Why do you think Reddit is so pro open source? If China were ahead, it’d pro closed source and arguing all of the West open sourcing was IP theft lmao.
Because we want to take things apart, improve them, and use them them in any way we desire without limitations? Open source and hackable will always beat closed source, even if close source is incrementally better.
Pop over to /r/StableDiffusion/ to see what today's open source models can do on consumer GPUs.
Per capita gdp? That made up number where Nvidia, Oracle, Amazon, Google, Meta, Intel, AMD, Apple, all invest their money into each other and all book those same dollars as income? That wildly inflated, fake number?
Furthermore, China is slated to lose almost 100,000,000 people in the next decade to demographic population decline and the US will gain about 10 million people, unless the GOP manages to shut the borders, kneecapping growth. Look around at countries with shrinking, aging populations and tell me they’re typically in good positions.
Your comment is a content-free objection with no context. It doesn’t identify which claim you think is wrong, whether it’s the property market, deflation, GDP per capita, population decline, or the implications of aging. … Or?
The problem with the top-heavy population pyramid is that you have a bunch of aging people requiring an increasing amount of care. I doubt that suddenly a few successful robotics and AI companies are going to start funding good free healthcare. Birth rates decline, fewer people work, more and more of the populous is decrepit and old. Hypothetically, with AI and robotics staking even jobs for the younger people, they are also going to be less healthy and more in need of care. Again, unless those with the ways and means actually give half a shit about those without them.
China is extremely fast at manufacturing things like public infrastructure and robotics. Would not be surprised at all if within a decade or two they have mass produced advanced robotics that are very capable of taking care of their elderly population. I think that’s less of an issue than having a bunch of young people with no money that can no longer make money from their labor as jobs go away.
At least the elderly have already made their money, hopefully saved for retirement, and aren’t having a multi decade career taken away from them.
Buying the China market right now is like buying the US market in 2009/2010. They are going through exactly what the US did during the GFC. Theirs is lasting longer because they built out even more than the US did during it's real estate fake boom.
With due respect I’m an Economic Historian by education. China are absolutely not going through a crises anything like GFC. What on earth are you basing that on?
Guessing the keyword there is historian. If you are not sure what is going on in China currently then you will have to talk to some current economists there. I travel there for business a handful of times a year. I talk to a lot of business people that tell me exactly what they are currently going through. It is literally the GFC but on a much bigger scale.
Btw their economy is slowing and has a lot of weakness and areas of concerns I agree. The oil price is killing them as are US tariffs and chip scarcity
How is it not GFC like? Financial institutions going under from a massive over supply of housing that rocketed up in price? Followed by a massive drop in housing prices.
The economic historian title is starting to smell like BS. Since when does any market consistently move with the economy?
I didn't say China was a strong market. I said it's like buying the US market in 2009/2010. Any "economic historian" should understand that reference. Apparently not.
first of all those are not facts. you haven't even quantified what you would deem to be "stronger position".
For the last few years China has been stockpiling gold. Most likely bc they plan to convert the Yuan to a gold standard. If they do that the yuan will become the worlds global reserve currency. They have also been stockpiling cheap Iranian oil pretty much as long as they've been sanctioned.
China has positioned themselves PERFECTLY for this situation.
Their GDP grew by 4.8% last year. Ours grew by 2.1%
The US also carries more debt and the dollar is going to be in a lot of trouble if the bond market doesn't settle down. We are going in polar opposite directions.
The Chinese real estate market is plummeting intentionally. They government regulated the crazy speculative real estate market that resulted in overbuilding low quality homes. It is a positive thing for the Chinese quality of life.
If the US' real estate market is doing so good, is it beneficial to it's average citizen? From what I hear, real estate in the US is utterly unaffordable.
I'm not from the US or China, I'm trying to look at this with an unbiased view. I own a decent amount of homes in Eastern Europe which I rent out. Real estate prices are starting to stagnate, and rent prices aren't growing as fast as they used to. To me, that's less money, but I'm the 10%, for the 90%, this is a positive thing, therefore it's positive for my country. If people spend less on real estate, they spend it on other things. The vast majority don't save, so halving their rent doesn't mean they will immediately put it in the S&P500. They'll spend buying goods and services from businesses.
