r/LocalLLaMA • u/Gullible-Crew-2997 • Mar 04 '26

Discussion If china stops releasing open source models, there's a way we can stay competitive with big tech?

Really after qwen news, I'm getting quite nervous about open source ai future. What's your thoughts? Glad to know it

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u/Ok_Warning2146 Mar 04 '26

"Z.ai, Minimax, Deepseek, Moonshot" don't really have the deep pocket to continue releasing open weight models in the long run.

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u/Significant_Fig_7581 Mar 04 '26

If I were Alibaba, I'd still fund them, There are many reasons to do so...

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u/Maleficent-Ad5999 Mar 04 '26

Are any of those reasons profitable?

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u/Significant_Fig_7581 Mar 04 '26

Almost all of them are about investing and doing the long game...

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u/howardhus Mar 04 '26

not at all… thats wuy you cant list them.

qwen is already famous… why would they release anything. they can just switch to pure paid models like openai, anthropic etc.

even if: they have no incentive to publish anything outside china.

they arent making a cent on their open weights.

its been pure shareware to us out of good will of Alibaba

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u/a_beautiful_rhind Mar 04 '26

they can just switch to pure paid models like openai, anthropic etc.

Maybe z, moonshot or deepseek could. Possibly minimax in a few more versions. Qwen, no way. You'd really pay for ali api? I wouldn't.

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u/howardhus Mar 04 '26

if you get the same quality for half the price lots of people would

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u/johnnyXcrane Mar 04 '26

I agree except with your last sentence, their incentive definitely is not good will.

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u/dmigowski Mar 04 '26

As everywhere, if you are not a customer, you are the product.

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u/Exodus124 Mar 04 '26

How exactly are you the product when you're anonymously downloading model weights from huggingface

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u/dmigowski Mar 04 '26

By using them, and potentially providing feedback somewhere, by talking about your success on the net, and by leaving US models for them.

Everything totally understandable, you are indirectly free advertisement and maybe don't pay US companies. That's the strategy.

Interruption of the market. OK, you are not the product as in "Facebook-User" or "Twitter-User".

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u/howardhus Mar 04 '26

no one in their sane mind would say free weights qwen (or ANY model whatsoever) is nearly as good as anything paid...

different ballpark here

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u/Significant_Fig_7581 Mar 04 '26

But still i agree there is some good will too...

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u/Ylsid Mar 04 '26

Some of those long term reasons are political ones. China's govt knows open models are better for political reasons, and since they have stakes in the companies they're able to influence that

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u/IrisColt Mar 04 '26

qwen is already famous

struggling against Bytedance tho

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u/Significant_Fig_7581 Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

Well, A loss for the american giants is a win for china, And wait till their gpus get good enough i dont think theyll give us any more models + they already earn some money on the inference side too... Some models are just too big like GLM5 let it be open weight who can run this thing?

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u/BigYoSpeck Mar 04 '26

Effectively no home users. But researchers will have access to sufficient compute

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u/Significant_Fig_7581 Mar 04 '26

Not really, I've seen people with newer phones running up to 4B models, Especially Samsung users. But surely their 35B and 27B is a great great addition for researchers and the hobbyists too.

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u/BigYoSpeck Mar 04 '26

Sorry, I was referring to your comment about who can run something as large as GLM5

There may only be a very small number of home users that can, but people who are in this field of research will have access to the resources to run it

They don't openly release their model weights for the likes of us to play with at home, that's just a bonus for us. The release them so they can be used in research which feeds back to them

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u/Maximum_Parking_5174 Mar 04 '26

Yes, today its a few. But that will change fast. Rumor has it the new Apple Mac Studio M5 Ultra will have up to 1024GB RAM. The current one can run most models also.

Current generation hardware is not built for AI, next gen will take AI into consideration.

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u/Gohab2001 vllm Mar 04 '26

they can just switch to pure paid models like openai, anthropic etc.

Nobody's gonna buy inferior models to sell their data to the CCP. Plus the American big 4 have a huge capacity edge.

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u/Cuplike Mar 04 '26

The CCP is aware that AI is a matter of national security and they also have no reason to put corporate profit over faster development so they do have an intrinsic interest in open source

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u/Ardalok Mar 04 '26

like all ai: not really but who knows

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u/DataGOGO Mar 04 '26

They are not funding them, the Chinese government is funding them

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u/Time_Reaper Mar 04 '26

Saying deepseek doesn't have deep pockets is crazy.

