Comment by bg24
18 hours ago
There is no coming back. After all, open-weight is NOT open-source. It is basically free model. And you pay to host it.
The value proposition is that 100's of providers and host and sell it. 1000s of businesses (eg. Microsoft, Databricks, Palantir to small startups) can run it, finetune it and own the IP and pay only for hosting.
On the other hand, you have OpenAI and Anthropic, who need to charge at 90%+ inference margin. It is because of 1) sunk cost, 2) sky-high salaries that they paid to keep the talent. Companies like Meta screwed things up badly by paying billions of $ for chief engineers.
Chinese labs are doing a favor to the world. But I can also say with 100% certainty that if US labs were to close shops next year, Chinese labs would immediately start charging $$. In fact, I think it might happen with open weights model soon. But still these fees will be one-fifth or one-tenth per token. Also it does not come with all the guardrails.
Solution: US labs need to reduce their costs, cut the salaries across the board and compete. AI and robotics are the last hope of US to get back to industrialization and continue being the superpower.
> Chinese labs are doing a favor to the world. But I can also say with 100% certainty that if US labs were to close shops next year, Chinese labs would immediately start charging $$.
How would do you explain the pricing of Chinese solar panels, after managing to destroy other countries' solar industries? The prices are still dropping per watt.
Could it be China's internal demand for solar is big enough, and its long-term governmental strategy on renewables result in an outcome that almost looks like largesse to the rest of the world? I suspect Chinese AI may follow a similar path.
> The prices are still dropping per watt.
FYI if you look into what has happened in the wholesale solar market since the end of 2025, this is no longer true. Prices are now 20% higher than they were in Nov/Dec, and were even higher earlier this year. Hard to predict the future but we may have reached a price floor, as at 2025 prices the module suppliers were below cost and losing money. The market dynamics have changed significantly since then
China may well save the world with green energy but I’m skeptical to assume we should just trust them to share their best intelligence with us freely, it’s a totally different think to sharing their best intelligence.
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This comment has been flagged in our software as AI-generated. Of course it could be a false positive (though from reading it myself it does come across as LLM-influenced). But if you've used AI to write or polish the text, even just a little bit, please don't. The guidelines specifically ask us not to do this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated
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While this has clearly been written by / with help from an LLM, the general info is correct and matches what I have heard from those suppliers (although $0.21/W future pricing is far higher than the estimates I've seen)
Pangram believes this is 100% AI generated. High confidence. If you just used AI to edit your work, then it would say it was human influenced or low confidence, which is contradictory to another comment you claimed.