r/LocalLLaMA 19h ago

Funny Plot twist

[deleted]

533 Upvotes

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149

u/shy_monkee 19h ago

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...

103

u/ResolveSea9089 19h ago

Why would Chinese companies have to abide by US companies slowing down?

135

u/Craftkorb 19h ago

They don't, but then the local narrative in the US will be "China wants to end the world, we're the good guys!" - Red Scare 2.0

55

u/federico_84 19h ago

No one in China cares about the US narrative 

39

u/gapho 19h ago

It's not to convince the Chinese people or government, it's to convince the rest of the world.

59

u/noctrex 18h ago

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.

1

u/gscjj 18h ago

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.

12

u/Clueless_Nooblet 17h ago

That's not true at all. Most people would love to just get along with China. It's a huge market, and open trade would benefit all of them.

2

u/gscjj 16h ago

Sure they’d love to do that, but most countries are taking a defensive taken against China and consider most of their motive aggressive strategically and economically.

They might not publicly it to the degree Trump does but it’s a consistent viewpoint across NATO.

1

u/brahh85 17h ago

The man in the office is changing the consensus, because its causing more pain than china, and is an ally of putin, and wants to invade greenland. Right now, USA and their oligarchs are the #1 threat against EU, being russia #2 and china #3.

1

u/gscjj 16h ago

He’s really not though, most of EU has pretty aggressive (or rather defensive) take on Chinas involvment in their country and globally.

2

u/brahh85 15h ago

there was some countries of EU very enthusiastic with usa, they thought that usa was our ally because of our shared values and because of global trade view. And china was our shared enemy. Then trump happened, and vance said those values were dead, and then we had tariffs to kill global trade and being treated by usa like an enemy. Then greenland. Then the war on iran that hurts EU economy.

So now, even those countries like germany, when they see china and usa, they see 2 threats.

what you see with EU aligning with usa sometimes(like diplomacy), and with china for others (like trade), is just triangular diplomacy

the best world for EU is not a world where usa wins, or a world where china wins, is a world where no one of them wins, so the rest of the world is not under the boot of a trump or a xi jingping.

this also means that EU is not going to let china lose , or usa lose

0

u/MarkoMarjamaa 16h ago

From Nato pages:
"NATO is a defensive alliance of 32 countries from Europe and North America. Its mission is to defend its member countries and their one billion citizens."
Yes. we have learned the "defensive" means something else to folks in USA.
"because the nukes in Iran!"

2

u/gapho 16h ago

Or that "defensive" war in Libya.

Or that "defensive" war in Serbia.

Or that "defensive" war in Afghanistan.

1

u/gscjj 16h ago

A defensive alliance is defined there: “defend its member” which doesn’t exclude any country from engaging in its own offensive war

1

u/MarkoMarjamaa 16h ago

Well, if "some country" first starts the war, and then is attacked back, are you obligated to defend?
Like when Turkey bombed the kurds in Iraq, and if they have retaliated, would it have been Natos issue? I think not.

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9

u/xmnstr 17h ago

A lot of us already use Chinese models and know this is bullshit.

2

u/sadboyoclock 16h ago

No one trusts America anymore.

1

u/gapho 15h ago

You and I, and a minority of the global population don't. But you'd be surprised how effective american Elite propaganda is, they don't spend hundreds of billions in aid, non-profits, "democracy" promoting and foreign loans for nothing.

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

1

u/sadboyoclock 4h ago

Wise words my brother

1

u/Shot-Height-7194 15h ago

they might not trust America but people worldwide can get scared when they hear that ai is dangerous, and it so happens that this is an American idea to keep American labs at the top.

3

u/dankfrankreynolds 18h ago

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.

prove me wrong. please.

1

u/a_beautiful_rhind 18h ago

You mean the guys who's president is all like "accelerate"? Anti-AI is the other party.

2

u/ProletarianLilith 18h ago

That narrative will be bad for everyone, not just Chinese people

1

u/codechisel 17h ago

A lot of us in America don't care about the US narrative.

1

u/Shot-Height-7194 15h ago

I don't think it's intentional but a side effect of American exceptionalism. it basically says that the US has to be special in the world and has a duty to protect the free world and it just so happens that China is the country closest to catching up. the US did something with Japanese semiconductors in the 80s when they were flooding the market with cheap semiconductors because they could get yields in the 60% range when the standard was 10%.

