alt Hacker NewsThis is the rare earth minerals dumping all over again. Devalue to such a price as to make the market participants quit, so they can later have a strategic stranglehold on the supply.
This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it.
It is a kind of cheat on the fair market but at the same time it is also costly to China and its capital costs may become unsustainable before the last players fold.
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> cheat on the fair market
Can you really view this as a cheat this when the US is throwing a trillion dollars in support of a supposedly "fair market"?
I mentioned this before as well, but AI-competition within China doesn’t care that much about the western companies. Internal market is huge, and they know winner-takes-it-all in this space is real.
> This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it.
It's a bit early to have any sort of feelings about it, isn't it? You're speaking in absolutes, but none of this is necessarily 100% true as we don't know their intentions. And judging a group of individuals intention based on what their country seems to want, from the lens of a foreign country, usually doesn't land you with the right interpretation.
> It is a kind of cheat on the fair market ...
I am very curious on your definition and usage of 'fair' there, and whether you would call the LLM etc sector as it stands now, but hypothetically absent deepseek say, a 'fair market'. (If not, why not?)
Isn’t it already well accepted that the LLM market exists in a bubble with a handful of companies artificially inflating their own values?
ESH
Are you by chance an OpenAI investor?
We should all be happy about the price of AI coming down.
The way we fund the AI bubble in the west could also be described as: "kind of cheat on the fair market". OpenAI has never made a single dime of profit.
Prosecutor, judge and jury? You have access to their minds to know their true intentions? This whole “deepseek is controlled by CCP” is ridiculous. If you want to know how bad the CCP is at IT, then check the government backed banks.
The way I see this, some tech teams in China have figured out that training and tuning LLMs is not that expensive after all and they can do it at a fraction of the cost. So they are doing it to enter a market previously dominated by US only players.
Do they actually spend that much though? I think they are getting similar results with much fewer resources.
It's also a bit funny that providing free models is probably the most communist thing China has done in a long time.
Good luck making OpenAI and Google cry uncle. They have the US government on their side. They will not be allowed to fail, and they know it.
What I appreciate about the Chinese efforts is that they are being forced to get more intelligence from less hardware, and they are not only releasing their work products but documenting the R&D behind them at least as well as our own closed-source companies do.
A good reason to stir up dumping accusations and anti-China bias would be if they stopped publishing not just the open-source models, but the technical papers that go with them. Until that happens, I think it's better to prefer more charitable explanations for their posture.
Ah, so exactly like Uber, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and so on have done to the rest of the world over the last few decades then?
Where do you think they learnt this trick? Years lurking on HN and this post's comment section wins #1 on the American Hypocrisy chart. Unbelievable that even in the current US people can't recognize when they're looking in the mirror. But I guess you're disincentivized to do so when most of your net worth stems from exactly those companies and those practices.