that they always seem to publish after some big announcement by American AI companies. But regardless, this is one of the benefits of a duopoly.
No more revealing than OpenAI, Anthropic and Google always having some new model that just so happens to be waiting in the wings whenever their competitors announce their own model bump.
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I think you are reading a lot into this.
There's always an announcement by one of the frontier labs.
I always see these malicious speculations without evidence, simply because these companies are from China.
The framing that Chinese labs open-source because they're behind assumes it's purely a competitive tactic. But there's a structural dimension: DeepSeek operates under a completely different funding model than US labs. They're backed by a quantitative hedge fund that views AI as infrastructure, not as a product to monetize directly. The ROI for them comes from trading alpha, not API revenue.
Chinese AI companies also face a domestic market where open-source distribution is often the only way to reach enterprise clients who won't pay SaaS premiums. The business logic aligns with openness in a way that US labs' VC-funded models don't.
> They're backed by a quantitative hedge fund that views AI as infrastructure, not as a product to monetize directly. The ROI for them comes from trading alpha, not API revenue.
That used to be true, but now they've raised ~7B$, so we'll see how / if that changes.
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Also, we’re seeing a classic commoditization spiral with open models rapidly closing the gap and driving prices towards the marginal cost of inference. The reality is that models themselves are general commodities and there's just not enough difference between them. A company can get ahead of others by a few months, but then the rest quickly close the gap. It's a really low margin business because there's no way to differentiate yourself.
Chinese companies understand this and they're treating models as shared infrastructure akin to Linux. The money is going to be in customization niches. Companies will charge to tune models for specific use cases and charge support for that. There's also going to be money at the bottom for hardware vendors making chips and memory. But the middle tier of generic LLMs is seeing involution where there's relentless competition driving profits towards the bottom.
And OpenAI has the audacity to call themselves a non profit. All leading US models are closed source for one purpose, money.
Nope. It is purely a marketing and distribution strategy. Without open sourcing their models, their businesses would have never gotten off the ground. I've written about this here: https://try.works/writing-1#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-an...
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Which is a good thing. Self-serving motives are more reliable than altruistic ones.
The world runs on incentives. Altruism/Self-serving are down stream of that.
Wikipedia is altruistic, and serves humanity quite well.
Open-source is also altruistic. If DeepSeek does become self-serving once they get the top spot, it doesn’t take away from the altruistic contributions that they made towards open models.
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Is it though? A large number of people get to experience a lot of power over others because they moderate Wikipedia. That's certainly why some of them do it, just like on Reddit
This statement is factually true and you are voted down because many people lack knowledge.
Any individual that provides free labor cannot survive off of said free labor. He must work for money to survive or get donations from someone who earned that money from incentive based labor in order to even buy the food he needs to exist as a living human being. Much of the time that labor is actually closed source.
This is a logistical reality. A lot of open source advocates are unable to get their brains out of the whole mentality that open source literally cannot exist without incentive based software supporting it. Who pays for GitHub to exist? Who pays for the food swes eat? I just code for open source all day and money falls out of the sky.
My smart friend says there are jobs that pay you to work on open source exclusively. Smart guy. In this case you follow the money trail. How does that company get enough money to pay a guy to work exclusively on open source?
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I hate to quote pithy proverbs, but "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." One can have an altruistic goal which ends up harming people too, which is where that proverb comes from. Prohibition and The War on Drugs in the US are two good examples of something that had altruistic origins[†] but ended up doing way more harm than good.
[†] Another problem with altruism: we don't all agree on whether a goal is altruistic, and what's altruistic in the enactor's eyes might not be in yours. Curating a fountain of human knowledge like Wikipedia? Probably altruistic. Protecting humanity from itself by installing your company as the stewards of frontier LLMs? Not so altruistic in my view.
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Go read Max Stirner. True "Alturism" doesn't exist. It's all egoism, even if and especially if you think it's not.
Agreed
Very interesting take
Look at how far OpenAI has drifted from their original mission. Everything comes back to greed, so it's ideal for the world if selfish motives happen to coincide with what's good for the world, like advancements in open models
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It's a standard take since it is how markets tend to work. They aren't powered by altruism, it is a big system for turning greed into good results. We don't have all this stuff because people suddenly woke up one morning and decided to be nice.
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I don't understand what is interesting about it: it's the default.
Markets don't run on altruism.
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Isn't it the entire basis of capitalism?
