slightly ot, but this seems like a good place to ask, since I don't think I have the strategic-business mind to understand it all myself: What's the play here with China having supported publishing open weight models this far? I know the official line is for the good of mankind and all that, but presumably it's more strategic than that. Soft power? Commoditise your competition?
The US economy highly depends on the valuation of the tech giants whereas the Chinese economy doesn't.
Additionally, the financial and technological equilibrium which makes OpenAI or Anthropic possible is rather precarious so they are poking on it, hoping to make it fall.
In my mind, they’re putting huge downward pressure on the major US AI companies’ ability to become platforms.
Think about the history of AWS. Amazon made a very specific point of building, specifically, a “platform”. When they developed a major internal service, they would sell it. Basically anyone who wanted to use it could pay AWS (often an outrageous amount, but it was often worth it), and AWS would provide the service, and AWS was consistently neutral and trustworthy. They didn’t really tell you what you could or couldn’t do, they didn’t even ask what you wanted it for, and they never used your private data for their own purposes. AWS pulled this off quite well despite the fact that competing products and even open source products could and still can, with effort, do most of what AWS offered.
Compare to OpenAI and Anthropic. They want to sell you their front-ends (chatgpt.com, claude.ai, their apps and harnesses), but the big money is selling enterprise contracts with per-token pricing. The latter is the platform.
But their platforms suck in comparison to their open competition. You are paying for inference on a series of models, but:
- You need to negotiate with them if you don’t want them to retain your data.
- They might not even be willing to not retain your data.
- Part of the model output gets encrypted before you see it.
- You are not allowed to give the model arbitrary input.
- They run classifiers on the token stream to try to restrict what you may or may not do.
- You cannot see the model’s internal states.
- You are extremely restricted in your ability to modify the model and you may not be allowed to modify it at all.
- Oh, and maybe the price is above market rates.
The last point is not really a big deal: AWS has demonstrated quite effectively that customers will pay many, many billions of dollars above market rates for a high quality platform.
But I think the rest are a big deal, and the open-weight models allow anyone to use a provider other than Anthropic and OpenAI and avoid all the other problems in the list. This means that, if I’m a startup building a product that uses AI, I get to choose between OpenAI/Anthropic-like terms and a far better alternative. And this makes it very hard for OpenAI or Anthropic to sell me on their platform even at equivalent pricing.
So far, there have not been any obvious drawbacks to open-weight models from the government perspective, so when a company wanted to release their weights, they weren't prohibited from doing so. Similarly, there have not been any obvious drawbacks to closed-weight models, so when a company wanted to keep their weights to themselves, they weren't prohibited from doing so.
So the real question you should be asking yourself is why you thought that China supported publishing open-weight models, even though they merely didn't prohibit it.
Denying positive ROI for non-Chinese labs, destroying AI industrial base of others, while allowing NVIDIA to profit?
OpenAI had been miniaturizing GPT models as far back as GPT-4o era, but Chinese free-beer models that run on 16GB consumer GPUs can handle the vast majority of LLM use cases, and now they have no options but to attempt development of actual superintelligence that can cure cancer or solve the P=NP question just to differentiate against free-beer alternatives. It's clear what China is trying to achieve.
I'm pretty daft with this but my opinion is that they are open source so they can help Russia war efforts (and maybe Iran) unofficially and indirectly.
there's alot of reasons, but one of the more commonly cited ones is that China facing chip restrictions means they lack the compute to provide the models for global usage, and making them open-weight is one of the ways to circumvent these restrictions.
Ultimately the "speed" that matters, is the speed of delivering _useful_ improvements over time. The speed of delivering that today, is bottlenecked by the speed users can accept and form opinions on new functionality, and the speed of doing it tomorrow is also bottlenecked by compounded technical debt.
For now at least, I'd say churning code faster and faster cannot widen either of these bottlenecks much.
Today, I use Claude heavily, but review all the code. I'm faster, but not by the multiples people speak of. And that seems ok to me.
I'm not American, so this is a guess, but I'd suspect people resisting "progress" are not as irrational as you perhaps suppose.
More likely, they feel they would disproportionately bear the costs, while the benefits either trickle down diffusely from the wider societal good, or worse, accrue to some private company.
For example you may feel AI is progress, they may feel the loss of the countryside near their house to a data centre, which they may believe will primarily benefit the owners of OpenAI et al. In such a case, their opposition would be aligned with their beliefs and values.
Internet Archive feels like an important... well, archive, yet I often worry about the load, financial and potentially political, which is put on it when people use it as a workaround for pay-walls, as is often advocated on HN
The archive that bypasses paywalls is archive.today (or archive.is, archive.ph, ...) which is run by some shady person, not a professional organization like Wayback Machine.
Other trebuchet fans who dream of building one some day may be interested in googling "walking trebuchet" for a surprisingly high complexity/results ratio.
Every time I see a strandbeest[1] on the beach somewhere, I wonder to myself why it hasn't got an array of trebuchet included, also recharged by the wind, to pick up sand balls and throw at people.
Perhaps tangential to your point, but I often write blog posts (although finish and publish far fewer than I start) where I write about something as it has occurred to me, informed by things I've absorbed no doubt, but without specific research. In such cases I explicitly avoid searching out prior work as a) seeing that something is well discussed and explored can take away the motivation to explore (in the same way reading puzzle solutions before starting might), and b) to avoid having green shoots of ideas shaped by the current of existing consensus. Now that doesn't mean I don't come back after doing my own thinking to see what the more well developed literature of people cleverer than me, who've thought far longer than me think; I just don't want to snuff out my own exploration at the start.
As I say most of these I never publish as I'm mainly using writing as a vehicle for thought, but when I do I'm never sure how to flag them. I don't want (imaginary, lets be honest) readers thinking I'm deluded into thinking I've found something new. I want to come up with a tag I can put on them which adds a pithy disclaimer card at the top or something so I feel more comfortable publishing them.
I've recently been running yolo mode, but in docker container with the codebase I'm working on a as regular mount with other reference code mounted as read only.
I've been experimenting with dedicated Linux users for various external tools with access to the relevant credentials limited to them and the Claude user only able to invoke the relevant clis by going through a pair of wrapper scripts: the first to change user to call the second via a su call as the appropriate user, the second wrapper to invoke a guard script which allows me to implement my own in-code permissions checks against the cli arguments. In _theory_ there's no way for Claude to work around it, as the sudoers file only permits the described manner to change to the user with credentials, and the user with permissions for each credential only ever runs deterministic code.
It's too early days to say how well this second part works out, but so far so good.
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