Teortaxes argues Chinese companies open-source competitive AI models because they face Western API resistance and lack proprietary secrets

@francoisfleuret Why not? They don't have much secrets Americans don't know, and they can't serve all the expected demand (partially because Westerners won't use their APIs, partially because they don't have the compute). It's a surprisingly cheap move that wins goodwill/attracts talent.

@francoisfleuret it also probably erodes frontier margins and slows down Western labs, but I don't buy that argument much because the frontier still rakes in cash by the billions

Ah "they can't serve all the expected demand" sounds like a very good explanation.

@francoisfleuret Strong ai open sourced, more and more companies can use it. They have many to hire, new graduates get jobs, you won't be laid off. America Ai, eating much budgets, laying off to pay token, you lose your job, you are homeless. Meanwhile musk become trillionare, maga maga

@ptremblay You are joking but it would make sense that companies fight in the open-source and close-source space, with a strong differential between the two.

For some reasons the Chinese companies are competing in the open-source space with the heavy stuff.

@tugot17 @francoisfleuret They try Singapore, Malaysia, Japan. Tencent, ByteDance use a lot of overseas compute. They're also the weakest open source players. but ultimately if you're a PRC actor you can get designated a security risk (Zhipu is on the entity list already) and you can be evicted too

@francoisfleuret n-no... you can't just release a better model and make it free! i wanted to suck people's wallets dry with my saas models first! p-please don't publish those weights it will crash my stocks!

@francoisfleuret Releasing huge models = free promo from enthusiast. Mayority of open llm fans do not have the infra to run it “at home” so they spend money on api.

If a chinese provider releases a non-open model right now, they get bad reputation from community and no usage over api (qwen)

@francoisfleuret Because they can?🤣 I guess you don’t want to know what http://z.ai gives to the Chinese military.

@farstpaul https://x.com/search?q=GML-5.2

@francoisfleuret yeh why. why not release weak models? 😆

@francoisfleuret Which one was released while I was asleep ?

@francoisfleuret They want to pave over American moats, to avoid getting locked in Dario’s trunk. Dario and others have been very open about their goal of creating winner-take-all and then using AI to overthrow the Chinese government.

@francoisfleuret Sadly for freedom-loving westerners, the CCP has rather informed and scientific industrial policy that decided a while ago China should lead in AI.

What Zuck could not do, the Chinese have done with enterprise diversity and perhaps government support.

Publishing algorithms too.

@francoisfleuret Chinese companies don't necessarily need to operate to be profit driven like American companies do since they can benefit from government intervention.

The CCP can subsidize open-weights to drive down the profitability of American closed-weight labs over time if desired.

@teortaxesTex @francoisfleuret but why can't exacly xiaomi rent from a US based neo cloud and serve the model through idk corewave on Blackwell to get good margins on the API?

@francoisfleuret They understand that the landscape of business is actually a massively multiplayer online RTS game with a huge number of actors, so the more friends you get, the vastly more likely you are to succeed

@axel_lieber @francoisfleuret I dunno how to tell you this but 99% of all monetary inflow is American enterprise. When they are unwilling to pay, what do you figure happens?

@dontbanjake @francoisfleuret Ehm 90% of global south uses Chinese servers😂 There is no difference for us US or Chinese really! Both sides dont guarantee data protection. But at least China is honest about it lol.

@ElnurIb01717668 @francoisfleuret Ah yes that global south the hotbed of capitalism. They spend so much.