alt Hacker NewsWhat amazes me is why would someone spend millions to train this model and give it away for free. What is the business here?
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Speculating: there are two connected businesses here, creating the models, and serving the models. Outside of a few moneyed outliers, no one is going to run this at home. So at worst opening this model allows mid-sized competitors to serve it to customers from their own infra -- which helps Kimi gain mindshare, particularly against the large incumbents who are definitely not going to be serving Kimi and so don't benefit from its openness.
Given the shallowness of moats in the LLM market, optimizing for mindshare would not be the worst move.
Moonshot’s (Kimi’s owner) investors are Alibaba/Tencent et al. Chinese market is stupidly competitive, and there’s a general attitude of “household name will take it all”. However getting there requires having a WeChat-esque user base, through one way or another. If it’s paid, there’ll be friction and it won’t work. Plus, it undermines a lot of other companies, which is a win for a lot of people.
I think there is a book (Chip War) about how the USSR did not effectively participate in staying at the edge of the semiconductor revolution. And they have suffered for it.
China has decided they are going to participate in the LLM/AGI/etc revolution at any cost. So it is a sunk cost, and the models are just an end product and any revenue is validation and great, but not essential. The cheaper price points keep their models used and relevant. It challenges the other (US, EU) models to innovate and keep ahead to justify their higher valuations (both monthly plan, and investor). Once those advances are made, it can be bought back to their own models. In effect, the currently leading models are running from a second place candidate who never gets tired and eventually does what they do at a lower price point.
I think this fits into some "Commoditize The Complement" strategy.
Curious to hear what “OpenAI” thinks the answer to this is
Hosting the model is cheaper per token, the more batched token you get. So they have big advantage here.
It's another state project funded at the discretion of the party.
If you look at past state projects, profitability wasn't really considered much. They are notorious for a "Money hose until a diamond is found in the mountains of waste"
Chinese state that maybe sees open collaboration as the way to nullify any US lead in the field, concurrently if the next "search-winner" is built upon their model the Chinese worldview that Taiwan belongs to China and Tiamen Square massacre never happened.
Also their license says that if you have a big product you need to promote them, remember how Google "gave away" site searche widgets and that was perhaps one of the major ways they gained recognition for being the search leader.
OpenAI/NVidia is the Pets.com/Sun of our generation, insane valuations, stupid spend, expensive options, expensive hardware and so on.
Sun hardware bought for 50k USD to run websites in 2000 are less capable than perhaps 5 dollar/month VPS's today?
"Scaling to AGI/ASI" was always a fools errand, best case OpenAI should've squirreled away money to have a solid engineering department that could focus on algorithmic innovations but considering that Antrophic, Google and Chinese firms have caught up or surpassed them it seems they didn't.
Once things blows up, those closed options that had somewhat sane/solid model research that handles things better will be left and a ton of new competitors running modern/cheaper hardware and just using models are building blocks.