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Comment by rao-v

3 hours ago

I know we have strong views on what a truly open model is (open weights, open training data, open training code etc.) but I really like how transparent they’ve been about the training of this model.

The realtime dashboard they shared during training (https://mimo.xiaomi.com/rl/) was an incredible learning and teaching tool for me, and they’ve been unusually comprehensive in sharing details about their methodology (check out that tech report - it's got lots of clever behind the scene tricks like Google or Deepseek writeups) and benchmark scores (even the stuff they didn’t do well on).

If you’re releasing an open model going forward, please consider offering the community more of this transparency!

maybe this is why Dario want to slow down AI development and all the big AI labs in the USA is singing the same song.

whey they all singing the same tune. it make me question what is their real motives.

they are afraid of Chinese good enough LLM model killing their margin. we already have story about US companies switch some task to use cheaper Chinese model hosted on Neoclouds.

  • The reason is money. They want regulation to make it harder for new competitors and competitors from other countries.

    They invested billions into training the models but there is no competitive advantage, we see that within a couple of months everyone catches up. There is no way to profitability unless they get some policies to shields them against competitors that can't comply with the regulatory requirements.

    That is also why there are things like Claude, Codex and Cursor. They are trying hard to build a customer relationship with a higher switching cost that hopefully sticks.

    But the problem is that the AI buildout has become a large percentage of GDP. So obviously the government wants to keep it going because these companies are pumping enormous amounts of money into the economy.

    • I’m still not at all sure about the “billions” invested claim. How much of that is cloud running the models? How much is pre and post training (which may or may not be part of what we’d want to include in accounting). Etc. Does anyone have links to good reporting about this: not blind recitations of numbers, but analysis and thought mixes with investigation?

    • > But the problem is that the AI buildout has become a large percentage of GDP. So obviously the government wants to keep it going because these companies are pumping enormous amounts of money into the economy.

      They are pumping enormous amounts of money into each other. Hardly any of that is making its way to people, it's all going to highly automated construction and to energy use.

      Seriously, how many jobs did the $1t in venture capital fund?

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  • Please explain how putting an upper bound on how good the strongest models can be prevents cheaper less strong models from catching up, rather than enabling it. I do not understand this argument at all.

    • > Please explain how putting an upper bound on how good the strongest models can be prevents cheaper less strong models from catching up, rather than enabling it. I do not understand this argument at all.

      They are not proposing to regulate only the strongest models. They are proposing to regulate all models. If they are already on top, regulation may stop them from proceeding further, but it also stops the cheaper alternatives from catching up.

      If they feel they have reached the asymptote of the curve, then regulation doesn't affect them, it affects those who have yet to reach the asymptote.

  • Does anyone know what are the proposed regulations? Controlling software is impossible, so the only option is banning hardware ownership. No more mac studio.

  • Dario has always wanted the AI development to slow down and be more careful. Safer AI development was a core reason that Anthropic split off from OpenAI.

    What's different today is that now all the big LLM firms want to slow down AI development. When men like Musk and Altman (both known for habitually shooting their mouths off and saying whatever they need to whoever needs to hear it regardless of truth) suddenly agree with Amodei, that's when things start to smell off.

    • > What's different today is that now all the big LLM firms

      not all, just a few American ones (~PayPal Mafia + Google), there are other big American LLM developers (notables include Nvidia, Meta, and Palantir) that do not agree

Thanks so much for sharing this. As someone who mostly watches from the sideline, can you share what you can see in this dashboard that someone like me can't see? Is it the metrics themselves that they measure (the metrics tab is absurdly detailed), something in the notices, or something else I missed?

  • I might turn this into a blogpost if folks are interested, but my god there is so much clever info in that dashboard.

    Here is one really neat bit:

    A cutting edge training idea (for agents, it's been used elsewhere for ages) is on-policy RL, basically, it's not enough to say "here is an end to end agentic sequence (including tool calls etc.) that is perfect" you want to say "here is a sequence you might actually have generated that turns out to be correct".

    Basically, it's more training efficient to improve models with small tweaks to do more of the right thing they are already doing sometimes than from some perfect oracular "this is the way" answer.

    (if you've ever tried to teach humans new skills, you’ve probably noticed this too!)

    When you do that, you care about how far the model you are updating (improving) has deviated from the one being used to generate rollouts (agentic rollouts for hard problems can take hours with lots of tool calls, so you can't keep redeploying every slight improvement).

    Lo and behold, the dashboard literally has:

    partial/avg_staleness (likely the measure of how many micro iterations the "generate answers" model is behind the "improving based on the occasional right answer" model)

    train_infer_diff/new_infer/kl (a more direct KL divergence based way of measuring how differently the two models generate tokens)

    How cool is that?!

    And don't get me started on the clever ideas hiding behind dynsam/avg@n ...

  • The best thing they did is being open about all the setbacks they had to deal with. They logged every restart with a reason, talked about dropping a cyber dataset after it degraded coding benchmarks. Also published real time training loss, benchmark scores after every checkpoint and running cost estimates.

    Really the only thing missing was dataset descriptions, the dashboard only had random IDs like "dataset-zrso". I guess it's their lawyers fault.

> got lots of clever behind the scene tricks like Google or Deepseek writeups) and benchmark scores

Xiaomi MiMo is led by Luo Fuli, a former Alibaba & DeepSeek employee. Perhaps it is due to Luo just how similar Xiaomi's tech & GTM approach is to DeepSeek's.

- How Luo Fuli Keeps an Earthy Touch as she Soars Through the AI World, https://newsen.pku.edu.cn/news_events/news/people/15385.html (https://archive.vn/I8Pmu).

- Luo Fuli, the 30-year-old ‘AI genius girl’ behind DeepSeek’s success?, https://e.vnexpress.net/news/tech/personalities/who-is-luo-f... (https://archive.vn/sb3B6).