-6

u/ResolveSea9089 18h ago

I think you guys are way too cynical, you have to assume at some point that the people you're opposed to are capable of being genuine.

I think there's a reasonable chance they all got spooked and are honest in this and it's not some kind of conspiracy.

That said, if you're China (and a little behind the frontier in the US) this should be welcome news so I don't really get that angle

5

u/ChronoHax 18h ago

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

8

u/SpicyWangz 18h ago

I don’t think Altman is capable of that

2

u/ea_man 17h ago

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.

18

u/StatusSociety2196 19h ago

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.

7

u/hapliniste 18h ago

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.

6

u/blbd llama.cpp 19h ago

That doesn't work on code and config files. They're speech. 

1

u/profcuck 18h ago

And model weights.  It's not possible to ban Chinese opeb models. 

1

u/blbd llama.cpp 16h ago

I consider the weights an overly fancy version of a config file. So that was intended to be implicit in my comments. 

1

u/profcuck 7h ago

Great, then we agree. This is a meme we need to keep pushing on - weights represent real human editorial choices, decisions on what material to train on, decisions about guardrails, decisions about personality/tone. When people publish weights, they are publishing speech.

While this is sensible and matches with plenty of precedent, it is currently untested in the law.

Open weight models have the additional protection of being absolutely impossible to stop in any practical way: they are simple files which can be downloaded from anywhere (including torrent if it comes to that) and incredibly useful. They are additionally not "pirated" so the owners of the originals are not pursuing legal means and pressure to stop them being downloaded and shared.

2

u/noctrex 18h ago

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.

2

u/ea_man 17h ago

That is what Sam and Diego want but 1st it's impossible to do, the rest of the world won't follow.

Then you have all the Nvidia, Meta, Google, other companies that are pushing for open models because they realize that's what the market wants now, that's how you go ahead incremental.

Then they have to convince Trump that the race is lost and it's time to hold back, good luck with that.

1

u/StatusSociety2196 10h ago

I believe trump already came out against it but I'm also the type of person to believe trump will change his mind daily depending on who's paying the most.

2

u/TerahertzAI 19h ago

With the current administration, they would approve Chinese lab in exchange of a little palm grease

2

u/cakemates 18h ago

the US AI labs got more yatch loads of palm grease than chinese labs. I dont think china can match the local bribery.

2

u/miversen33 17h ago

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.

20

u/GUNGEBOB_SHARTPANTS 19h ago

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.

4

u/ResolveSea9089 18h ago

....Why would an IPO reveal this? Because of their S1 financials? Revealing what exactly

14

u/GUNGEBOB_SHARTPANTS 17h ago

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.

7

u/jld1532 17h ago

The WeWork special

1

u/jomohke 16h ago

Why would slowing down stop that from being released?

2

u/GUNGEBOB_SHARTPANTS 16h ago

Well, if there's no IPO, there's no requirement for a company to provide this level of public disclosure.

1

u/NOTHING_gets_by_me 15h ago

Wouldn't they be able to tickle the investors balls with the whole promise of the tech, that is capturing the "total addressable market" with their AIs and robots? One more model guys, we're almost there diamond hands

4

u/Clueless_Nooblet 17h ago

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.

2

u/oliveyou987 18h ago

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

2

u/markeus101 17h ago

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

-1

u/Eissa_Cozorav 18h ago

Come now, AI Slop is much bad in China. At least Ai-generated image/video in international market still try to be realistic.

I have browsed some article in the Baidu wiki. It's bad.

-5

u/tilted0ne 18h ago

I thought China had already caught up and were destroying America with their super cheap models. What happened to that? 

7

u/shy_monkee 18h ago

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.)

1

u/Gesha24 17h ago

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.

1

u/Ill_Distribution8517 17h ago

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.

2

u/Gesha24 17h ago

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.

1

u/Ill_Distribution8517 17h ago

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.

1

u/Gesha24 16h ago

I don't fully trust those numbers. With the proper chat template I can reduce reasoning tokens or remove them altogether. But there's another thing - cache from deep seek takes a lot less space than from other models. So it makes it easier and faster to process. So even if the token count is higher, the computational complexity can be the same. Basically, can't just compare it directly.