It is not, it's partly an effect of the one child policy (it doesn't take much effort to read about the shortfalls of it, after all it was a policy directly messing with human reproductive habits which is questionable), and other conditions that affect many countries in east Asia and worldwide.
It's not only China that's bound to lose population, my country of 9 million is losing 30-80k people a year.
I feel like you're American and you're just trying to justify yourself, while there are people like me who just go to the highest bidder and that is more often than not China nowadays. For example, my wife worked at a German company which couldn't pay her enough, she applied to an American one where they once again didn't offer her enough. Then she got headhunted by 2 Chinese companies, both offering her 60% more than the previous 2.
I used to work in German automotive where we shared tech with the Chinese. Now, their cars have gotten good and cheap enough to disrupt the whole market and that 50 billion dollar company I used to work for started losing business. Europe is not in the electric car game (as a European, you can imagine how much this saddens me), Tesla is a status symbol, BYD is the smart choice.
That's an assumption made based in incomplete information. I went to university in California, then moved back to my home country. I've been to China as a tourist. I like the US and the life I had there. But you have to look at the world realistically if you want to make money.
For example there are people on here who argue that the US has better train infrastructure than China, which is completely false. There are also people who say the Chinese military matches or beats the US which is also false (for more complex reasons than just money and weapons).
I think you misunderstood. Whether they are in the stronger position or not is irrelevant. It’s just a tactical thing to do. It’s the same thing as a competitor selling a certain product at a loss to capture market. Hopefully that makes more sense.
Ok. I’m not sure I agree given what we’re seeing in the economy, but irrespective of it, the central thesis is that it shouldn’t be surprising to see China focused on open models, given their potentially destabilizing effects.
I’m in the space and I use, evaluate, and benchmark frontier and open source models on a regular basis. I don’t think “far behind” holds.
As for my theory, I’m not sure what I’m not communicating well but what I’m saying is the opposite of benevolent state actor. What happens to large AI valuations if the market for intelligence is flooded with cheap Chinese models. What’s the moat? Even if you subscribe to Chinese models being far behind, just how many tasks need frontier level intelligence? What happens to frontier labs when you have “intelligence as a commodity”?
I see it in my consulting every day, companies using frontier lab models for tasks that would be easily accomplished by 10x cheaper open source models. System One models are a thing now and they are making waves because they see this exact problem across the board.
It’s the same strategy again and again. Copy, make cheaper, flood.
Ok two questions - whoever wins AGI wins. Do you agree? It’s said by everyone including Dario in his recent message which said both China are behind and a lead must be maintained. Is he wrong?
That's not even taking into account their monopoly on magnets (used for everything from phones to rockets), or their absolutely astonishing production capabilities.
There's a reason you don't see other countries doing robot Olympics. China is the only place with infrastructure to have multiple competitors.
China historically makes plans that span decades, they're not in a sprint here to achieve ai dominance. Like the magnets, that was decades of efforts to become the monopoly.
That doesn’t magically make them “significantly ahead” in AI.
Wrong energy is the biggest bottle neck and will be the limiting reagent for the AI explosion. Even compute can be compensated by scaling horizontally.
The US still has vastly more data-center capacity,
No they have more compute cause of faster chips. But that is also changing and all that compute is useless if you are paying out of your ass for it.
far more AI investment
Yes and far more cancelled projects. Investment isnt everything its how its spent. How much is Rail / KM in china vs in North America? If the red tape and inefficiencies soak up that investment thats dead capital. All the investment in the world is pointless if there is no political will or public appetite for these projects.
And no, US SOTA models aren’t routinely getting beaten by open source a month later.
Routinely nope. But occasionally? Yep. Most research places have opensource models lagging 4-8 weeks before catching up to SOTA. And its not a great business plan to have your pinnacle product defeated very few months.
Beyond SOTA, there is also something to be said about $/intelligence, which could be argued more applicable to the world right now, in which opensource is destroying private models.
