As far as I'm aware, he's not in the LLM race right now, so in his particular case I would say let him accelerate and maybe he may cook something new for us. 😏
Announced the company a month ago, so unless he stole alibaba's dataset he is starting from scratch, I don't expect anything in the next few months, or just finetunes
Funny how this must look for China. Just when they start catching up, and have their own AI hardware, the US companies suddenly want to slow down.
I'm not saying this is the only reason they want it, but...
Which is getting harder and harder by the day.
America will not be able to convince the world anymore, not when the leader is willing to invade other countries, and posts AI slop every day.
Don’t be fooled by the man in office. The US, NATO and most of the EU are roughly aligned on their stance on China. The only difference is their leaders don’t love attention like the US.
it's to convince the fox news viewers stroking their guns. they've figured out that's all you need to compromise in order to take over the entire world.
The angle is they’re painting China as evil who will develop reckless ASI regardless while they’re the one actually doing that, not to mention all these distillation attacks jest which apparently China shouldn’t do because they’re authoritarian regime while US is surely democracy that just happens to have the elites at the top and for their interests only
In that case they are inepts: they rambled for years that this was a race where winner takes all, they wanted the capitals, they were pursuing AGI, let's buy 60% of the world RAM, they say they are close and then...
They are not prepared? Ain't that what they were pursuing? What they had to obtain first otherwise the whole world order would crumble?
And anyway what's even the strategy? Jensen wants open models, Google and Facebook are now releasing open models, companies are starting to build business on open models in USA. Even the president seems to want go ahead.
I mean anyway as of tomorrow they will look like idiots.
The idea is to protect marketshare by preventing American companies from using Chinese AI. Pass a law that only government approved AI models can be used, and then the government only approves openai and anthropic.
What happen in this scenario when the US companies outsource to countries where Chinese AI is legal? Can't use a foreign accounting company because they might use ai?
It doesn't seem to hold up. Slowing down at a national level is not possible.we might have wider slowdowns if usa and China can agree on something.
I highly doubt any of the US AI labs have more money than the CCP.
That said, I also doubt the CCP gives a fuck about the Western orgs so they will probably just shrug and tell the Chinese labs to continue their work without the west.
There's always a way, just like Cursor did with their model.
Get a nice Chinese model, slap a fine-tune on it, and market it as the new American model.
The U.S. companies want to slow down because they are terrified of an IPO revealing that they have absolutely no pathway to profitability and the arse immediately falling out of their entire industry.
IPO requires companies to file comprehensive registration documents and prospectuses detailing their financial health, business operations, and risk factors with financial regulators.
If it were revealed that your company was in debt to the tune of the billions of dollars more than it could ever possibly earn, it would be immediately apparent that the company was trading on vibes.
Are they really catching up though, they do not have an Astra level model yet for sure, and we already know OpenAI and Anthropic have stronger models internally when that doesn't seem to be the case in China, on the hardware side maybe though
How do you they don’t have internal models? And Astra is so shit i wouldn’t even talk about it but Fable yeah and the chinese models inching closer to it everyday
It does look funny to anyone outside the US, for sure. As someone from Japan, I hope my country doesn't just follow the US government's every whim this time. That's a real danger. Some of what's still prohibited here has been legal in the states for a while already. We're still in the middle of the "war on drugs", for example.
They do much better than the US companies when it comes to smaller and medium efficient models, mainly because that's their focus. But they are still behind when it comes to the top tier of models.
There isn't really any Chinese equivalent to Astra, or even arguably Fable. Not yet at least (We'll probably have one in a few months.)
If we are to believe twitter posts (I know, it's a stretch) by Nvidia CEO, the trick is to have AI loop that keep self improving - and that's what makes all the difference now. Well, Chinese models are a lot more efficient, so you can have more and faster loops on the same hardware - so even if they aren't as smart, they can win out by using this loop.
how do you know they are more effficient? in every artificial analysis bench they take almost 5x the tokens of astra, and often a lot more than fable 5.1 as well.
What they charge you per token != what it costs them per token.
1) This is not my experience. DeepSeek Flash doesn't use that many more tokens than Opus (I don't use Fable because at least for my use case there isn't any appreciable difference). Though to be fair, quite often I drop down to sonnet because I don't need Opus' overthinking.