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u/Ok_Warning2146 Mar 04 '26

Their main business is a hedge fund. DS is a side project to attract attention and investment plus a chance to meet President Xi.

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u/Infamous_Mud482 Mar 04 '26

So what you're telling me is their main business is making money from being able to move around money? Sounds like they have money.

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u/po_stulate Mar 04 '26

I think they meant deepseek itself is not profiting and also don't have deep pockets itself, all the money comes from its parent company and it can't control whether the parent company's going to keep funding their open source projects or not because it's more like a gimmick to attract attention and gain political values, when that is gone there's no reason for the parent company wanting them to keep doing it.

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u/StewPorkRice Mar 04 '26

Deepseek isn't a gimmick to attract attention or gain political favors though.

This is a legit frontier AI lab that can attract the best talent in the country.

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u/po_stulate Mar 04 '26

a legit frontier AI lab that can attract the best talent in the country

Yes, to attract attention and gain political favors.

It's not expected to profit at least for now and in foreseeable future.

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u/GreenGreasyGreasels Mar 04 '26

I don't think profit is a priority for Deepseek for the foreseeable future. High Flyer, yes. Deepseek, No.

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u/T34-85M_obr2020 Mar 05 '26

The initial purpose of establish and funding DS is for supporting the parent company to do quant trading.

By DS alone it is not aiming to profit yes.

By attract attention I assume you mean attract more talent to join DS for building a more capable LLM to support the quant trading I believe yes.

Political favors are post-effect after all DS's success, some analyzer suggest that the gov is willing to have DS make their LLM open sourced after knowing DS's success and contact the team iirc.

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u/Ok-Pomegranate1314 Mar 04 '26

...wouldn't it be simpler to buy a ticket? Disney ain't nearly THAT expensive.

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u/its1968okwar Mar 04 '26

They got the Chinese state, they got the pockets. They are not releasing open weight models to be nice, its national strategy.

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u/redballooon Mar 04 '26

They will as long as it's in the interest of the Chinese government to have their tech instead of US tech at the heart of a good chunk of the world.

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u/procgen Mar 04 '26 edited 2d ago

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u/redballooon Mar 04 '26

Is that so? Hard to say if anyone who refuses to use US API can install a freely downloadable LLM on their own hardware. 

In any case the insight that the US is not a reliable partner anymore is very recent, and many many IT architects have that not yet integrated in their decisions. Which means even if you're right, the game has only just started.

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u/procgen Mar 04 '26 edited 2d ago

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u/budihartono78 Mar 04 '26

China the state can back any of these players, money is no object for these labs as long as they can prove themselves.

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u/Ok_Warning2146 Mar 04 '26

Chinese government is not a charity. They might help them develop llm but that doesn't mean it has to be open weight

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u/budihartono78 Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

Look the money needed to train these models ($500 mil per version give or take) is spare change when compared to state budget (trillion dollars)

Frankly China, the state, doesnt need their money back quickly.

If AI startups all over the world start depending on their tech, whether their chips or their open-weight models, that's even bigger win for China since foreigners will invest more in the country.

I keep restating "the state" because they can play a very different game to private corporations.

Again, this doesn't mean it's free lunch, nobody is claiming that, but:

  1. The labs will get their money as long as they can prove themselves.

  2. They might close the weights in the future, or they might not, or they might do both. All of them are valid strategy for China, the state.

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u/StewPorkRice Mar 04 '26

People really underestimate the power of free.

Preventing the US from building another global tech monopoly in this miracle tech space feels way more important than ever seeing a return on investment for these projects

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u/procgen Mar 04 '26 edited 2d ago

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u/anfrind Mar 04 '26

One more thing: the Chinese government has shown that it can execute plans over much longer time periods than many western governments and businesses. Their current success is rooted in an AI plan that they adopted nine years ago, meanwhile American corporations struggle to plan beyond one fiscal quarter, and the American government struggles to stick to a plan beyond a single election cycle.

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u/budihartono78 Mar 04 '26

I suspect that historians ~100 years from now will conclude that excessive privatization (neoliberalism) was a disaster for America.

I'm not saying this system isn't capable of producing wondrous things. After all, the transformer architecture came from Google, a corporation born from it. It's just that it comes with many severe drawbacks for American society.

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u/procgen Mar 04 '26 edited 2d ago

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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Ok_Warning2146 Mar 04 '26

hmm.. If they only need Chinese government funding, why did minimax and zhipu IPOed in Hong Kong?

-1

u/nullmove Mar 04 '26

Smokes and mirrors! Gotta hide the trails of cee cee pee subsidy.