You mean more predictable, not more reliable.
I don't think so. I can confidently predict that altruism will give you a very unreliable income stream in the vast majority of cases.
Disagree. It’s More reliable.
Could you explain? (asking in good faith)
Projection is a funny thing. It causes people to misread situations all the time. Southern slaveowners feared violent retribution from freed slaves, for example [1]. It was pure projection and said more about the South than it did the slaves. The reality was there was no violent retribution. It was the opposite where the former slaveowners continued to inflict violence on the formerly enslaved.
I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them.
A better reading (IMHO) Of the situation is that China believes that AI shouldn't be used simply to mint a few more trillionaires but the benefits should be shared with society. Why do I say this? Because we now have 70+ years of China doing exactly that. The transformation in China all the way from rural villages to Tier 1 cities has been utterly astounding. China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty.
In some ways we're at a similar point to the late 1990s and 2000s when Microsoft execs complained that Linux, being free, destroyed intellectual property value. Linux should be a perfect example of how people can and do act altruistically, or at least not in a way to bait-and-switch to enrich themselves.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1d26grm/in_the_...
It's even worse than that. China publishes stacks upon stacks of policy documents in which they explain clearly what they will do and why. This includes why they do poverty alleviation and why they believe big monopolies that own everything are bad. But almost no western observers care to read those documents. Instead, western observers, including HN, speculate endlessly about China's intentions, and "it would be naive to believe they would not do X" or drawing equivalences to Soviet Union or whatever. And the "journalists" sell this notion that Chinese state intentions are "untransparent" and "unknowable" while pretending the policy documents don't exist.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.
This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.
Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.
Extremely interesting comment, thank you. Got some links where I can download this source material? I don't read or speak the language, but will try interrogating it with an LLM
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I 100% agree with you and want to add something.
If you simply take what the Chinese government says at face value, you will be correct way more often than 95% of Western policy wonks, media talking heads, "analysts" and so forth. Because, like you say, they tell you everything they're doing.
In the recent US-China summit, Xi Jinping just came out and used the Thucydides Trap metaphor, which tells you everything about where China thinks it is and where it sees the US going, which is to become increasingly belligerent as their power declines. Now whether or not you agree with that assessment (I do agree), it still tells you China wants to avoid open hostilities, it sees itself as continuing to rise and it fears what a declining US might do.
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> And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions
...you've almost achieved enlightenment on the nature of the majority of HN comments: vibes-based, off the cuff braindumps, where an idea is examined as it is being typed. It's great for tech and software discussions where many commenters have good knowledge or even mastery, but on "exotic" topics, an incorrect take can be voted to the top because it sounds right by affirming the biases of the majority. If you're a practitioner in a non-tech field and a topic in your field comes up for discussion on HN, be ready to be disappointed - and be ready to question all the other correct-sounding comments in areas unfamiliar to you.
Aspiration for the masses and policy reality are different things. They will say monopolies are bad, but what they mean is only if the state doesn't control them. The CCP has huge state run monopolies and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't understand their policy without understanding Marxism-Leninism. When pesky reality gets in the way of policy, it's called corruption.
In communist or post-communist countries like China and Russia, the percentage of government workers is extreme. To them, all social action is political action, and that includes economic. Since there is only one party allowed, any economic action (and thus political action) which threatens the CCP is unacceptable. They leave other private companies alone.
The CCP is bad and this conclusion is justified not only in theory as a distant observation of ideological concepts, but from their behaviors around the world which echo some of the causes of World War 2. That doesn't mean Chinese AI companies are bad, but the CCP will certainly find ways of using it for its purposes. For now, they're quite far behind on AI, but they deserve credit for optimizing for some use cases which masks poorer generalization.
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I had the most ironic rollercoaster ride thanks to your comment.
I copied it into DeepSeek because I figured who's better to teach me about greatness of Chinese government policies if not the most popular Chinese LLM?
Anyhow, it must have detected _something_ in your comment because Chinese censorship policy kicked in and DeepSeek refused to talk about it. Funny because I would wager the overall sentiment about China's abilities to govern in your comment was positive but okay.
I literally asked it "expand on it so I can learn more about Chinese policies" and that was enough to get censored!
Anyhow, after saying few times "huh? but I want to learn what's great about Chinese policies!" it finally gave me response in... Mandarin. So I asked it to provide me that information in English and... it refused. Talk about difficulty of finding any materials in English ;-)
After starting a new chat and using plenty of positive adjectives to make sure I don't want to learn a single bad thing about China, I finally got a list. Looks like China is 100% successful in everything they do! How neat!