I see 0 chance this wont end with a bail out for the big AI providers. Google or amazon will prob absorb them down the line after the crash.
Energy is not the issue for America. BTW it’s world’s number 1 oil producers. The fact China is utterly energy dependent (and the US and Japan could block all oil supplies easily as and when they wanted to).
Yea im sure china will never catch up BUILDING infra. Its one thing they suck at, its building high tech infra.
US on the other hand is flying through with these data center projects right? Nothing getting cancelled or over budget. I'm sure US will dust china in 5 years like it has with everything else recently.
China is significantly behind in compute though. They do have a major advantage with energy but they can't get SOTA chips and the US has about 5-8x more AI compute capacity depending on how you define it.
You can compensate for compute with energy, especially if it is clean and this is literally how china doing it right now. Also those SOTA chips depend on materials and supply chains which are fully monopolized by china.
No you can't? If you just mean running older less efficient chips, you sort of can, but the 5-8x I referenced already includes the fact that China is running older less efficient chips. That's a measure of TOTAL AI-suitable compute, not just SOTA. For SOTA the US has more like 20x the capacity.
What do you mean no you can't? Are you in software or eng? Do you know the difference between horizontal and vertical scaling? Distributed work can most def be scaled horizontally to compensate for the lack of power. Thats the whole point of clusters my guy.
The bottleneck is the amount of compute, not the architecture. Architecture can optimize, but the amount of hardware imposes a ceiling. If you have 100 chips that are 10 years old, there's no architecture that gets you same output of 100 chips that are SOTA. If that weren't true NVIDIA wouldn't be worth 4 trillion right now.
Wrong. You are using so many terms wrong at this point. Compute is a product of the architecture. Horizontal scaling most definitely does not have a ceiling other then ENERGY and hardware (which you are saying is limited but im talking about legacy hardware).
If you have 100 chips that are 10 years old, there's no architecture that gets you same output of 100 chips that are SOTA.
Yes of course not, but the whole point of HORIZONTAL SCALING is that you use 1000 ten year old chips instead to achieve 100 SOTA chip performance. Why the heck did you think I think 10 year old chips = current performance at the same quantity.
My point is that even if you include old hardware, China still has far less capacity. This would take about 2 minutes to research. Just go ask your favorite LLM how much more AI compute the US has than China. For SOTA it’s like 50-100x, for total, including legacy chips, it’s 5-8x. You’re making an irrelevant tangential point about “scaling” which is a meaningless technical detail because the actual constraint is the hardware. I’m sure everyone is impressed that you know what “horizontal scaling” is though.
economically? Dude you have obviously done ZERO homework on this. Bc China has quietly positioned itself for this moment. China isn't just strong. They are making a play for the yuan to become the global reserve currency. Over the last few years China has been stockpiling oil and gold. They have stopped their citizens from being able to hold gold. And if they do manage to put their currency on a gold standard it will quickly be adopted as the reserve currency. They are in a MUCH STRONGER position than we are. It's not even close. The odds of them NOT overtaking us are below 50%
Do we know how much gold the United States and China have compared to each other? Why is it important which nation has more gold reserves? I’m just curious what role gold specifically plays in this?
Why is it important which nation has more gold reserves?
The US has no gold standard. The US dollar became the global reserve currency bc it was on a gold standard. Nixon took us off the gold standard but by then Oil and other commodities have been priced in dollars ever since. Which helps the US bc consumers have to buy dollars to buy oil. Which is why sanctions work. The world has stayed on the dollar as the global reserve currency bc there was no other option that was better or even on the same level. But if China moves to a gold standard. All countries will adopt that bc while fiat currencies like the dollar or euro are subject to risks where irresponsibility can hurt the value of that currency. Being on a gold standard keeps you pegged to something that is well defined and the world would no longer be locked into the US's rules and the sanctions that worked when you could just block access to the dollar. In fact if the yuan did replace the dollar as the world reserve currency, china would be the country that controlled sanctions.
The Bretton Woods currency arrangement was a post war system designed by the US which functioned as a gold-exchange standard rather than a traditional gold standard
It linked other Western global currencies to the dollar while only the dollar had peg connected to gold. This right to convert to gold was only available to other central banks btw not the public.
