alt Hacker NewsThis entire piece boils down to “I like open source therefore it is winning”.
Everyone here has already raised good counterpoints, but one more is that all the companies publishing open weights models are heavily VC funded. What is their exit strategy? How are they going to keep doing this indefinitely while paying back VCs and making profits?
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Right, this is the classic VC playbook and people should really know better. They use capital to undercut competitors on cost to gain market share, then slowly crank up the costs until they are (hopefully) profitable. It makes 0 sense long-term to spend tens of millions on training a frontier model and releasing it for free for someone else to host on their GPUs. It is naive to believe that when the capital starts to dry up and the VCs are looking for a profit that the models will continue to remain open-weight.
Chinese labs are a bit different since they are somewhat state-funded, so I'd expect them to shift to a model where Chinese models are hosted on Chinese infra.
There is plenty of room for open source models that "require" a subscription to be used or obtain working updated binaries. Same as any open source platform.
I'd be happy to pay a small monthly fee to license the model to run locally. I'm already paying for Claude, GPT, Gemini,etc.
Basically. The article doesn't say in what way they're winning or what the US should do.
I think it's as simple as looking at the incentive structure. The Chinese gov't has incentive to kneecap US monopoly on frontier models. It makes sense for them to continue down this course if it strengthens their position.