So I said "That's cool. Does this set of policies have one name? Can you recommend any books about it? In English of course" and...
...request denied again.
I mean, maybe it says more about how horrible DeepSeek is for this kind of research but boy, it was so ironic I now have stack of iron at home.
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This is a really bad, poorly thought out take, and historically inaccurate. Also, we're not afraid China will somehow be like us. If they were like us, that would be great. The problem is that China is already behaving like it is ready to abuse the power it has on a scale that the US never has.
Russia, China and Iran all make public statements as if they abide by international law and everyone else are the law breakers, while their measurable actions are shockingly contradictory.
It is their actions that have caused the US reactions, but many people present them as if they occur in a vacuum.
The AI race sits within this context, with a constellation of concerns that most people do not think about. Of course the AI engineers have their own motivation, the companies will share some of that motivation combined with their business trajectory and governments will get involved with it for the justifications they see.
> I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them.
Or because they're human and that's what humans have always done. If the US is no longer a check on China, what will happen to Taiwan?
Frankly, you seem to be arguing that the US is somehow uniquely bad when, in actuality, The US has been hegemonic during a time of incredible peace and minimal imperialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Peace for who? Like just look at the last 50-70 years of US intervention in LatAm. Backing a series of coups and extremely violent right wing dictatorships.
The issue is one of incentives. The US needs cheap foreign labor because of deindustrialization policies in the 60s and 70s. These were arguably passed as a check on labor power since socialism was still looking potentially ascendant at the time. Whatever the reason though, the contemporary US is reliant on keeping foreign wages down and domination of the oil trade. Imperialism grows out of this need for external resources to maintain economic growth. It would be less relevant to us if we had better fundamentals, but we traded those away to avoid letting certain demos get wealthy and powerful.
China's play is more mercantile. They benefit most from stable trade conditions. They get richer the more customers they have. They benefitted massively from becoming an industrial trade partner with the US in the 60s and 70s. Because of this, they have completely different foreign policy objectives. All they need to do to win is normalize relations and build trade infrastructure. Its way cheaper than imperialism.
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> Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.
US labs in Google, Meta and SpaceX are not leading, none of them managed to build something on par with GLM 5.2.
Care to explain to me why they still don't collaborate and still choose to do it in private?
I'm not sure I'd put Google in that list, but either way: Because they think they have enough capital that they can catch up and don't need the reputational boost of this.
As good as Gemini's visual intelligence is, it's a terrible agent.
Google at least still releases open source models to the public.
Thank Apple?
Those are mostly for embedded devices and the current "sponsor" is Apple.
Aren't they only open weights, not true open source?
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Gemini 3.1 is still up there, though? If Google started to compete on price they could be very successful.
It'll be their inability to build coherent products that dies them in, not their models.
Wait, are you claiming that these companies haven't contributed to the ecosystem via research and open source?
No idea I don’t work there.
They are focused on the things you do when you are not over-capitalized and you can’t get unlimited nvidia hardware to train on. And the results speak for themselves.
Meanwhile we in the US are blocked from buying Huawei GPUs and retirees are boasting about the nvidia in their portfolios.
Also, historically, China has always viewed intellectual property as public property. Similar to open source.
> Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.
Even if they're ahead they don't have enough GPUs to scale. Open sourcing is hence a good strategy to at least get market share (even if not $).
Are they behind in models, or behind in VC money to burn on subsidized compute offered to the public and early customers?
Genuine question.
Not everyone is motivated by greed
What do you think is the underlaying motivation?
You ask me what I think. So far deepseek has been very consistently trying to advance state of the art research in a transplant and public way by writing papers and publishing working code. They are also not at the mercy of the stock market in the same way many Americans companies are. Before anyone assumes too much, I live in Europe.
Not a greed thing. It’s a national security thing.
True!
So the marketplace is working.
This is the way! Open source models will benefit, and once open source models reach the state of "good enough" the hyped up US AI companies will fear, since the availability of free, good enough, AI models will set the ceiling for how much they can charge. Then the bubble will pop.
You mean open weights, I guess? There are as far as I know very few open source models, the training data is seldom released. Sadly.
Regardless of where they are, the Chinese will always share their progress, as they're collectivist/cooperative at their core, compared to the individualistic/competitive US.