Comment by fnordpiglet
10 hours ago
I’d also note that running a 2.8 trillion parameter model at scale efficiently is not simple. I would expect when open weights land getting it running fast, efficient, and at full capability will require sufficient resources it’ll be expensive outside of Chinese hosting. Which I think almost no western corporation would use for any internal work. You have to anticipate your use won’t just go towards training but will be actively mined for IP, trade secrets, MNPI, etc, or anything of use to the Chinese government or Chinese companies. I don’t say this to crap on the Chinese - but this is the playbook for the last 30 years.
That said I fully intend to use deepseek hosting for operational agents that are making decisions about non sensitive material. The economics are astounding.
Kimi? The economics aren’t that amazing to merit switching from 5.6. I expect fable will rapidly reappear in subscriptions. Competition is good.
The APIs for the frontier models via the US hosters do the exact same thing wrt saving the requests and responses for data mining. Let’s not pretend that pervasive surveillance is an eastern thing.
Come now. The purposes for which the data is used is relevant. I am much more concerned with my internal corporate IP being actively used against me than passively used to train the model. I would also note you and sign agreements that prohibit the collection of data for use as well, which is also one of the key selling points of bedrock. In the west you can actually enforce such an agreement in court and win.
I wouldn’t lump this into a west vs east thing as well. This is particularly PRC. I feel comfortable doing business in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, etc. But it requires some particularly strong willfulness to pretend the PRC isn’t actively and structurally built around economic espionage, and funneling IP through PRC for short term economic gain has been one of the primary factors in their growth over the last 30 years. This just scales it faster.
I wouldn’t expect the USG won’t compel AI companies in the US to disclose and retain data as well - however it’s not a simple thing, the companies are hostile to it themselves, courts are often unsympathetic to the government, and the “machine” for converting it into actionable economic advantage is non existent - and there’s a very significant human component in that all links in the chain are culturally uncomfortable with such things. While it happens and it’s possible it’s very difficult, fraught, and does not scale. The PRC is the opposite - the courts, government, and business culture are all aligned in the goals and processes.