Comment by kube-system
19 hours ago
> I'm sort of baffled by what the entities that train the open-weights models get out of it though. Is it just a direct play to undercut the US providers because they view them as a threat? I just don't really understand the business model behind it.
In China, it's because they are being heavily subsidized to do the research activity. It's not really complicated -- if you allocate public money for people do to a thing, they will do it.
China is known to spread love and kindness through markets with no self-interest, after all.
The US funds (and used to even moreso) scientific endeavors that stand to bolster the entire country all the time. Medical research is the obvious one, DARPA is the defense based one (though oftentimes defense is just a post-hoc justification for a lot of those), the Department of Agriculture is constantly researching improvements to the farming industry, the Bureau of Weights and Measures and the NSA fund cryptography research.
Research and development of new technologies often is a "rising tides lifts all ships"-type deal, which it is absolutely in the government's best interest to support.
For China, the best case scenario would of course be to control a locked-down best-in-class frontier model that the rest of the world becomes reliant on. The US seems to be beating them at that, and "Everyone is reliant on the United States" is a pretty bad scenario. A middle ground, positive outcome is that no one is reliant on locked-down closed models, so they're supporting that outcome.
It's really not that nefarious.
"public" doesn't mean "love and kindness with no self-interest".
We only think "government spending is for hippies" in the US, and only when we don't look at public spending like defense bills.
Of course it's in self interest. It's too bad that the US has gone the other direction and cut public funding for research.
> it's because they are being heavily subsidized to do the research activity
Is it actually true? This seems pivotal because currently most theories rest on the idea that individual Chinese companies are acting in China's overall economic or strategic interest. It's a tough sell to believe they all just do that through implicit desire to align with the CCP's direction. I would believe it much more easily if there were concrete incentives involved.
Yes, incentives are why people go to work in the morning. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA4012-1.html
You could say the same thing about Linux in the 90's and 00's. And yet here we are.
Remember the Halloween papers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
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You're fixating on what's a meaningless blip in the story; the technological world was built on post-WW2 US spending that ended 40+ years ago.
This is totally false. It moved from pure military to university grants. Go ask professors how the government funding environment is now. It’s a five alarm fire of collapse.
China wants the US economy to flounder. Building our entire growth model on software that can be copied and taken by a small group of people will have no possible consequences.
> China wants the US economy to flounder
It’s not that simple. If the US economy goes into a recession, it will take large sectors of the weak Chinese economy with it either directly or indirectly.
It’s probably more accurate to say they don’t want American LLMs to become dominant. The huge US data center build out doesn’t depend on Anthropic and OpenAI anyways. Those data centers can just as easily serve Qwen or GLM models.
They can't do this at the same margins. Cloud compute traditionally has <= 30% margins, and that's the very generous profit margin that folks like AWS are able to squeeze out of it with lock-in and proprietary tooling (something that will probably go away as software becomes more commoditized.) Frontier model companies (e.g., SpaceX) have been promising profit margins in the 75%+ range.
China is looking after their own interests, but they absolutely don't want their largest export market to struggle. The global economy is not a zero-sum game, and the idea that it might be is the root of many of our policy issues in the US.
Chinas interests today are a US with reduced power and a global economy more focused on China.
Someone loses power for someone else to gain. It’s literally the definition of a zero sum game? China targets areas it thinks it can win and dominate in the future.
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I don't think it is true that they necessarily want the US to struggle, I suspect it's more self interest. LLMs seem to be one of the biggest innovations of the last few decades, China probably just wants to make sure it's not being left behind and/or made hugely reliant on the US for what seems to be turning into a piece of critical infrastructure.
China has an effective strangle hold on some key sectors (solar, rare earths) and I am sure they relish this position and the leverage it gives them. You'd be careful not to give away that same leverage to a competing power if you can invest a few billion now and cover your bases.
Assume, crazy business, that china wants what’s best for the world. Recognizing the danger of an AI arms race rapidly producing uncontrollable superintelligence, it focuses on open weights to reduce the economic incentives for further advancement of AI beyond the “highly useful for humans” stage.
Seems like the only thing that could avert an intelligence rapid take off. Everyone wins except for shareholders.
> China wants the US economy to flounder.
Why would they possibly want their largest customer to flounder?
I think lot of Americans overestimate how much China needs them. (Understandable, I suppose, since the UK made a similar mistake vis-a-vis the EU about 10 years back.)
From a Chinese perspective I expect China’s largest customer is China. These days it’s actually kind of wild how many Chinese consumer products aren’t (and won’t be) available at US retailers. And a lot of them are quite good.
For a while now China’s wanted to reduce its dependence on the US for a variety of reasons. And undermining the US tech industry, whose products the US government likes to use as a cudgel, may serve that goal quite nicely.
It is largest customer for now, but they try to boost internal consumption as well as diversify client-base. US is also competitor, so China is interested US to fade at least in competitive areas.
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The fact that the US economy is load bearing towards unprofitable projects while things like medicare for all or universal childcare continue to not exist is just a damning indictment of the country.
I don’t think that’s true. The US is China’s most valuable trade partner.
edit: misread parent
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