Imbue co-founder Kanjun Qiu requests research examining if Chinese AI labs open-source models to bypass government control
She seeks empirical evidence on Chinese AI open-source strategy.
Positive users praised Chinese AI labs open sourcing models for enabling faster global progress and shared solutions, while negative users suspected it as a tactic to undermine Western AI research and market position.
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@kanjun If your economy thrives on commoditization, you want the ecosystem to win and not individuals.
@kevinsxu's piece gives a great overview of the history of China’s open source ecosystem, showing that Chinese AI labs are building on years of groundwork rather than appearing overnight: https://interconnect.substack.com/p/chinese-open-source-a-definitive
I published a piece last year on the “topology of China AI,” which explains the overlap between academia, industry, and government institutions in the AI sector, much of which is directly tied to open source: https://afraw.substack.com/p/topology-of-china-ai
and .... the reason these labs open source isn’t to “prevent government control,” but to serve firm-level growth incentives: to catch up, be legible, and gain users and traction quickly when they lack legitimacy in the Western tech community. Today, open source is also VERY much encouraged by the state, but the success of open-source AI isn't a result of state-led initiatives.
@kanjun Read Bunnie Huang on "Gongkai"; exclusionary tactics don't work in China. Also, Dario has frequently stated he wants to become an AI monopoly so that AI can overthrows the CPC, so clearly CPC would like to pave over the moats to prevent that.
@kanjun Yes, I wrote it.
@slashML Interesting! Could you unpack that more? It seems like China's hardware industry thrives on commoditization, but it's unclear that this would extend to them being commodity suppliers of software.
@kanjun It's faster, Opensource is more powerful; A prime directive from on high, that this is The Way.
All the solutions saturate the market in one shot.
@kanjun Western capitalism is relatively more comfortable with monopolistic rent-seeking, whereas the state controls the commanding heights in China. Any company that got an exclusionary monopoly would be busted up by CPC anyway so why try?
@kanjun Open source incentivizes standards which commoditizes hardware.
I don't think there is going to any single convenient story that explains it in some nice clean way that would fit within the char limits here. It is a complex series of things and each lab has their motivations.
There is the regulatory angle but also the basic cultural differences between the "east" and the "west". These open models with nonrestrictive licenses are a public good and do collective good. It might be baffling to people from the more extreme individualistic cultures but there is sound reasoning behind why someone would do that and it not have anything at all to do with the US or western labs.
Each innovation that gets shared publicly with zero attachments/expectations at least has the possibility of spawning more downstream innovation. The net effect over a longer horizon is one where the total benefit *should* be a lot higher than if one singular entity was in control of it all like many western labs would seem to prefer.
This is mostly a story why I would be willing to spend millions training something that I then gave away for free. It is the same sort of reasoning behind why I've spent thousands of hours in my life working on oss software: simply because it was needed, would be useful and nothing more than that.
@kanjun I’m interested in the answer too. But couldn’t it be as simple as that they’re behind? Open sourcing is a pretty common strategy to drive adoption / data feedback loops. When and if they catch the American frontier I guess we’ll see.
@kanjun They think long term. They systematically undercut higher cost western producers via state support and overcapacity. It's how they took over solar and many other industries.
Opensource, in this case, is just a tool to gain control of the market long term.
@kanjun But many of those labs are starting to slowly close up as they close distance with the leaders. Each model is more restricted. Alibaba stopped releasing weights at all.
Haven't seen a single well-sourced paper on this specifically, which is kind of telling.
Most of what circulates is inference from behavior rather than documented intent. Would be curious if anyone's done actual interviews with people inside those labs, that seems like the only way to get past the speculation.
@kanjun Altruism
@kanjun Open source as cover, not resistance plausible deniability meets talent war.
@kanjun See Apple in the mid-90s: the software is free but the hardware comes at a premium.
@kanjun Feed the world and the world will one day help feed you. A monopoly helps only a few, and if we lock this up, we will only doom each other. Just my guess. Thanks China.
@kanjun Google open sourced tensorflow , Facebook opensourced pytorch. The entire AI revolution would not happened without this - both Google and Facebook gained. Chinese labs needs the AI revolution to happen internally within china.
@kanjun To undermine American AI research, obviously.
I think China is worried about the US getting sole and absolute control of the best AI in the world.
Everyone having access to the best AI in the world is better for China than only US having it.
(game theory)
@kanjun 没有特殊的，就是闭源比不过美国，那就开源，在算力不行的情况下做闭源那不是找死