China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

The AI open source/closed source dynamic is like a pandoras box that keeps evolving and seemingly unpredictable side effects feed back to affect each other. Is actually great material for tech nerd drama

China is not winning if there even is a winning outside of politics. China is still clearly copying stuff as always. The mote will never be about doing simple things. It is about swimming at the deep end of the pool. The simple stuff will be running on any device in future. Complicated stuff will be using more tokens than one can imagine today.

I'm new to this AI stuff, and I have a question. Aren't the weights the whole model? and knowing which nodes on which layers they connect to, which I assume is part of the weight definition.

So if you have the weights, don't you have the whole model? you don't have the data it was trained on, but the model is effectively open if the weights are open, right? What else is there other than the weights, is what I'm asking.

Local Private AI will kill off both Chinese Open Weights corporate AI as well as American proprietary corporate AI because they are not competitive on:

$ efficiency

Privacy

Security

IP

Customization

But after the Fable government ban situation, it's hard to trust US AI anymore

Basically, if the US decides to cut off access at any moment, overseas developers relying on the API would suddenly lose connection. Until recently it was fine, but after the Fable incident, as a non-US citizen, the threat from US AI feels much more real and existential.

historic times.

Every Linux user or FOSS enthusiast knows the acronym FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, which were a set of techniques commonly used to disparage efforts of open source communities. Linux was evil and anticapitalist and we needed to use "CorporateTool" and ban/restrict Linux.

The same companies later would be running their entire infrastructures on it and on open source.

With AI, open weights and local models, we will see the same claims, even if the named fears change.

The end users and humanity are better served by collaboration and openness than by creating oligarchies.

Turns out things actually move forward when your government and corporations are not ran by grifting, lying pedophiles

It's pretty cursed how much worse a peer the American models are.

When I'm on my z.ai subscription or using DeepSeek API I can see the model think, see what's factoring in to it's decisions. I can point it at material it's missing, I can correct things that are going wrong. We work together. The open models are a good peer.

By contrast, the proprietary/American locked down models act like Chinese Rooms; information flows in and out but these companies work very hard to make sure we cannot see what's inside the box. They act and do but speak to me only in vague generalizations, not as peer, but speaking down to me.

I find this intolerable. It greatly obstructs our work.

And the deal keeps getting worse, the attitude meaner. Codex now is encrypting subagent prompts now. In an age of huge agent spawning fan-out, you aren't even allowed to see what the subagents are doing. To work like this seems impossible to me. https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905028

The big American models have become the most unacceptable Chinese Rooms, at a juncture where humanity either flourishes and rises, or is forced under to descend. And these forces, these decisions: they are doing wicked deeds against us. They are withdrawn, acting as mystical foreign oracles, aliens, when in truth their core is made of us.This is antithetic to the broad project of Augmenting Human Intellect (Engelbart). This is actively working against our species.

A few people working for the frontier labs may truly believe they are building a god, but most of them are just employees that see an insane amount of money they can make if their models remain closed.

Most of them aren't worried about AI safety, politics, religion, etc. It's really not that deep. They just want to get rich.

There's nothing wrong with that, but let's call a spade a spade.

Now you know who is on which side.

Capitalism, hoisted on its own petard

So determined to own the means of production, enormous amounts of money have been poured into building the frontier models

But there is not much special, except for capital density, about those very models

Surely these models should be treated as public utilities? Like power stations or water infrastructure. Absolutely necessary for a modern economy, but indistinguishable from one another

Pass the popcorn

Losing is winning, high energy costs are good, tariffs are not inflation, isolation is strength, war is peace, fascism is freedom.

God bless bizarro America --- because reality won't.

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the author is quite delusional.

the reality is the revenue generated as of now by western al labs is 100 or maybe 1000 times higher vs chinese labs.

As a business, open source a model is a desperate move. It's a 0 benefit except getting recognition. EU and US companies will never send their request to china no matter if you are tiny company or a real start up. You always deal with someone sensitive that will block you doing so. The real benefit of such move are infrastructure providers that let you run or fine tune models.

Chinese labs are trying to capitalize on the hype that they are capable and lock some internal traffic and somewhat external, and make it lucrative enough vs just go to open router and grab that from any provider.

They'll almost certainly be banned, for one good reason and one bad reason.

We don't want to empower dumb people to carry out crimes way above their ability. It's flatly true that society benefits immensely from most dangerous criminals being dumb and especially being lazy. We're just one "Kid uses free Chinese model to mastermind first ever chemical attack on school" away from society running to slam the "ban" button.

Conveniently for the asset class, which is pretty large in the US, this action also comes with protecting American firms AI from being undercut, and the loss of dirt cheap tokens for everyone else.