Chinese firms are increasingly choosing self-built infrastructure over SaaS
@teortaxesTex @NoeFlandre @natolambert their customer are mostly themselves, they train models to decrease costs. they don't want to pay apis, its not their (or the chinese) mindset to buy saas
@NoeFlandre @natolambert @xeophon what does it matter how big it is? They have the hardware, it has very high sparsity and efficient attention. bigger models are cheap if they make fewer mistakes
Users express interest in Chinese firms training custom LLMs to cut API costs and own their intelligence, thanking the coverage for highlighting the practical approach.
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Chinese companies have figured out what American companies have not figured out yet.
If you're a large, well resourced company, it helps to have your own model. You own your intelligence and can customize it.
If you don't, you're just renting your mind.
When we were in China, @xeophon and I made a quick detour to visit Meituan. They continue to be one of our favorite open model builders, as they're showing how a variety of companies can succeed here and baffle a lot of people as to why they're making models.
Meituan is one of the larger tech companies in China. They're building LLMs to add services to their own products. In China the notion of the "super app" is very popular, so this dream of more services for users with AI is very natural there.
With this, Meituan wants to own the full stack of how they deliver value to their users. When we visited, they were very unassuming about everything. We just met a few people from the LLM team, a quick meeting about building models.
They build general foundational reasoning models, and then fine-tune it further for their products. They can release the general model to support the ecosystem and learn how it can be used.
Their focus was very clearly on ownership, and a hint of cost-saving, so the recent news of v2 being trained on asics fits with that mentality. They want to deliver real products to users with low cost.
Companies like this will keep building models in China. It's a small micro study of how different the players in the AI ecosystem are. Kimi, Z ai, etc are all much flashier offices, come across as the "hot new thing" but Meituan has the talent and resources to build models as well.
Congrats to the Meituan team & thx for having us!
@xeophon @teortaxesTex @natolambert Interesting. Thanks :)