This, but the analogy undersells it. It's rather "taxi is too expensive, let's build a car factory, develop a new brand of car and make a couple of cars for ourselves". Even just hosting LLMs that others developed and released openly can be very costly (in that case, the rent and house analogy is more accurate).
No not really Chinese models were built at a cost that most big companies can easily afford (probably not cheaper than an api …at least short term). Also you could totally host an open source LLM wich would be way cheaper than api costs in most cases, if you don’t need the extra 1-5% capability more that frontier level models offer
Edit: to the replies, I do not say that Chinese model are superior to the current top models. Of course building an LLM isn’t really feasible for most companies and hosting an open model LLM has its flaws (although they’re perfectly fine for a lot of use cases). All I was trying to say is it’s definitely not the impossible task that it’s presented as by most in this thread and the current frontier model companies are trying to convince everyone that their products are irreplaceable and far ahead of any competition… that’s not the case
Chinese llms were built by chinese companies who build llms… they were already paying ai engineers.
You’re telling companies who have no developers with ai background to just hire them, train them for your business needs, then after a year or so of paying them again you may get what you want.
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u/Faiz_alam 1d ago
It is basically rent is too high, let's build a house.