[rubslopes]

I don't think the real-world evidence supports your argument... OpenAI and Anthropic have all of those advantages today, and Chinese models are reaching the same level. Clearly, the Chinese labs are doing something very right that is not directly related to infinite money.

[TeMPOraL]

Doesn't change the argument. As long as the models are open, the big cloud providers have strict advantage, because even if some open model gets ahead, they can just serve it from their infra, and do it better than everyone else.

This proves the strict inequality in my claim is preserved, everything beyond that is just debating the size of their advantage.

[kelnos]

> As long as the models are open, the big cloud providers have strict advantage, because even if some open model gets ahead, they can just serve it from their infra

Why would I want to use it, though? If, say, Anthropic were to serve a hypothetical Kimi K5.0 from their infra, seems like they'd keep their pricing where it is. If I can use that same model from kimi.com/Kimi Code, for less money (which seems like a safe bet in this scenario), then I wouldn't use Anthropic's offering. Even if Anthropic did lower prices, I doubt they'd be able to match kimi.com/Kimi Code.

> ... and do it better than everyone else.

Why would you assume this? That doesn't follow. "Better" has diminishing returns, and all of these companies have impressively scaled up already, and will continue to scale further in the coming years. And, regardless, I would absolutely use someone else's infra if it cost, say, 20% less, even if inference was a bit slower, or I hit rate limits more often (not usage limits, rate limits).

[zozbot234]

Isn't Amazon Bedrock doing something quite similar already? The obvious argument is "We have Kimi at home" i.e. no need to pay for Chinese-supplied APIs that might misuse your submitted data.

[ben_w]

Cloud v. local is a different axis to secret v. open.

Claude is secret and cloud; Kimi on e.g. AWS is open and cloud; Kimi on your machine is open and local; If there are any closed and local models, I don't know what they are (Apple Intelligence, if I had to guess?)

I'd argue slightly differently from TeMPOraL: Cloud has advantages when the best models are the big ones. Right now this is so, but this may not always be the case. If we are in a world where the models stop improving at any point (for whatever reason) while hardware keeps getting better (it might or might not), then we may find the small cost benefit from operating at scale isn't worth the effort let alone the legal implications.

Unrelated, but for me the film called Kimi is higher in search rankings than the model is and oh wow we really do have a problem with the whole "finally the torment nexus" thing don't we.