alt Hacker NewsIt's hard to say what their motivation is. The Chinese firms seem to be working hard to commoditize intelligence which may be the most effective way to debase American frontier labs. And yeah: it also happens to be really good for humanity.
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In China, you can’t officially use US APIs. The world saw a taste of this with Fable, but in China, this has been the situation all along.
So it’s not a surprise why open weights are so cherished. As frontier models continue to block everyday individuals from securing their own codebase, I expect the adoption and usage of open weights to continue.
As an example, HuggingFace recently was investigating a security incident and got locked out of frontier closed APIs. Yes, HuggingFace.
> It's hard to say what their motivation is.
Not for anyone who reads history.
Back in the late 18th century, England was the world's top economy, in big part due to its textile industry. England had an export ban on the technology, but textile worker named Samuel Slater brought blueprints over (Supposedly in response to a bounty posted in a newspaper by the US government!). The technology diffused rapidly because the legal environment made competition easy, and ironically the US had better sources of energy (superior water-power sites).
Arguably, China is doing the same thing in the 21st century.
Fwiw, American industry has given away a lot for free - you could include large parts of the open source movement in that - and all the "free" VC backed services like facebook would be another prong of the same comparison. I would rather compare this way, that China is gaining soft power and goodwill, in the technology and innovation sense, in a way that's similar to how USA has done in the past.
There’s a Twitter thread making rounds by Dean Ball about deceleration in AI development caused by open models and I can’t understand how people don’t see that it’s true: open models dismantle the frontier lab capex spend potential by reducing the training budget to zero in the limit. Tokens from different providers are not fungible, but customers are nevertheless very price sensitive and close enough is good enough, eg. K3 being opus+ in capability and cheaper than opus per successful task in the long run is an obvious financial decision.
No training budget means deceleration, or at least slower acceleration, margin compression and a completely demolished IPO valuation; path to machine god requires dollars and capable open models externalize training costs to true frontier labs parasitically.
IMHO humanity has a better chance at not destroying itself due to less than breakneck pace - but there’s a chance frontier models get sponsored by the USG and are never released publicly so they can’t be distilled and then what?
> It's hard to say what their motivation is.
Not that hard to say IMO, they basically see models becoming a commodity and see value in the applications on top of them. So if Alibaba Cloud is the best place to build applications on top of Qwen, why not give the model itself away?
China is watching world sentiment shifting away from USA. Doing many small things that show both strength and openness is surely very intentional.
> It's hard to say what their motivation is
Why is it hard? Their government has been very clear that they plan to win on manufacturing: https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55...
Technically they've been saying it for the last 40 years.
Popular open-source projects:
Google: Chromium, Kubernetes, Android, TensorFlow
Meta: React, PyTorch, Llama
Microsoft: VS Code, TypeScript, .NET Core
LinkedIn: Kafka
Slotted in along these, an analogous explanation is that Alibaba needs Qwen internally (vs depending on an American company), but licensing is not part of their revenue strategy. (As a cloud vendor, they can make money on inference. The strategy is very similar to the US hyperscalers ex-Google.)
Joel Spolsky wrote in depth about this notion of commoditizing one's complement in 2002[1] using tech examples stretching back into the '80s.
1 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Humanity is a bit of a stretch, and to be seen over time, not that I'm saying it won't happen; let's get some hubris here.
They are trying to make money. That's what firms in any capitalistic economy care about the most. Regardless of the government's presumed interference, the companies themselves are all trying to make money. All competing for subscriptions and API payments.
One aspect of this is making a name for yourself i.e. PR. Making a capable model open source helps a lot with that.
Xi Pitches China as Leader of New Global AI Order, Challenging US Dominance:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-xi-promote...
> it also happens to be really good for humanity.
AI being good for humanity is still an open question, but for closed vs. open models/weights, yeah it is preferred. I foresee it won't be much longer before everyone will be slicing/distilling/tuning their models once the architecture improves.
> It's hard to say what their motivation is.
Maybe because the industry isn't yet very sure as to what the use cases might be for these technologies they're hoping that by making it open source and accessible to everyone that someone could find interesting applications for it and even more so, perhaps, way to further the technologies themselves.
There are more Chinese than Americans, so statistically speaking, I'm guessing, there'd be a greater chance for one of Chinese engineers to make advancements than one of American. But that's pure speculation on my part, being neither, I'm just happy I can be a part of it and play with the tools as well~
I'm paraphasing but the Chinese premier said recently AI should be seen as a common good that should benefit everyone.