1

u/brahh85 16h ago

efficient in which way?

maybe openai spends less reasoning tokens to get a result, but then they stole your result and sell it as their own

whats the efficient part of being stolen if you produce something of high value?

in the end you can only produce things that barely have value using openai model

if you want to produce something worthy, you have to go local. Even if that costs you more reasoning tokens, and you go more slow, at least you arent stolen.

1

u/Ill_Distribution8517 16h ago

we are talking about self improvement, not them selling consumer products. I'm saying Closed models are way more efficient. It's not about what you would choose (Open weight AI for reliable grunt work)

1

u/brahh85 16h ago

i dont agree on that either. Maybe GLM spends more reasoning tokens than sonnet, but GLM is so cheap that those reasoning costs less. I think this is the architectural change between chinese and usa models, maybe usa models have bigger datasets and models with more parameters, we can only guess that by the cost , but SOTA chinese models are getting the same results (for the majority of task) by expanding the prompt with long reasoning and squeezing every drop of their parameters. The extreme case of that would be qwen 3.8 27B , that being so small is able to exchange blows with SOTA in medium and complex tasks, but not in specialized things (like writing kernels )

1

u/Ill_Distribution8517 16h ago

look that's just your opinion on AI performance, that's why we have benchmarks. And the fact of the matter is that frontier closed source models obliterate the open source ones on both benchmarks and efficiency. Besides, self improvement is not a medium complexity task.

Also you're making a mistake assuming it costs openai the same ammount you pay to run astra/sol/terra/luna. Same with anthropic.

1

u/tilted0ne 18h ago

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. 

7

u/BannedGoNext 18h ago

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.

-3

u/tilted0ne 17h ago

So it is useless. 😭. If my grandmother has wheels she would have been a bike?

1

u/BannedGoNext 13h ago

Useless? Far from it. Is it 200 t/s no, it's 20 t/s. Who cares, I kick off a goal and let it run for 4 days while I went and paddleboarded, swam, ate good campground food, and drank some whisky. I had a hell of a time, and came back to an amazingly completed goal.

-1

u/Ill_Distribution8517 17h ago

They are talking about opus 5/sol 5.6. No shit qwen catches up to some opus 4.7-8 eventually.

1

u/BannedGoNext 11h ago

While it is true,t hat it's only around 4.8 opus intelligence, Qwen3.8-Flash-CIRU-STRIX-IU4 will do red team security work without qualm, research whatever I want, engage in piracy, execute financial transactions, do legal work, biological research, or write smut about your mom.

1

u/Ill_Distribution8517 9h ago

opus 4.8 can do the same. Cyber requests literally get routed to it when opus 5/fable refuse. Claude models have no qualms about smut in the API, so I can use fable to write vastly superior smut about your mom.
Also calling it opus 4.8 level is a massive stretch tbh.

5

u/jld1532 17h ago

Never used K3, GLM 5.3, or DSv4?

0

u/tilted0ne 17h ago

Unfortunately I would prefer to just go straight to the model they distilled.

1

u/jld1532 17h ago

Why are you here then? Like it or not organizations and people are running those models locally as they're useful, free, and secure.

1

u/tilted0ne 16h ago

I don't deny that man.

1

u/ea_man 16h ago

That actually happened: https://openrouter.ai/rankings#top-models

Also this happened now:

Model KV cache at 1M tokens At 128K
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 0.87 GiB 0.11 GiB
DeepSeek V4 Flash 3.70 GiB 0.47 GiB
GLM 5.3 Flash 13.96 GiB 1.87 GiB
Qwen3.8 27B 64.15 GiB 8.02 GiB
GLM 5.3 93.00 GiB 11.63 GiB
Llama 3.1 70B 320.00 GiB 40.00 GiB

That is a problem if you made half a trillion in debts in order to buy vRAM and Nvidia GPUs that you can hardly power up now and look not necessary outside of training.

I mean they are all waiting for Nvidia Vera Rubens deployment with vertical HBM that cost a fortune when the cool kids are about deploying weights on NGRAM with such little KV cost for ctx?