[Arkhaine_kupo]

Isn't there pretty good indications that the chinese llms have been trained on top of the expensive models?

Their cost is not real.

Plus you have things like MCP or agents that are mostly being spearheaded by companies like Anthropic. So if it is "the future" and you believe in it, then you should pay a premium to spearhead it.

You want to bet on the first Boeing not the cheapest copy of a Wright brother plane.

(Full disclosure, I dont think its the future and I think we are over leveraging on AI to a degree that is, no pun intended, misanthropic)

[malka1986]

> Isn't there pretty good indications that the chinese llms have been trained on top of the expensive models?

So what ?

[antonvs]

It would mean that their costs are lower than they would be to achieve the same capabilities otherwise.

[fc417fc802]

Well it raises an interesting conundrum. Suppose there's a microcontroller that's $5.00 and another that's $0.50. The latter is a clone of the former. Are you better off worrying only about your short term needs, or should you take the long view and direct your business towards the former despite it being more expensive?

[blitzar]

Suppose both microcontrollers will be out of date in a week and replaced by far more capable microcontrollers.

The long view is to see the microcontroller as a commodity piece of hardware that is rapidly changing. Now is not the time to go all in on betamax and take 10 years leases on physical blockbuster stores when streaming is 2 weeks away.

Ai is possibly the most open technological advance I have experienced - there is no excuse, this time, for skilled operators to be stuck for decades with AWS or some other propriety blend of vendor lock-in.

[fc417fc802]

This isn't betamax vs VHS. It's VHS vs a clone of VHS. The long view necessarily has to account for R&D, long term business partners, and lots of other externalities. The fact that both manufacturers will have a new model of VCR out next month, and yet another the month after that, really has nothing to do with the conundrum I gave voice to.

I'll also note that there's zero vendor lock-in in either scenario. It's a simple question about the tradeoffs of indirect parasitism within the market. I'm not even taking a side on it. I don't even know for certain that any given open weights Chinese model was trained against US frontier models. Some people on HN have made accusations but I haven't seen anything particularly credible to back it up.

[malka1986]

If the clone is 1/10th of the price, and of equivalent quality, why would I use the original ? I would be undercut by my concurrents if i did that, it would be a very bad business decision.

[FridgeSeal]

Well the company of the former microcontroller has gone out of their way to make getting and developing on actual hardware as difficult and expensive as possible as possible, and could reasonably accused of doing “suspect financial shenanigans”, and the other company will happily sell me the microcontroller for a reasonable price. And sure, thy started off cloning the former, but their own stuff is getting really quite good these days.

So really, the argument pretty well makes itself in favour of the $0.5 micro controller.

[woadwarrior01]

That's a very tenuous analogy. Microcontrollers are circuits that are designed. LLMs are circuits that learned using vast amounts of data scraped from the internet, and pirated e-books[1][2][3].

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-accused-trying-cut-dea...

[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/openai-desperate...

[3]: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-cut-pirated-millio...

[fc417fc802]

> Microcontrollers are circuits that are designed. LLMs are circuits that learned using vast amounts of data

So I suppose the AI companies employ all those data scientists and low level performance engineers to what, manage their website perhaps?

It's poor form to go around inserting your pet issue where it isn't relevant.

[ForHackernews]

You're asking whether businesses will choose to pay a 1000% markup on commodities?

[blitzar]

> Isn't there pretty good indications that the chinese llms have been trained on top of the expensive models?

there are pretty good indications that the american llms have been trained on top of stolen data

[svara]

This is proven. You can prove it yourself easily. Take a novel from your bookshelf, type in any sentence from the novel and ask it what book it's from. Ask it for the next sentence.

This works with every novel I've tried so far in Gemini 3.

My actual prompt was a bit more convoluted than this (involving translation) so you may need to experiment a bit.

[re-thc]

> Their cost is not real.

They can’t even officially account for any nvidia gpus they managed to buy outside the official channels.

[zozbot234]

> Isn't there pretty good indications that the chinese llms have been trained on top of the expensive models?

How do you even do that? You can train on glorified chat logs from an expensive model, but that's hardly the same thing. "Model extraction" is ludicrously inefficient.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> How do you even do that?

I am not going to comment on how they did it. But they were openly accused by OpenAI of it. I believe the discussion is over destillation vs foundational models.

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/openai-accuses-deepseek-of...

There are other theories like OpenAI inflated their training costs to seek further investment in later growth quarters. Meanwhile Deepseek under reported their cost to portray China as more cost efficient investment. If that was the case then their performance is similar, with similar training costs but one side reported even the coffee from the coffee machine in the office in the total while the other only counted the minimal CPU cycle cost and not the GPU, energy, engineering etc. Which is plausible too.

I have no dog in the fight but the first accusation seemed quite serious, hence why I asked

[ForHackernews]

This so-called "PC compatible" seems like a cheap copy, give me a real IBM every time.