Comment by Bengalilol
16 hours ago
Whatever the consequences, I have to admit China has understood that all those are raw materials and that open sourcing everything will help growing their economy (as a whole).
The worst idea was to build corporations providing services with AI. It was an extension of the latest 50 years model, which is about to crumble. Now, we have our revolution. (Ok, ok, I am a little bit too enthusiastic, I now need a fallout shelter).
> ...open sourcing everything will help growing their economy (as a whole).
Most Chinese models are no longer open source. Qwen, MinMax, and GLM are transitioning to weights-available models, leaving only Xiaomi and DeepSeek in the open-source space.
AFAIK, there's no evidence that Alibaba won't keep releasing more open source models. Before 3.8 there was speculation they wouldn't release the weights, but they finally did - Although I guess the largest model wasn't multi modal.
And Minmax is set to release their latest flash model on October 23rd.
So not sure where you're getting this from, unless I misunderstood something
It doesn't matter anyway. Weights aren't IP so the licenses are bunk.
> Weights aren't IP so the licenses are bunk.
This is not yet a given, I expect rule-making or copyright law expansion if courts rule otherwise.
Things also change. In the 80s lawyers carefully suggested white pages phone listings came under copyright but "sweat of the brow" was rejected by US supreme court in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
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Why is that btw?
Because if you don’t open weight you can dictate pricing as you’re the only party that can serve the model. Also attracts users to your platform rather than inf providers.
Not sure what you are promoting here. The "open" model currently seems to work, if you a) burn outsized amounts of money that you have in the bank, in an attempt to get good eventually (Meta) or b) distill other models.
Both ask for a fairly narrow definition of what constitutes a good idea. There is plenty indication that both Meta and all of the Chinese labs will go closed, as soon as that path makes more economical sense for them. They are certainly already steering in that direction.
This is just like linux and the larger open source movement. It liberates closed source code that should be open. In the future we will look back at this like we do the start of linux.
Treating AI like microsoft office subscriptions is really the losing model, at least in the long run.
Some open model might be Linux, none of them will be Chinese though.
You're kidding yourself if you think the moment they get an upper hand or better models they won't close everything down
It’s really hard to vilify the Chinese now on this and make it stick! So far, they seem to be championing openness and freedom on this front, which considering the nature of the technology, is a huge deal!
If they change their stance later, we’ll criticize them the same.
Its not about bad/good. It's about self-serving interests. Currently, it serves China's interests to open source the models. If they had capabilities beyond those available in the US, I expect that would no longer be the case. Especially given the military/cyber implications. You don't expect them to open source their J-35 blueprints, so why would they behave differently here?
The reason this matters is, if along the way, they destroy all economic incentives for US labs, you may find yourself in a world, where you have no alternatives to closed Chinese models.
Look no further than what happened to mineral processing. Notice they are not open sourcing their mineral processing and magnet-manufacturing technologies.
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Many of the open source models are now only open weight though. Where is your criticism?
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It’s possible they don’t if they fundamentally believe the AI market is going to end up being an exercise in just mass manufacturing tokens, which China is going to easily win because they can generate way more electricity than any country and manufacture almost everything they need to do it domestically.
The models are just a distribution mechanism in that case, and it’s in their interest to get that into as many hands as possible.
If the Chinese government has anything to say about it, which in China they typically do, they won't be able to close everything down since the official stance is to be more open than closed.
Not really. The official stance is likely to be the dominant supplier of hardware and models to run on it. And the models will need to be refreshed every so often as world evolves, especially if it evolves quicker. Global south will be buying Ascends soon. And EU will eventually follow as well or bleed money to US. Selling hardware to run freely available models in itself is sufficient and way easier to enforce than that someone won't pirate the model. Can't pirate the GPU.
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