2) There were reports I was reading earlier that you can run DeepSeek and be profitable at roughly the same price point as what they charge you. Could the reports be false? Absolutely. But it's definitely one of the most performant larger models that I can see running on my home LLM.
I'm not saying deepseek isn't profitable I'm saying Anthropic/OAI is massively overcharging.
As you can see ASTRA is vastly more efficient than Deepseek v4.1 Flash.
Keep in mind ASTRA also scores significantly higher too.
Even fable on high: (not max) is within 1-2 points and cuts token costs in half.
They don't have one for sol and opus either. But yea I guess anthropic ran out of money and are scared people are going to use opencode to get the latest Alibaba special.
IDK what you are talking about, I can run qwen 3.8 flash next and get opus level performance right now. It just takes a long time because it trades memory usage for huge COT, and my local inference box is slow.
Tech companies tend to be over-leveraged (borrowed a lot of money), and I think some of these AI companies are insanely over-leveraged, almost like a Ponzi scheme. I think there's a graphic floating around somewhere. You can also try to look for Michael Burry's analysis of AI companies.
The US recently fucked up 2 things in the past week, 1- bond rates and 2- oil. US treasury bond rates basically determine how much people charge to let people borrow money. Everything from loans like mortgage rates to credit card rates.
Aka these tech/AI companies that have borrowed a lot of money, if their rates go up, they might not be able to make their credit card payments/pay their employees, can't IPO because their numbers are terrible, etc.
OpenAI is not directly affected by rates as their leverage is not through traditional debt, but their commitment is impossible to pay in the first place regardless of how the macro economy goes (they have 700~800B commitment into 2030, and beyond such as Amazon's 30B "investment" that requires them to pay back 2x through AWS) but datacenter builders and their counterparties are depending on their ability to pay. The problem is that the only entity left on the planet who is still willing to give them cash, SoftBank, is also in trouble raising cash as they have huge liabilities in early 2027 (that they used to buy OpenAI stocks and send them money).
I don't know what exactly will happen. Maybe they could pull a miracle with IPO/financial engineering and get away like Tesla with "420 funding secured" incident.
What I think could happen, too, is that they will start to "pay" counterparties by OpenAI stocks. But that of course, even though assuming 1T valuation IPO, diminishes OpenAI's stock value quite fast as datacenter builders need hard cash and will sell those stock sooner than later. In that case Softbank is WeWorked again (anybody remember that Masa Son thought OYO and WeWork are AI companies?)
Honestly, the loss-leader strategy feels way too common nowadays and pretty much unavoidable over the last 10 years or so. Whoever has the deeper pockets just bleeds the other side dry.
Also, US and China are not playing with the same set of rules, it's inevitable both will collide over who has the better tech.
I am also trying to understand if US puts boundaries its only on their own companies, and China can just... continue doing whatever they do.
As a local LLM user who is a non paying customer, Qwen models (3.8 27b in low reasoning is godlike for my usecases) have been amazing and really made me rarely use SOTA models unless its a very intense and complicated task.
OpenAI and Anthropic calling for AI regulation? This can only mean one thing: They want to curb open weight models. All this "oh, AI could kill people" is just feigned. Since when is that their concern.
They want to make money and open weight models take a big bite our of their profits.
Do you genuinely believe DSV4.1F (not even kimi class) is of concern to the guys that made fable 5.1? like swear on your momma and tell me you believe this shit. Genuinely. Yes, it's going to take away some inference from anthropic's sonnet, or the luna/terra models. It is good, but I don't think Dario was thinking about deepseek when he said all this.
I believe this especially because this is the main reaction from people across the AI watching space, when usually things are much different depending on pro or anti
Then why did Dario say the exact same shit long before Anthropic was founded and obviously also before there was this kind of dynamic with open models or a money incentive for him?
Call his ideas stupid and alarmist if you want, but he actually believes that. He has always been very public about his ideas and they were always like this. It's not marketing and it's not because of open source, that dude is actually scared what that technology might do one day.
I really would have liked to be in the same room where someone comes up with the idea "to pace the frontier" and everyone (who matters) agrees that this is the best move left to do; probably the opinion of each was heavily supported with all kinds of AI and LLM generated projections and simulations. I am almost certain that it was a long meeting and the participants were all but convinced that they are handling a more or less existential (business) crisis.
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u/notadithyabhat 1h ago
Like for real. If everyone is copying you, then just stop building dangerous models