The Chinese firms may just be making a bad business decision.
Its about closing the gap. its the gap over everyone else that will give one country leverage over everyone else in the AI age. Makes me wonder what the world would look like if a country or group of countries did this during the industrial revolution.
In case of American labs, always follow the money. In case of Chinese labs, always follow the IP.
This is their motivation https://try.works/why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-rem...
It’s too soon to say if it’s good for humanity; that might be overly optimistic. Commodity markets aren’t always good (for example, arms or drug markets). Will LLM’s turn out like one of those? There are people I respect arguing in favor of more regulation.
What I understand is that by doing this it seems like profit will shift to chip makers,as we'll run more models locally, and currently American companies have the advantage here.
So what would the long game be for chinese companies?
It's the exact same playbook Silicon Valley uses. Subsizide, lose piles of money, capture market share, recoup investment.
They've done this in other industries like solar panels, chips, and EVs. This is no different.
> It's hard to say what their motivation is.
Involution is a major problem in Chinese industries [1]. Where companies will sell their products at a loss, effectively playing fiscal chicken [2] with one another to dominate a market. It is such an issue the government has had to step in to prevent EV companies from destroying themselves by more-or-less requiring companies sell their goods at a profit [3].
The straight forward line of reasoning that AI/LLM labs are applying this logic to their profit.
I think (we) Americans are reading a bit too far into this assuming government intervention, conspiracy, etc.. Chinese markets are downright cut throat. They're using those tactics to compete with US labs.
1. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/what-i... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) 3. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/05/china-warns...
its hard to say what their motivation is, if you live under a rock and have severe brain damage.
Good for humanity, and also GDDR/HBM manufacturers.
US Tech companies have created $20 Trillion in stock market value on top of plenty of OS stack. They will do fine with commodity intelligence.
In fact, there are no other organizations in this world that is well suited to leverage scaled intelligence than Silicon Valley and great American companies
Indeed, their competition is the only thing preventing network effects from giving OpenAI/Faang tech companies an easy shot at monopoly / regulatory capture.
US firms can replace US workers with chinese AI. I'm not complaining.. but it sure is an odd situation.
Wait till they get the heretic treatment. It's going to be great.
The purpose is the same as that of all Putin-Xi-Khameni geopolitica: destruction of any democratic alternative to cults of personality.
Think of those poor billionaires, I feel terrible for their awful plight!
Anyone else think the AI environmental backlash is astroturfed?
I keep looking at the numbers. The power use numbers are not that problematic. Ordering a burrito on DoorDash uses more power than a few days of heavy AI use. The water argument applies to some locations, and is mostly a local governance problem... if the data centers are using too much water, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they'll push toward closed loop cooling.
Yet the visceral pile-on here is so extreme, it feels fake.
One thing I've learned after 40 years on this planet is: propaganda works, and much of what a large fraction of people believe across the entire political spectrum (left, right, anything else) is there because someone paid to put it there. It's depressing but it's true, and it makes sense. Propaganda is an asymmetrical attack on human cognition and discourse, and in information security the attacker always has an easier job. Crafting viral bullshit is orders of magnitude easier than fact checking. On top of this, humans are busy and don't have time to fact check and logic check everything they read. As a result, much of what we believe is "sponsored content."
People get mad when you talk about this because everyone wants to believe they're too smart to fall for propaganda.
In any case, the US AI labs deserve to lose for their stupid "safety" regulatory capture monopolization push, which ended up blowing their own feet off and handing the lead to China.
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> most effective way to debase American frontier labs
You're not going to debase the frontier labs through distillation.
> It's hard to say what their motivation is.
Feels pretty easy to me.
They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn.
There will still be plenty of customers who will pay them to host the models and run inference, even if the weights are open and others can offer competing products. (If necessary, the Chinese government can ban use of foreign inference services by Chinese citizens and businesses to give their own companies a domestic monopoly.)
When their models equal or surpass those from the Western AI labs, they can even stop releasing weights for new models, and keep all the inference revenue for themselves.
Meanwhile, they're still manufacturing much of the hardware that everyone in the world needs in order to run datacenters (see also: Spolsky's "commoditize your complement" essay).
Beyond that, it's a soft-power play. As the world keeps looking at the US more and more skeptically as an ally and superpower, Chinese companies releasing weights for competitive models is a way for China to look better and more world-minded.