alt Hacker NewsI agree. I can totally see in the future that open source LLMs will turn into paying a lumpsum for the model. Many will shut down. Some will turn into closed source labs.
When VCs inevitably ask their AI labs to start making money or shut down, those free open source LLMS will cease to be free.
Chinese AI labs have to release free open source models because they distill from OpenAI and Anthropic. They will always be behind. Therefore, they can't charge the same prices as OpenAI and Anthropic. Free open source is how they can get attention and how they can stay fairly close to OpenAI and Anthropic. They have to distill because they're banned from Nvidia chips and TSMC.
Before people tell me Chinese AI labs do use Nvidia chips, there is a huge difference between using older gimped Nvidia H100 (called H20) chips or sneaking around Southeast Asia for Blackwell chips and officially being allowed to buy millions of Nvidia's latest chips to build massive gigawatt data centers.
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“They will always be behind”
Car manufacturers said the same.
> have to release free open source models because they distill from OpenAI and Anthropic
They dont really have to though, they just need to be good enough and cheaper (even if distilled). That being said, it is true they are gaining a lot of visibility (specially Qwen) because of being open-source(weight).
Hardware-wise they seem they will catch-up in 3-5 years (Nvidia is kind of irrelevant, what matters is the node).