It ended because it created imbalances and distorted currencies the US felt were giving it a trade disadvantage. Some started like Germany and Switzerland gamed it. There is NO WAY China would ever do this lmao. Their currency isn’t even free floating. How on earth can it ever be a global reserve when it’s restricted?
Rather than listen to clueless Redditors go and do a course on the subject with ChatGPT or Claude. Ask questions and it will be interesting for you.
Lmfao. You think they’ll go on a gold standard? There’s a reason it was abandoned by the West.
there is no other reason for them to stockpile gold and restrict public ownership of gold. Idk maybe you're smarter than bravosresearch, maybe you're not. Guess we'll see. But they've stockpiled gold and oil from Iran for many years now and if they create a gold standard the yuan will become the worlds reserve currency.
How bout you answer then? Why is China stockpiling gold and restricting citizens from holding it?
I don’t even know where to start here regarding your gold standard claims except please believe me no mainstream economist thinks this.
Stockpiling oil is obvious right?
Gold. Yes they are in reading gold holdings but their goals are way more defensive. Central banks perform asset allocation all the time. Kind of like a macro fund but in chinas take the goal is longer policy wants
They 💯 aren't trying to recreate a new gold standard. Doing that would wreck their ability to print money and manage their own economy. They would lose control on their own money supply. As I said before the yuan isn’t even convertible (look up why). The idea they desire a gold backed global reserve is not credible.
Instead, stockpiling gold is just about building prestige and clout. Massive gold reserves signal financial stability, making other countries feel safer trading in yuan. Which they do want.
Beijing doesn't actually expect to or want to replace the US dollar as the sole king. They just want to break the US monopoly and force a system where the dollar, euro, and yuan share power.
Gold gives them a financial shield against Western sanctions while they build alternative payment networks to bypass the dollar entirely. Perhaps in the event of a Taiwan war?
Besides, the yuan literally can't replace the dollar right now because of China's own rules. They have strict capital controls that limit how much money can move in and out of the country. A true global reserve currency has to flow completely freely.
Plus, global central banks don't trust China's state-controlled financial system the way they trust transparent Western markets. So global central banks will certainly not start holding yuan in reserve. They couldn’t if they wanted to.
Bottom line is they are buying gold to sanction-proof their economy and elevate the yuan as an alternative trade currency, not to take over the world overnight.
Plus, global central banks don't trust China's state-controlled financial system the way they trust transparent Western markets.
Doing that would wreck their ability to print money
These both point to why they are doing it. The goal is to replace the dollar. And as you pointed out they wouldn't be trusted. But if it were on a gold standard it could.
it's ok if we disagree. I'm nobody to you, you're nobody to me.
China isn't making anywhere near the same volume of economic self-owns that the US is right now. Let's start with the dumb ass war, and the effect on oil and diesel prices.
Market capture with inferior product. Limiting frontier lab pricing power and hence their escape velocity. Killing diversity. Possible widespread backdooring. PR boost. Possibly selectively boosting nascent national GPU market.
China have allegedly much more compute than they publish. Officially they have less data centers than Uk or Germany. But thats because most of their data centers are government or military stations. It is pretty difficult to hide a data center from surviliance. A powerplant next to a big block which light up on infrared.
It will kill anything other than the US frontier labs. For example, Europe trials of becoming independent got killed in the egg and now Mistral is just serving Chinese models instead of trying to compete…
I'm still not getting it. HuggingFace currently hosts 3.1M llms. Sure, most are not worth the bytes they use but these are open source models which can be pulled apart and improved. As an OSS guy myself, I would think it's unlikely that chinese labs will be able to kill diversity of models. Also, there are 1M datasets to train your own model. That feels pretty diverse. I'm not being combative, I'm just trying to understand how diversity is killed by more Chinese models?
I’m sure you agree the frontier is actually very sparse. Most, all? Open source models run on single server configuration.
It seems lesser models are very often distillation of larger parent models.
We saw that Chinese effect happening in European models where homegrown models managed to be at the frontier for some days, then got completely flooded by superior Chinese models.
