Comment by petcat
1 day ago
The Chinese labs are not providing their open-weight models for free because they think it is good for humanity. They are doing it because they are severely chip constrained due to the Nvidia and ASML embargos and all available GPUs have to go toward training with very little left for inference [1]. So they are giving their models away for US and EU hosts to serve inference in order to still have a presence in the market.
It's not a great position to be in and it will still take a long time for the compute gap to close. In the meantime, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are essentially unchallenged.
[1] https://www.konstantinpilz.com/posts-publications/chinese-st...
I don't particularly care why they do it, they do it. OpenAI is less open than the Chinese.
You should. Maybe they have it open now just to destroy competition and then they close it. Now you have a closed system, with no alternatives.
Besides...
"If passed, the rules would require Chinese companies to obtain licenses to export the core technology behind their leading models.
They would also ban the export of A.I. that can be used to launch cyberattacks, as well as models trained on what China calls “core data.” The government broadly defines that as data that concerns national security, the welfare of Chinese citizens and the public interest. Experts say the scope includes data on the military or critical infrastructure, state secrets and other sensitive information. "
So pretty soon they won't even "do it".
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/world/asia/china-exports-...
> You should. Maybe they have it open now just to destroy competition and then they close it. Now you have a closed system, with no alternatives.
What makes you think there would be no alternatives, though?
Put it like this: Kimi K3.1 is downloadable and can be run locally. (If you have a datacenter.) This is a very capable, ~2.8T parameter model.
Now let's say that every Chinese firm goes closed in six months or a year and jacks up pricing... What's stopping a bunch of enterprising upstarts from updating all 2.8 trillion parameters, extending them, distilling the model into very competent flash models, or applying targeted RL?
Once the principles are understood and there are models that can be pulled off the open internet, it doesn't seem that hard to spin up your own LLM. You just need some financial resources and a reason for doing it. And that would come into play if the Chinese kill every closed American provider and then go closed themselves.
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Explain to me how they're going to take back the weights they shipped?
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why would i even care, if what's currently provided is better than good enough, and can be extended in post training / augmented with search?
So at worst the Chinese models would do what the US models already do??
Note that only one country has so far banned foreigners from using their models, and it wasn’t China.
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"The Chinese labs are not providing their open-weight models for free because they think it is good for humanity. "
Neither do Anthropic and OpenAI.
neither did google or any other american company did open source anything for the greater good there is no point in this comment.
I think the point is cope
> for free because they think it is good for humanity
I like Qwen as much as the next person, but that's a bit to credulous. Those models would not get the compute allocation nor distribution they do if it was not aligned with broader policy.
How long until China has its own chips?
It's a shame "AI" cannot be made to run on bitcoin mining dedicated hardware because they mastered that in only a few years
> How long until China has its own chips?
There are dozens of Chinese domestic AI accelerators: Huawei, Alibaba, and Baidu all have chips, there are a bunch of smaller startups too. The chinese mainland is behind on leading edge fabrication though, SMIC only does ~7nm class since they don't have EUV.
This might just be the thing that tips the scales in China deciding invasion of Taiwan is worth the risk. They're eying the Russian war warily though, if they can keep the United States distracted long enough and the EU at bay by continuing to bankroll Putin then they just might risk it. The window for that is closing though.
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Unless you were sarcastic: it absolutely can. Try finding a 170 for a reasonable price.
Heh, TIL
In case you're wondering as well:
https://wccftech.com/nvidia-cmp-170hx-8-10-gb-prices-explode...
It restores firmware features related to RAM, PCI-e speeds, BAR size, VFIO...
https://github.com/amoghmunikote/cmpunlocker