[2ndorderthought]

They aren't spending money like we are. They've been able to do what they have with an embargo on Nvidia cards even.

I think we will see model size shrink more and more and become more efficient. Ideally to the point where they run on high end computers and not data centers. That's the future in my opinion.

At that point you could run them on your phone or chrome book for free or with ads like Google search. Or pay for privacy

[2ndorderthought]

Aurareturn. I don't think they care. Geopolitically China stands to gain a lot by commoditizing it's complement. They don't need a booming insanely profitable ai industry. They are not trillions of dollars leveraged in. I think for them the applications matter more. And they can do just fine with the us scrambling for a few decades. They don't think short term the way the us does. Neither do most countries. They also don't do the individualistic burn everything down for one trillionaire thing.

[aurareturn]

China !== Chinese LLM labs.

[2ndorderthought]

Sure but those are still profitable enough without trying to take over the world. Even with free models. Not every new idea is worth 20 trillion dollars. I think most small companies are happy to take home a few billion.

[aurareturn]

None of them are profitable. The industry will consolidate and the consolidated company will need to make money.

[2ndorderthought]

Alibaba was almost measuring profit in the trillions of dollars profit last year. They make the qwen models. Sure their profit is driven by another vertical, but I don't think they are in any danger of having cash flow issues. Supposedly they have already broken even because they had serious business needs for LLMs. And again that vertical is complimented by their investment. It draws in ad revenue, customer support, etc.

[aurareturn]

I'd love to be wrong but I don't see how Chinese frontier models will keep getting released for free. I'm pretty sure Qwen no longer releases their flagship models to the public.

[aurareturn]

They may not see the economic value of releasing models for free and then hoping that you'd use their API. Once they catch up more to US models, they will inevitably go closed source. That's my prediction.

I could see a much more restrictive licensing agreement before going full closed source. It could be a scenario where hyper scalers such as AWS or Azure will gain far more value from free Chinese models than Chinese labs such as when AWS often gained more than for-profit open source software than the creators.