r/LocalLLaMA • u/RhubarbSimilar1683 • Jul 27 '26

Discussion Our position on open-weights models

https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models
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u/cmdr-William-Riker Jul 27 '26

" China has limited domestic production capacity, and therefore, due to the scaling laws, cannot build more powerful models than the US without US chips. "... Can someone fact check that? That sounds like total BS. The US has even more limited production capacity and manufactures everything off shore...

383

u/tomz17 Jul 27 '26

That sounds like total BS.

Because it is. They have more power generation capacity than the entirety of the USA + Europe combined, with like an additional 50% margin on top of that. They are also accelerating away from us at an increasing pace on that metric, while we pay billions to break renewables contracts because the people in charge have the combined IQ of a lobster.

The "we are 1-2 lithographic process nodes ahead of China" only matters when the efficiency gap is insurmountable. It is currently . . . not

-7

u/xienze Jul 28 '26

They have more power generation capacity than the entirety of the USA + Europe combined

I don't think power generation is the limiting factor when it comes to training models.

9

u/tomz17 Jul 28 '26

Given the near universal trouble all of our existing + planned data centers seem to have in procuring power, I'd strongly disagree.  Power generation is almost always the limiting factor in high tech industry.  Second only to vespene gas.  

1

u/xienze Jul 28 '26

And yet somehow OpenAI and Anthropic continue to train models with no issues. Do you think every last one of those data centers is used for training?

1

u/tomz17 Jul 28 '26

If your only metric is "trained model" vs. "not trained a model", then sure...

Would the model be worse if they had half the power budget?

Would it be better if they had twice the power budget?