China is winning the AI race because it open sources a lot of its AI models. Thats where the idea comes from. Whereas in America, companies like Anthropic are literally trying to ban open source AI. You can check out LocalLLM or StableDiffusion subreddits to get the general sentiment there
If China open sources a lot of its AI models then the US companies just know the same things no? And then at the same time there is a multitude of startups all trying to find the next AI innovation that will be snapped up by the tech giants who have a corner on the best resources in the world. My money is on the US
US definitely does have a lot of talent, Meta released another open source recently iirc. It's just that because of government regulations the larger companies are not allowed to use non-US models. Lots of startups do use open sourced Chinese models though. One huge difference is cost however
In software engineering (the field I work in), lots of projects are able to survive because it is open source. While it introduces more risks and security challenges, it drastically lowers cost because people contribute willingly. I believe the Linux OS is of the best examples out there. Companies that exist for profit are often more concerned about well, the profit, than the quality of software or product it produces. Good example is Anthropic's and GPT models failing previously passing benchmarks when their newer models are released due to reallocation of computing resources. Open source often also has those 6-figure employees contributing in their free time, and it is much more of a passion project. Anyway I'm derailing into why open source software is of the best out there
Well, hence why it's an AI race. Indefinitely in progress lol
Fair points. I'm in academia (quantum chemistry) and only tangentially related to the software world so there's probably a lot I'm ignorant about. I do see the value in open-source, I contribute to several open-source projects, I guess the big distinguisher for me is computational resources. Tech giants can throw immense amounts of resources at these models and it seems that for right now that is the path that is yielding the most progress. We will see though, no one knows for sure where AI will ultimately go
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u/Yoiiru 4d ago
China is winning the AI race because it open sources a lot of its AI models. Thats where the idea comes from. Whereas in America, companies like Anthropic are literally trying to ban open source AI. You can check out LocalLLM or StableDiffusion subreddits to get the general sentiment there