Comment by andriy_koval
4 days ago
> ALIBABA because it tickles them to erase/cap profits in western labs, free optimisation/research, great PR.
we talked about Chinese models. Yes, erase/cap profits, PR, and give clients peace in mind that model access won't disappear. So, it is infiltraiting markets.
Your argument was that releasing models as open weight was allowing them to collect data but reality is that open weight models precisely allow users to completely avoid data collection – something that is not actually possible with closed weight models.
Motivations are more complex than that, if they wanted to achieve that they'd follow approach taken by some western labs to release weaker models only as open keeping frontier behind APIs.
I explained it already: open models -> market infiltration -> more data because many/majority clients still use official API because of convenience.
Use of official API outside of China is closer to opposite of reality.
Look at ie. OpenRouter you'll see how many providers there are and how much traffic they get.
If the goal was data, opening weights would be the worst available way to achieve it: a cheap, closed API would capture 100% of traffic (ie Anthropic style), weights can only lose share from there.
With open weights it's net loss of active users of your official api – you're loosing users to self hosting and dozens of providers.
The thing is that open weights create permanent exit that closed models do not have, inference is commoditized immediately, people choose open weight models specifically for data privacy (and stuff like soc2/hipaa compliance) and if somebody wants convenience they go to claude/openai and friends anyway.
Also chinese labs are not uniform with their approach just as western labs are not.