> Internet comments say that open sourcing is a national strategy, a loss maker subsidized by the government. On the contrary, it is a commercial strategy and the best strategy available in this industry.
This sounds whole lot like potatoh potahto. I think the former argument is very much the correct one: China can undercut everyone and win, even at a loss. Happened with solar panels, steel, evs, sea food - it's a well tested strategy and it works really well despite the many flavors it comes in.
That being said a job well done for the wrong reasons is still a job well done so we should very much welcome these contributions, and maybe it's good to upset western big tech a bit so it's remains competitive.
It is not only that Chinese labs can undercut on price. It is that they must. They must give away their models for free by open sourcing them, and they must even give away free inference services for people to try them. That is the point of the post.
There is not ‘must’ here, they did not ‘have’ to undercut every other strategically and technologically important industry the rest of the world has, but they did as a point of national policy.
‘Have to’ and ‘every other’ are both doing so much work here that I think your worldview on this is likely just incorrect.
The decisions to mobilize a large rural base toward manufacturing and the central bank goals to keep the yuan cheap as a critical support of this project were absolutely national.
They were ultimately about bringing (or trying to bring) one of the most populous nations in the world out of extreme poverty; in particular the people of the country out of extreme poverty.
There are different policies in place today, and, crucially, bleeding edge tech is not gainful labor employment —- BYD has some factories with roughly 2 employees per acre of robotic production, for instance. Or datacenters where the revenue could scale but the labor will not.
So, these are different times, different goals, different political and labor outcomes. Reasoning about what China “must do”, or has as a matter of “national policy” should start with a clear look at history and circumstance, or you’re likely to read things incorrectly.
At the same time you have OpenAI's "no more sidequests". These labs can only expand so far horizontally. I don't believe they will go very far beyond code generation and its adjacenies.
Future upgrade cycles on phones and laptops, PCs, will be driven by SOCs that embed some type of ASIC that run a specific model. Every 6 months there will be a new, better version to upgrade to, which will require a new device. This is how Apple will be able to reduce cycles from 3 years to 6-12 months.
I've used Kimi K2.5 when I run out of Codex quota. It does small and medium things OK. But if I work on complex things, I'll later have to spend two days cleaning up the mess with Codex. Hopefully 2.6 does better.
If there's no open source models coming out of these small labs, why would anybody care about them? They would be forgotten the instant they stop open sourcing.
Chinese labs have no marketing and sales capacity in the overseas market, so they in fact have no choice but to open source their models as that is what brings awareness and trust in their models. In fact, it is overseas open source marketing that drives adoption of their models in China as well. I wrote about this here: https://try.works/writing-1#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-an...
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