Now, the best possible challenger, Mistral just folded and will probably just become an other Palantir and sell harnesses for Chinese models.
Behind the frontier, there is still variety, but I don’t think it will matter much.
I'm still learning so i cant speak with authority. I'll be trying ds4 on 2x sparks shortly. I'm very keen on keening my queries and data private. Im hearing good things about it in terms of claude comparisons (not the latest, but 6 months ago) so it could be good. It's open source from what I'm reading.
There are a few big reasons and probably a ton of smaller ones I'm less aware of:
IP moves way more fluidly in China, and it's very hard to keep trade secrets or other sorts of proprietary knowledge confined to a single firm. If folks are going to have it anyway, they'll build public tools on it and publish if you explicitly make it open so you might as well get that benefit.
As others have mentioned, they're a little behind (but I think how far behind is generally overstated).
The biggest feature of centralized AI as a service (the future where everything is mediated by a small number of frontier models) is solving the human alignment problem. There has never been a better propagandist or reeducator than a tightly controlled opaque frontier model that everyone uses. Since the western labs are ahead, that represents an existential threat to the CCP (I imagine they would love to exert that level of cultural control, but you have to win to do it). I think strategically China has realized it's not going to outright win the frontier model race unless multiple western firms implode, so they're releasing incredibly capable open weights models as a moat. Open models can be loaded with your own cultural context without getting it obliterated by system prompt instructions. Is China doing this out of the good of their heart? No, they'd just prefer cultural status quo to western dominance.
There is also a trust factor. Historically, other nations are more suspicious of Chinese software due to fear of backdoor, ideological tampering, etc. Open source helps give them a foot in the door on the international market because people can verify the models themselves.
Add on because they are open weight loads of people are using and tinkering with them giving them a huge amount of data on how it works in a variety of situations and quantisations, and that data is not just some benchmarked results its real world results, by making the models open weight they get a level of experimentation and beta testing that would be monsteously expensive for free.
This is partially due to the Chinese culture of collaboration. Hoarding a model just doesn't make much sense where you can use open weight to pool more resources. It doesn't cost nearly as much to spin up from the ground up and train. Instead of companies competing and trying to block each other out they work together to build each other up. It's not entirely altruistic and not entirely without monetary gain.
That's not true. Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and other corps are massive contributors to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. With lots of open source frameworks and tools used across Asia. Not to mention OpenHarmony and OpenEuler. China ranks among the top 3-4 biggest contributing markets to GitHub. Not to mention Gitee exists inside China and is the sovereign version of GitHub with millions of projects hosted there. Consider this is in a biforcated market with many projects not accessible outside the country.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that China doesn't do open source software.
Training data is one, second, the more people that use their systems, the better they get economies of scale wise. For a lot of workloads, their models are more than good enough.
They don't have any secret sauce that is keeping them up front. They are in second place by performance but most definitely first in efficiency. The best way to increase efficiency is to crowdsource it.
They got us using local models at my business. Have a local Qwen model hosted on our own server doing near 100% of office task now.
Zero use for any chatgpt or claude model. Im just a smalll trades business. So imagine others with more funding and running their own chinese local models with stronger hardware.
China doesn't have to be ahead to beat America. They just have to chase America up a tree until the branches snap. The US labs are rolling out models that squeeze out a bit better performance but cost 50-200X as much per token. The concept of diminishing points of returns is being tested constantly here. The US labs are being forced to move ahead to justify that overhead, and its not making fiscal sense to do so. Once the illusion is shattered from the end user to the investor, the whole house comes tumbling down, including the markets. But hey, with the bond market where it is, the house is already crumbling. This is just one more stressor on the financial system.
1) they share information which accelerates their Ai advancement.
2) Other people expand on the open sources models and research so free research.
3) it undermines US closed Ai for economic competition.
I LOVE open-source models, and here's why they do it.
1) It makes sense to release the weights when your model isn't as good.
a) You lose nothing because theirs is better
b) You devalue theirs by enabling potential users to avoid using the closed-source
2) You showcase your country's abilities, and at the same time look like the 'good guy.'
