[nathanasmith]

There won't be any new generation of models more powerful than Fable since the argument against Fable would apply even more. Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 is the best we'll ever see from this point forward. Soon low cost Chinese models will catch up to those thereby destroying Anthropic and OpenAI's pricing power which will mark the beginning of the end for them too.

[tw1984]

you need to be 8yo to believe Chinese are going to give you SOTA models at low prices. being open is not compatible with the Chinese culture.

Chinese here, no racism card here please.

[lbreakjai]

They would have a golden opportunity to inflict damage to a geopolitical adversary. The US economy is being propped up by AI, I'm not sure they'd miss the chance to blow that bubble if they could.

[tw1984]

there are ongoing tough competitions between China and America, that is for sure. however, a bold however, it is not in China's interest to see a crashed America. as an export oriented economy, China needs a stable and functioning America to maintain global order, that is how China got free lunch for the last 3 decades.

just imagine a world without the US acting as the world police, you'd be seeing armed conflicts in middle east, Africa, South East Asia, even in Europe and North East Asia. that would make China extremely hard to extract 1 trillion USD trade surplus a year, which is now required for China to maintain employment back at home.

without the US, even for a relatively stable global environment, trade won't be possible as most countries are not capable of providing goods and services wanted by China. Their currencies are literally junk (including Japanese Yen and Euro), Chinese are not going to take those junk in exchange for real goods. Trade is now possible because, by one way or another, those countries have USD to pay. those USD are backed by 300+ million highly productive Americans who repeatedly proved that they can create values in the scale of dozens of trillions a year.

the best part of this whole thing - America is singlehandedly footing the whole bill to provide such trade friendly environment for China for FREE. this is not cold war v2, back in the days of cold war, the US didn't help USSR to such extreme extent.

[gmueckl]

It depends on the end goal. Free good enough models are a way to drastically devalue Anthropic and OpenAI. A well timed release of a capable model that can run on obtainable hardware, so that a small/medium company can afford self hosting, has the potential to destroy one or both of these companies. This would narrow down the frontier model oligopoly and give the Chinese government a lot more power beyond its borders.

It really depends on whether the Chinese government wants to make good money or "win" the current AI bubbke.

[0x3f]

> being open is not compatible with the Chinese culture.

Hardly, it's one of the least IP-law burdened places in the world. Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc. No real restrictions on duping products, so execution often becomes the winning ticket. That's all pretty open and good for consumers.

You could argue they won't allow SOTA models to be exported but it doesn't really have anything to do with Chinese culture not being compatible with openness.

[tw1984]

> Hardly, it's one of the least IP-law burdened places in the world.

that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open - they know full well that anything made publicly available would be cloned/copied within days.

it is not only a part of the competition common in all countries, there are unique reasons in China - millions of graduate engineers join workforce every single year, there are not that many projects they can work on. starting copying & cloning some existing stuff even at someone's own cost is a pretty effective way to get into the game.

> Ready access to media, yes, but also scientific papers, books, etc.

There is this old Chinese saying "Teach your apprentice and your own ruin follows" (教会徒弟饿死师傅), that has been telling a completely different story for thousands of years. When they don't even want to hand over tech know-hows to their own apprentice, why would anyone be expecting them to have the desire to share it publicly?

[0x3f]

You can find Chinese sayings for almost any position. It's orientalism to reduce modern Chinese society/culture/economy to proverbs and sayings.

You say that you're Chinese so there's no such stereotyping involved, but actually Chinese people commit this sin against themselves all the time.

己欲立而立人，己欲达而达人

"wishing to stand, one helps others stand; wishing to succeed, one helps others succeed"

> that is one of the major reasons why companies there won't be open

But the AI labs _are_ often being open. And cloning stuff more generally doesn't really require OSS anyway. Product features are easily cloned in most cases, without any secret knowledge.