alt Hacker NewsI think one of the motivations is undermining US companies. OpenAI and Anthropic are the two biggest players, and are American. Open weights models reduce the power those two big players have over the industry. If the Chinese companies tried to play by US rules and close-source their products then people would mostly use ChatGPT and Claude. So the Chinese companies don't make a ton of profit either way, but by releasing the models as open weights they can at least keep the US from making as much profit.
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I am actually wondering if they're trying to burst the bubble, which would predominantly affect US market and, effectively, be the end of silicone valley dominance.
I don't think so, it's just how things played out. Thanks to Meta, after llama leak and meta followed up with llama2 and llama3 that caused everyone else to follow up with open models, Stablediffusion, Mistral, Cohere, Microsoft phi, IBM granites, Nvidia Nemotrons, so the Chinese labs joined the fun too.
This makes sense, but either ways, its a Big win for the consumers as these Chinese companies will keep the frontier labs' quality and prices honest.
American companies just take those Chinese models and repackage them for profit like Cursors composer-2.
Is Meta trying to keep the US from making as much profit with Llama? Is Google with Gemma? Microsoft with Phi?
It's much simpler than some flag-waving nationalism.
It's mostly only OpenAI, Claude and Gemini may have their unique advantages, but when speaking of models and new paradigm, only OpenAI can do it.
It’s really simpler than this. China has a dearth of compute even with the easing of US export controls. Releasing open weights models is very much a “bring your own compute” move because every Nvidia chip they have is going towards training rather than inference if they can help it.
It's a strategy so old it has a name: Commoditize your complement / competition
Also even a Joel Spolsky article (did he come up with the term?): https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
The Chinese want to kill a possible US monopoly in the crib. Yay for open source the old bane of monopolies.