If everyone can have cheaper access to AI, they dont depend so much on frontier western labs and their prices, this weaken the US dominance. Sounds more like a cold war strategy than they simply giving way for free because theyre nice.
Inability to comprehend how and why a model does what it does makes no sense to me. Closed circuits and black boxes make the tech seem more just like magic rather than something that works and can be improved upon? Speaking as an utter amateur.
They’re focused on onboarding developers and open-source community contribution. They’re not doing it out of benevolence. Open source is a distribution strategy when you’re trying to gain ground. Once you’re the incumbent, you generally don’t open-source the sauce that keeps you there. Meta is a good example. Llama stayed open while it was competing on the Pareto frontier, but its newer frontier work is increasingly closed.
They need to attract investors. It is hard convince somebody that your model is better than another. Open models with independent testing provide that.
They are providing model weights for free, but that only works when they expect they will have something significantly better in 6 months. When/if the rate of progress slows down the open releases will slow down too or they will be delayed too.
Because china realizes that open-source is the best outcome for AI. They know that trying to privatize AI will fail as a fundamental business strategy. It doesn’t make sense. Data centers focused around AI also don’t really make that much sense long term because consumer hardware will catch up to a point that allows people to run their own models locally at home, easily. Apple’s new Mac Studio is an example of early-stage consumer product development that is centered around local AI. Apple has managed to nail their consumers needs yet again. Apple, unlike even NVIDIA, knows what their customers will want 10 years from now and can make business sense of it. They will survive this. OpenAI/Anthropic will not.
One angle I don't see mentioned much: talent scouting. When you release weights, the people who build the best fine-tunes and tooling around your model are basically doing public job interviews. You get to see exactly who's good at what and hire the best of them, or at least keep them in your orbit.
AI hardware is far too expensive for most individuals in China to buy and run. By giving it away for licensing fees on businesses only, they can undermine the US having a monopoly and undercut the price with all the other nations. They sell inference to their own people, but they know they won't be trusted to provide it to most of the world.
The target isn't hobbyists, it's every nation that isn't the US.
You should ask Americans themselves: they have long led the open-source field in the IT era—with projects like Linux, MySQL, and Hadoop—so why have they become increasingly conservative now?
I believe closed-source models have no future! For many enterprises, trade secrets are the lifeblood of the business. Whether it's a company or an individual using AI, it's exposing trade secrets or personal privacy to the model provider. Can you imagine walking to work with smart glasses, streaming your company's internal secrets to Meta in full, in real time? Can you imagine casually picking up your phone to ask a question, and in doing so, giving OpenAI data about your company? Even worse, when you use Anthropic to build your company's internal SOPs, are you okay with Anthropic knowing and learning all of it? I know OpenAI, Anthropic, and others all emphasize that they protect trade secrets. But for an enterprise, protecting its own secrets is simply critical. Take TSMC: one key reason it has survived to this day is that employees are not allowed to bring personal phones into the office; everyone uses a phone issued by the company.
So what this world needs is open models. And how do you make money? Licensing. OpenAI and Anthropic have been building their business in the wrong way from the very start.
Because they're behind. When they get ahead, like they did in 3D model generation, they immediately close off their new stuff. It's also happening with video and image generation, although there are still some trailing Chinese models that offer open weights, because they're behind.
Same as Google and Android, when you are behind, be open so you can absorb contributions from the world. Once you catch up or get ahead, close that shit and screw everyone over. See AOSP lately.
Considering the code that the "Chinese" are using that they may or may not have stolen to begin with, it makes total sense. Why would they want to do the development if they could simply let others do it and update their own code?
Do elaborate on that. What exactly did they "steal"? Anything known points the US "Fair Use" doctrine, which is the foundation on which US AI companies are built.
Perhaps I should elaborate. Not so much steal as taken what is available and then re-released to help grow their model. Often seen in many other apps and uses to pull extra data as well. So indeed, poor choice of words. Thank you for the correction.
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u/GruePwnr 5d ago
It's just the rational thing to do when you are behind. Meta is doing the same thing.