alt Hacker News1. they still have revenue though. it might not enough to cover all the r&d but it is surely enough to cover the hardware cost.
2. people tend to ignore this, but the salary budget of a US frontier lab and chinese frontier lab is nowhere comparable, the first can easily outdone the later by 100x.
3. us labs, like other US style startups, always throw ton of money to capture the market. I don't see the chinese company doing the same scheme at all.
so, surely chinese AI providers also lost money making new models, but they are not spending nearly as much as US ones.
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Literally nothing is known about how these companies are financed. The usual story is that Moonshot was chosen when 'Mythos' occasioned a huge state crisis. China is the ascended masters of insane amounts of capital poured into whatever the state takes into its head next.
>1. they still have revenue though. it might not enough to cover all the r&d but it is surely enough to cover the hardware cost.
>2. people tend to ignore this, but the salary budget of a US frontier lab and chinese frontier lab is nowhere comparable, the first can easily outdone the later by 100x.
Both arguments make it seem like there's a double standard for american vs chinese AI companies, where american labs are held up to strict standards for profitability, but chinese labs get a pass because [insert handwaving about how some aspect of chinese labs is different]. Let's do apples to apples comparisons here, what are both sides' run rates and revenue growth prospects?
>3. us labs, like other US style startups, always throw ton of money to capture the market. I don't see the chinese company doing the same scheme at all.
Right, instead they're releasing their models for free so competitors can undercut them on inference. American labs' prospect of "there are open models 90% as good but cost less" might seem bad, but chinese labs' prospect of "there are companies offering the exact same models but aren't on the hook for r&d spend" seems even worse.