alt Hacker NewsI saw the same kind of comments when the first Deepseek model was initially released. However the relevance that investors assign to something like this does not seem to match the excitement expressed here.
I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns.
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> I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns.
Quite failure by someone to assume that EU businesses would use US over Chinese, based on the current political atmosphere. US causes even bigger concerns than Chinese labs.
> they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models
This is exactly right. The only AI that matters from an investor perspective is the AI that is built into your phone, your car, ships with Windows and Mac, and built into legal and business tools like Lexus Nexus and Salesforce.
Everything else is hobby.
>I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns.
Correct. And they're likely very correct in the belief.
When people on the internet claim that frontier labs are done for because Chinese open-weight models exist, they really don't appreciate that the people spending the money do not want to hear "we can just run it cheaper ourselves!" Any software engineer with even a few years of experience knows that phrase is absurd, and executives are simply not interested in the risks associated with such an endeavour when they can just buy the solution outright.
Consumers will have access to open-weight models just like how consumers have access to Linux. But you can just go look at the market share of operating systems to see why something being free and openly available doesn't matter to executives who just wants to get things done and is willing to pay a premium to a trusted business to do the work for them.
And none of that even touches the fact that these frontier labs have only ever been in-front of open-weight alternatives. Again, if you're an executive, and you're questioning if you should pay a premium for a better version of a tool which you presume is important for your company's ability to compete, then the answer is immediately obvious: pay the premium or risk falling behind competition who is willing to pay the premium. And when you're talking about global companies who can pay these bills without it being significant enough to even show up on a quarterly financial statement, then it's an obvious sell.
There were pretty specific rumors about IPOs happening early this year, up to apparent insider bets on prediction platforms. Don't you think the apparent delays in IPOs could have something to do with the open weights/open source competition? The monetary conditions (interest rates,...) were better early in the year, arguably predictably so, so what would be your alternative explanation why they chose to postpone?
Many big investors may be too deep into this, so they prefer to extend and pretend rather than cut their (potentially massive) losses.
So, they choose to believe, lacking a better strategy. They will also try to lobby their belief into existence.
> the relevance that investors assign
I think there is also a perhaps the need to assign air-quotes to "investors" when talking about the US markets.
There's too much fluff and noise there. Too much (over)leveraged trading. Too much speculation.
What the real investors think is hidden behind the actions of the speculative traders.
> I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models
The Chinese models are open-weight. You can download them and run them on your own servers. Or you can outsource to Mistral, Privatemode or any of the many other US/EU inference hosters.
So the "security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns" arguments are effectively non-existent. And whatever argument does possibly remain, also applies equally to Anthropic, OpenAI & co.
If you believe those investor, I assume you mortgage and bet all your wealth on it. SpaceX? Anthropic? Chinese has talents, electricity and Huawei. I really believe those investors are tulip blind to pile money into those western AI. China even now world number 3 ssd+ram ahead of SK Hynix. So armageddon of RAM SSD LLM model at dirt cheap price. And as time progress, large ram and small gpu will be built into handphone (which again dominate by Chinese).
> I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns.
European business users (+ consumers) can access GLM-5.3 via Mistral.ai hosting. (with GDPR)
This isn't true, especially not with the inference engine becoming public, now you can build your on models on the same or similar architecture and ship massive gains on top of these stacks.
I think people don't realize the Salesforce SAP Palantir would love to ship these models, and they have/are shipping them.
The threat of exfilteration of data via these models is high but it's nowhere near as high as the margins.
For instance if you could cut your ai input bill by over 90% would you do it? Can you put some of that extra margin say 10-20% to make it more secure.
I know of atleast 10 fortune 500 companies that are entirely planning to or have moved to Chinese models for a large portion of their work.
It's insane people in finance are delusional enough to think that won't happen.
Maybe Govt will try to de-risk with bans on using open models but I don't think that's going to work at scale, people will literally spawn labs to launder DeepSeek/GLM models into a US model by some novel training etc approach or something.
I still don't think that it's as much a kami-kaze rather it's an attempt to normalize the world around the Chinese stack.
If DeepInfer is supported by everyone, it will be much easier to export stuff aka hardware that only supports it for now or is optimized for it.
Assume china starts selling hyper optimized Asics for inference at some point.
This feels like a race to the bottom as soon as possible because they have much lower costs, if there is a Wipeout in AI Labs in US chinese labs are largely insulated, and they can hopefully buy Nvidia chips for cheap if that does happen.
If they are open sourced, it means any random data center could host it domestically and AI becomes a utility.
The US will move to ban it for most major businesses in some capacity.
You're entire company would become ineligible for gov contracts if you have use DeepSeek. Something like that.
Europe is going to be just as worried about using US models for large parts of government related functions and they're going to feel alot better about open source self-hosted chinese models than US models which can literally get turned off on a whim by Trump. They'd prefere home grown models if they can, but if they can't they'll go self-hosted and that'll be Chinese at this rate.
lol big corporations are 100% using Chinese models in their business operations. They dgaf about security, speak to anyone in cybersecurity or cyber insurance
The labs pushing this cyber scare is an attempt to cry wolf. The corps don’t give a fuck
> I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns.
Well they are wrong, I'm at a large EU startup and they are currently considering Deepseek as their default model, Opus/Fable would still be available for complex tasks.
There's very little understanding of business operations on HN, especially outside the tech echo chamber. The "software will eat the world" mindset.
Based on HN comments, every company would be running Gentoo and developing line of business applications in Haskell or OCaml.
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> I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns.
They'd be wrong. Especially about Europe. Many companies are in a bind about this: they can't upload their confidential files to a service provider but they do want AI. So right now they end up with a choice: do nothing, breach their contracts, use a service provider that pinky promises not to share their data (which we have already seen they will violate) and run local models.
The latter is the reason you can't buy powerful GPUs for reasonable prices because a local model (GLM 5.3, DS 4, etc) + some hardware is all you need to solve the problem in a way that avoids the legal issues.