I think this explains why they are open sourcing broadly. It's not to be nice. It's a strategic play by the Chinese government to help ensure there are many players in this race and not too much power accumulates to American labs (even if American labs benefit in the process)

There is no rule that every Chinese LLM company must open-source their models, and many don't.

(Similar to how U.S. labs have NSA leadership)

Even if there's a party member at the C-level of some company making day-to-day business decisions, that doesn't necessarily mean they're carrying out detailed instructions from higher-ups in the party as opposed to following their own best judgment. The CCP generally doesn't micro-manage everything, but operates more in a "mission tactics"-like way, where the top level gives out a broad goal that gets condensed down into a slogan like "new productive forces," and interpreting and elaborating on the details is left to lower levels who seek to align their initiatives with the top-level goals (e.g. by describing AI as a "new productive force") and initiatives that appear successful will get blessed as official policy.

That different companies follow different strategies when it comes to model releases is clear evidence that there is no unified party line on this question yet.

> If China ever gets ahead, they're going closed source and weights immediately.

Anthropic itself admits that Chinese models are merely months behind. Your argument does not make sense, because Chinese labs are contributing massive optimizations like the one this post is about.

Please quote people you appear to be patronizing. China can't do anything about previous released self-hosted Chinese models. If you can show that local Chinese models funnel vast amounts us data home I'm sure you can move a lot of people to your side.

Comments like this also always fail to address why there aren't Western AI companies doing the same thing. Is it because they might get sued into oblivion by Big AI in the US?

It might be better for all of us if you solve that first instead of repeating something the government has been repeating for the last decade or more. It does this, mind you, while sabotaging itself in countless high-tech fields and leaving it all to China for the taking.

But it does not explain publishing techniques like the ones referenced here in this article.

Commoditizing one’s compliments is a different strategy.

Or perhaps they've looked at history and concluded that this historically hasn't been where the value is, anyway. It wouldn't be unprecedented - FAANG companies have a long tradition of publishing their algorithms and releasing open weight models. Because they saw the real value as being the training data and in proprietary special-purpose models. For example Google published the transformer architecture and released BERT as an open weight model, but doesn't really even talk in public about the (presumanbly) specialized internal models behind revenue-generating products.

That's giving a lot of credit to Google's organizational ability to productize Google's research...

- DeepSeek gave a canned PR response about how the Chinese government is about oeace and unity, and we shouldn't think about the past.

- GLM 5.3 acknowledges it and talks about it, even acknowledging the censorship of it.

- K3 will talk about it similarly to GLM.

TLDR of timeline/chain of events: some billionaire hedgefund manager with AI as hobby, said fuck economics, let's opensource AI... and all the other players have to now compete with that market force. Of course it does not mean equilibrium will last forever, we already seeing defections from model, but imo thats basically what happened... singular hedgefund bro said fuck profits... other PRC players also had to fuck profits, which ends up tripping western labs so deep in debt who can not say fuck profits.

How could Jev have possibly built something out of reach of a frontier lab providing the same or 5x as much resourcing to one of their teams to achieve? Which they can do because Jev has only received $40M of funding recently, so a round that is approximately what OpenAI is spending per math problem they try cracking.

In addition to that, these frontier labs have got extremely good at generating synthetic data and running generalised training pipelines. I can only imagine how easy it would be for them to build this internally vs Jev building it from scratch.

And then the final thing: one of the best places you might apply Jev is within a harness, behind layers that customers increasingly have abstracted from them. Frontier labs have huge incentives to do this as it could make their offering much better and cheaper. And whoever gets this first wins another big attraction for users.

My take on this is Jev is either acquired almost immediately for the benefit of the next 1-3 months head start for whichever lab acquires them or we get a similar model offered from all labs in 3-6 months or sooner.

"Confidence gives you a built-in mechanism for the model to say “I’m not sure about this one.”

I don't know, that seems like a huge deal.

The race is probably on to acquire this company right now.

* Setting a strong, non-consensus vision. -> AI's are trained to produce the median / mode answer. So this almost disqualifies them by default.

* Having courage to do the correct, obvious thing even when your team or investors don't think it's the right call. (This might be firing someone everyone likes but who's role is no longer needed, it might be changing strategies away from the product everyone just spent 6 months on, etc. etc. the list goes on). -> Ben Horowitz has called this kind of decision basically the entire value of a CEO. This is also EXACTLY where today's LLMs keep getting worse and worse. They are utterly spineless.

* Having unique skills and credibility to build a team -> This can come from many sources (track record, vision, charisma, specific achievements, network, etc.) , but people need to want to join YOUR team, not someone else's. They have to believe that YOU are going to win against the market. There is no way you're going to have an edge by using a commercially available AI API with an open source harness at the helm. That is just so utterly uncompelling to top candidates.

* Fundraising -> On the surface, very ammenable to AI, but again, as an investor, would you seriously invest in a CEO that is literally replicatable by any other company?

The value I can see for something like this is a human to get a "2nd pair of eyes". But humans have tons of advisors already and generally speaking, getting takes on what you should do as CEO is not the hard part. It's seeing through the fog of war, finding clarity, and then implementing that clarity across the org, which is surprisingly hard.

VCs likely won't demand that you be replaced with a claude subscription. But shareholders might wonder why they should approve a fat package for a meatbag. Private equity, picking over dinosaurs, won't hesitate.

Lindy Fiorina hacking up HP? That job is now mechanised.

Most human CEOs are disqualified then. Whenever I join a company these days, they stress how important the company's values are, and they are somehow basically the same as every other company.

* Your amount of "lost" time with kids is often less than you think. On one side, you very likely socialized more, traveled more, were less disciplined about what you worked on, etc. On another side, some things that you are going to do anyway (dishes, maybe calling your parents, groceries), you can often do with kids, and so this time isn't really "lost"

* If you are fortunate enough to have some means, you might consider not outsourcing parenting, but outsourcing "life admin" work. Specifically things like laundry, dishes, buying groceries, picking up around the house, etc. I recently got someone to come to our house 3x / week for 3 hours and it's a game changer for me and my wife (who also works). (I know my point above says you can do some of this with kids, and that's kind of true, but not always, and it still lets you do other things with your time)

* Assuming you have a partner, and the premise here is you still want to be a very active parent, then I recommend being very deliberate about almost never parenting together. As in, one of you take all the kids, and the other can do what they want for 1-4 hours at a time.

Lastly, while I'm a pretty active dad myself, I reject the premise put forth here that your job is to maximize the time spent with your kids, as if this is the main metric by which parenting success should be judged. Just no. Actively no. Kids having time alone and with their own friends outside of the eye or ear of their parents is a really important part of growing up. Kids having time with various caregivers who are not their parents (be that grandparents, aunts, uncles, friend's parents, camp counselors, babysitters) is also good and healthy.

The struggle is real though. There's no easy answer. Hope these thoughts help!

Kinda disagree. My Kids 3 mind, so apples:oranges. But something I keep reminding my wife about, whenever she feels like shes failed, is that childhood outcomes are strongly correlated to parental involvement and interest at this age. 2 active, interested parents is a huge advantage over 1, and 1 is a huge advantage over 0. Just the time we both spend with him, engaged in conversation or reading books, has already paid massive dividends, and we can see that he just soaks it all up like a sponge. Wont be that way forever, he will eventually find better interaction with peers. But right now its a massive force multiplier, and we only get one shot at it.

seems like a petty easy construction, proof engagement kinda thing