alt Hacker NewsI think the misconception here is that they "give them away".
Sure, you can download the weights and run it yourself, but to run a 1T+ parameters you need roughly 2TB of VRAM (for full precision). That costs around $500k to $1M, not including electricity and rent.
In reality, they provide their models priced via API or subscription just like any other company. The "free weights" are only useful for other research labs. It seems that China understands that research should be shared and open, which is one of the reason that AI has been able to develop that fast in the last 10 years.
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I mean I think the primary reason is really the attention is all you need paper and meta's "leaking" of meta's llama.
China is plenty happy to steal IP and just say "this is just how business is done in China it's a cultural thing" but quickly run to defend their own IP in western courts when stolen by western businesses. It works one way.
And I have experienced this firsthand when having something manufactured there. Exact clones appearing on Alibaba just days after.
> free weights" are only useful for other research labs
No, they are useful for any compute provider who can host these models and sell inference. Which effectively puts a cap on whatever the Chinese companies can charge. So longterm that means that their margins are limited to cost + some low margin.
If they are making money by selling tokens then anyone who has sufficient compute to host their models can make more than the Chinese labs since they don’t have any R&D costs.