alt Hacker News> 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.
Replies
> They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn.
Man, imagine Darios face when suddenly, he cannot decide anymore what other people consensually do with their own hardware in their free time.
Rumpelstilzchen.
There’s a simpler explanation, which is that this is how Chinese business operates.
When I was in China earlier this year the big topic of conversation was “overproduction”. The big example was electric cars, where there were too many companies making too many cars and making revenue but no profit.
It was explained to me that generally Chinese firms will compete hard and maximize revenue above all, whereas western firms tend to focus on profit.
(And of course this is clustered around industrial sectors that the government favors, so there is some high level strategy in going after AI, but maybe not the commoditization.)
As I recall, in 2023/24 OpenAI told US Gov that AGI will be achieved in 2026 and we will use this AGI to “dominate” China. Based on this, US Gov cut off China from all AI hardware. It looks like China got the message and this is the response.
Also, a little competition is good for everybody (especially US consumers), no?
>They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn.
You can say that, but they are at least better at democratizing AI than the American labs, and on seeing the US labs crash and burn we are at least aligned.
> They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn.
I want to watch that too.
If they take Meta and Musk with them, all the better, but that is just dreaming I am afraid.
Or it could be good for humanity.
>When their models equal or surpass those from the Western AI labs,
that moment is now. They are not doing it at least not yet.
to be honest i think this is a open source vs close source software.
some companies chose to have the benefits of one or the other
They're selling the robots that use these models. The rest of the world just hasn't got round to embodiment yet.
> They want to… watch the US AI labs crash and burn.
I don’t think dozens of large independent companies and thousands of researchers are working just to spite Sam Altman. Ad much as I don’t like him, I have other things to do and I am sure so do they.
As soon as the competition is bankrupted they no longer need to release for free? It’s like how big players enter markets by launching at a loss to destroy competitors?
I feel like there could also be a simpler explanation.
Why does a debian contributor make debian free, why do they work on this thing anyone can use?
Is it because linux and debian hate windows and iOS and want to see american fail?
No, it's because most debian contributors believe software source code, information, should be free, users should be free to modify the code they use, and that they're building a thing they want to share with the world.
Maybe the chinese AI labs believe AI is powerful and useful, are proud of what they're doing, and want to share it as broadly as they can so everyone can use it.
There doesn't have to be any weird "chinese government" or "they hate the west" type vibes, it could just be the same thing as OSS, they're trying to do what they think is best for the world.