Comment by ipaddr
5 days ago
It puts all US companies at a price disadvantage and forces American company to shoulder the load of training frontier models most will never need while the rest of the world has cheap AI access.
5 days ago
It puts all US companies at a price disadvantage and forces American company to shoulder the load of training frontier models most will never need while the rest of the world has cheap AI access.
The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier. If the US joined the rest of the world, declined to develop frontier AI, and allowed itself to become dependent on cheap Chinese AI, once that dependency was fully realized it would eventually translate into a lack of access to the frontier. That doesn't matter until, suddenly, it becomes the single most important thing to the entire country's future.
China is making a simple bet: that the US will offshore AI in favor of cheap tokens, just like the US previously offshored manufacturing in favor of cheap goods. They're doing this because they know that if they alone possess frontier manufacturing and AI capabilities, then they alone can build the world's most powerful technologies in the future which combine the two (e.g., robotics that will revolutionize all their industries, domestic life, and military far beyond any other country).
> The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier.
So... just use distillation and create their own frontier models?
I don't see the problem here.
If the goal is to hold sovereign ownership over your own SOTA models, China has already shown that any nation could achieve that pretty easily if they need to.
And that's ignoring the fact that many of these models are open weight so hosting/owning sovereign inference/intelligence itself is entirely a hardware problem.
This whole conversation reminds me a lot of North Korea deciding they needed their own OS when Linux is right there. If the technology is open and available to all, then sovereignty over this core technology is irrelevant.
Linux is not a relevant comparison, because the fundamental capabilities of an OS do not grow exponentially with time or investment.
If building full sovereign ownership of the production chain for frontier-level AI were so easy, there wouldn't only be two countries on the entire planet that have that right now. If distillation worked in the way you seem to imagine it does, nearly every country in the world would have a full sovereign frontier AI stack.
10 replies →
Spot-on and really well written post highlighting the challenges here. Really it just comes down to the US and surrounding sycophants and China. There just isn't any other game in town. For the US to just, well, give up on AI development would be civilizational suicide. I wouldn't put it past us though, most Americans in particular are so weak minded they only care about cheapest possible product. It's interesting to see how well propaganda campaigns have been working to harm American interest in AI and related technology (data centers are a bit of a different story). Young students are applauding guest speakers giving them the news they want to hear about how AI is bad and they need to tear it all down, while in the real world those same students are actively committing career suicide by refusing to innovate or adapt. It wouldn't really matter except that they vote, and those votes will wind up doing harm under the guise of doing good, but really it's a matter of delusion that we will all pay the price for.
Anyway the good news is everyone says China's strategy of just releasing open-weight models is the coup de grace for American technology companies and all the investment, research, all of that stuff by all of these companies who certainly don't care to survive and continue making trillions of dollars and can't possibly be managed by the same genius engineers who post on HN will just go away.
And then once that happens we'll just do what China did, and let them build a bunch of AI capabilities, scale out data centers, invest trillions, then we'll just release open-weight models too and then what?
You don't need to know a whole lot about AI to realize that most people on the Internet that are commenting on these stories haven't thought about how the real world works for more than two seconds when it comes to this stuff. China can enact a strategy, we can copy that strategy and even improve upon it.
Surprise Pikachu.
You (not you) can't claim a lead is unimportant and this undercutting strategy is so good and then simultaneously say the US can't do it back to China. That's dumb. If the lead doesn't matter everyone will stop doing AI research because being undercut is too expensive. How likely does that seem, and why isn't China stopping research if that is true and they just need to keep releasing open-weight models? Sorry, but being on the leading edge matters a whole fucking lot. As I've written in other posts this is like a cheap Android phone from Wal-Mart versus the latest iPhone. There's a reason you buy the iPhone and not the cheapest Android phone you can find even though they have all the same apps and both make phone calls.
I'm open to changing my mind here, but I have yet to see a convincing argument. Just a lot of pearl-clutching and China fear mongering.
We can see the same situation play out with manufacturing capability.
The USA has recognised that it needs more manufacturing capability. But rather than just build that capability (which is what the Chinese state-planned economy would do, and did) it tries to incentivise private companies to build it. Which didn't work because the companies building domestic manufacturing face competition from Chinese imports. The investment money can get better returns chasing property deals or rent-seeking monopolies.
In the "we can do it back" case, it still takes a US private company a lot of time and money to distill their model off the Chinese model. There has to be a lot of profit for them to do that. That profit isn't really available - it's a competition with all the other models, and no monopoly rents. There's for sure a viable business there, but it's a "lifestyle business" not the 1000x growth business that VC's want.
1 reply →
Lots of people want this outcome. We now know that the closed-weight model isn't an effective moat, but if the closed-weight model business fails, the open-weight business has nothing to distill, and model progress slows.
I suspect this is part of why China dipped into their vast strategic oil reserves to reduce purchasing and offset the shortage caused by Trump's blunder in Iran. If energy prices get too high, training will slow. They know they can pirate our models at 95% fidelity, so they want training to continue so they can pirate the next ones also.
Why would model progress slowing be necessarily bad for China?
They've invested in capabilities that undercut attempts at AI supremacy by US companies. Every time they put those capabilities to use:
- They look more and more like somebody who can prevent whatever world domination plans appear to be brewing in the minds of US billionaires. They can turn this perception into leverage over other countries by threatening to close their model weights.
- They get to use the improved models to boost their economy's efficacy (they probably think they can put it to use better than anybody else, and they might be right).
- For every $100 that the US paid for a given unit of improvement, they just pay $1. The longer the US keeps this going, the less stable it will become because the sacrifices the US has made to pull it off are causing things like measles and explosive diarrhea and will ultimately lead to unrest. Meanwhile the longer China keeps this going the less likely the US is to stand in their way, because the US will have neglected overlong the things that make it a threat to China (the legitimacy of the dollar, soft power programs like USAID, a thriving economy).
Also they have leverage over US because they've recently demonstrated that they can raise the price of oil. That means that they can pop the AI bubble anytime they want. So the longer the US is dumping everything into model improvement, the more opportunities they'll have to use that leverage.