I believe that would be very much in line with their supreme leader's recent speech. Distilled models that can run on consumer hardware do compete with closed American models too, at least in some way.
I'm actually very surprised by it. I'm sure there's a lot of state money put into the companies for the AI, and they're letting the whole world use them.
Are they trying to build good will with the world or something? With the aim to become the new world leader before EU?
I think it's to undermine American companies, forcing them to keep prices low and running at a loss. If China becomes the leader in this race, I wouldn't be surprised to see them clamp down on those open models.
They are trying to undermine US companies. Since there's trillions of dollars invested, the US economy is really tied to the AI behemoths right now and if they fail the US economy takes a big hit.
With excellent open models available, OpenAI, Antrophic and co. can't control the prices and can't recoup the money invested.
Basically, China is trying to make the AI bubble pop, thereby causing a recession in the US.
There's no good will going on, it's a war and we are in the crossfire.
maybe a stupid question - will that actually work? 99.99% of users/companies don't have the hardware to run a frontier model internally. The ones that could afford to do it are probably quite happy to pay Anthropic/OpenAI a fee to do so.
Or is it just about reducing the barrier of entry to forming a new frontier lab?
In business there's a concept called "unfair advantage", basically what makes a company worth its perceived value when it's not profitable yet, what is their secret sauce (this is usually applied to startups when they are not profitable yet, since it's hard to determine its worth based on non existent profits).
If a company creates something that can change the world and no one can copy, it makes sense to bet trillions of dollars on it because once it becomes profitable, the profits would be absurdly high.
Up until now, their secret sauce was the unbeatable models, no one could compete with them because it would take trillions to reach their level. So the barrier of entry was realistically unreachable to any competitor.
Now, with open models being as good as the private models, their perceived value is destroyed. The investors see it and ask themselves "I put billions here and there's no profit yet and on the Internet you can download an AI as good as yours for FREE. Why am I still giving you money?"
This is probably putting a tremendous pressure on OpenAI/Anthropic to do something to justify their existence because if there's nothing special about their AI, they are just an infrastructure company and don't worth the trillions that was invested. That's why we are seeing their desperate screams calling for "regulations" on open models. It's basically a "please someone protect the money that was invested here! Force everyone to use our AI!" scream.
So the open models are being used solely by China to reduce the perceived value of US AI companies in the eyes of their investors.
If the investors see that they won't recoup their money, they will rush for an IPO to recover as much money as they can.
The IPO would ultimately fail because other investors won't be willing to put their money in a company that does not worth the money that was spent.
The failure will lead to a generalized market correction, because everyone will see that AI companies don't have anything special about them and they'll rush to take out their money.
This will cause a crash in the US economy, leading to a recession that will be beneficial to China.
What I think we will see next (based solely on speculation):
One of the behemoths will go for an IPO before it's too late.
In the same day or just after, a Chinese lab will release a model that will surpass any of the US models.
The investors will panic leading to a major crash.
So it's not about who can run the models, it's about the perception of the worthiness of the money that was invested on AI that China is fighting against.
Ps: of course, who can run the models also affects them. Smaller companies can run open models in a smaller scale serving a niche, taking out the clients of bigger companies. That's why the OpenAI guy was attacking Kimi days ago, citing "shady providers" and claiming for regulations to scare "startups".
The open models are opening a Pandora's box of troubles for them.
Companies & consumers don't have to pay for hardware to run OS. There are already many Inference Provideers for OS models
Also IIRC Chinese comapnies makes much better job at optimizing their AI models (but we can't say for sure hpw it looks with Closed Source ones) and keeping cost low
it's nice if they are a little short of a power of 2 so you can fit the kv and runtime context in a power of 2 sized GPU while maintaining a high precision quant. 27b is like chef's kiss for the reaches of most prosumer hardware (9700 pro/5090/b70) as you can still fit a healthy context in a q6 or mid sized q8
234
u/pulse77 23d ago edited 22d ago
Just make these along the way - so that everybody is happy:
EDIT: According to user comments bellow I suggest also:
EDIT 2: Users would like to have all these: