alt Hacker NewsThe way to develop in this space seems to be to give away free stuff, get your name out there, then make everything proprietary. I hope they still continue releasing open weights. The day no one releases open weights is a sad day for humanity. Normal people won’t own their own compute if that ever happens.
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I think it is in the interest of chip makers to make sure we all get local models
This is obviously a strategic move at a national level. Keep publishing competing free models to erode the moat western companies could have with their proprietary models. As long as the narrative serves China there will be no turn to proprietary models.
That has been a viable commercial strategy for most modern, funded businesses. Capture market share at a loss, then once name is established turn on the profit.
Exactly. Open source is a commercial strategy for Chinese labs. They have no other effective way of marketing their models and inference services: https://try.works/writing-1#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-an...
Always has been, it’s literally saas; the slight difference is that the lowest tier subscriptions at the frontier labs are basically free trials nowadays, too
Its the new freeware model!
I'm a little more optimistic than that. I suspect that the open-weight models we already have are going to be enough to support incremental development of new ones, using reasonably-accessible levels of compute.
The idea that every new foundation model needs to be pretrained from scratch, using warehouses of GPUs to crunch the same 50 terabytes of data from the same original dumps of Common Crawl and various Russian pirate sites, is hard to justify on an intuitive basis. I think the hard work has already been done. We just don't know how to leverage it properly yet.
Any reason for them to do this other than altruism? I don’t think this can be regulated.
The Chinese state wants the world using their models.
People think that Chinese AI labs are just super cool bros that love sharing for free.
The don't understand it's just a state sponsored venture meant to further entrench China in global supply and logistics. China's VCs are Chinese banks and a sprinkle of "private" money. Private in quotes because technically it still belongs to the state anyway.
China doesn't have companies and government like the US. It just has government, and a thin veil of "company" that readily fool westerners.
Why is it sad? These things are useles all around, along with the people who overuse them.
It would be a great day for humanity if people would stopping glazing text autocomplete as revolutionary.
I think that's an overgeneralization. We've seen all the American models be closed and proprietary from the start. Meanwhile the non-American (especially the Chinese ones) have been open since the start. In fact they often go the opposite direction. Many Chinese models started off proprietary and then were later opened up (like many of the larger Qwen models)