[rootusrootus]

Neutering OpenAI and Anthropic would be my guess. Commoditized LLMs won't hurt Google nearly as much as it hurts the LLM-only companies, and so accelerating the inevitable just helps knock out potential future competition in areas where Google -does- make a lot of money now.

[literalAardvark]

I think this plays a part, but the truth is that Google doesn't need to do that, Chinese open models are already doing that by themselves.

So perhaps another part is just Google showing that they can indeed play at the big boys table.

[gdiamos]

There is demand for US open models.

[literalAardvark]

I sincerely wonder why. Chinese censorship is only really relevant if you're doing anti China stuff, which is to say never, while the Western kind of model censorship ( a combination of copyrights and general fairness ) are something everyone's had to work around at least once, even if just for writing an interesting story.

[gdiamos]

It’s about enterprises who care about supply chain risk and having a throat to choke if they have a problem.

Here’s a real example.

I’m in a design meeting talking about a model use case. We have a question about the data pipeline or the prompt format that would benefit from knowing about how the model was trained. The enterprise team lead calls the dev tech engineer from the company who produced the model. He is already in the office and walks into the meeting to answer the question.