[epolanski]

Chinese have a wider outlook on it.

Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.

But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.

So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.

They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.

It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.

But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.

[rapind]

> It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.

I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.

[Levitz]

Moving towards China because of concerns of autocracy is a hilarious concept.

[rapind]

And yet here we are.

[antonvs]

Yeah, for me it's the latter. Until recent years, it was at least possible to defend the US as having some good principles, despite how imperfectly defended or promoted they may have been. That in turn could make it worth defending. Now, it's just blatantly turned into everything it always stood against.

[metalspot]

> But also a financial one

china's advantage is manufacturing capacity. giving away the model is a loss leader for the hardware business. they have a big gap on chip manufacturing. the only way to close that is by developing more efficient software. an open ecosystem is the best way to accelerate innovation of software development. since they are behind the US on model capabilities they aren't really losing anything by making the models open weights and being open about the performance enhancements techniques. but the open weights models are not necessarily what are running on the platforms or what they have internally. deepseek released v4 on their platform about a month before the open weights release, which I would guess was done to expose it to adversarial testing, so they could fine tune the removal of capabilities from the open weights model. (but i may very well be wrong)

[mekdoonggi]

Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.

[dyauspitr]

I think you’re assigning magnanimity to a competitor that is lagging behind and has every, state backed incentive to capture the market the only way they can. By making the models dirt cheap to access. If the roles were reversed you wouldn’t see open source versions of Chinese models. Much like you don’t see them open sourcing their blade battery design.

[georgeburdell]

An excellent example of Poe’s law. I can’t imagine what kind of Western person would hold such a cognitively dissonant view of globalism, for example.

[epolanski]

What do you mean?

[sally_glance]

Well yeah humanity in the sense of everyone except maybe Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols, ... I mean open models are really cool, but I have a hard time believing China is doing it purely for the greater good. The commoditizing your complement story sounds much more plausible.

[cultofmetatron]

realisticaly, the united states has no right or moral authority when it comes to human rights or rule of law given the last few years. given that, the admonishment of china's human rights violations against uighurs run hollow and hypocritical.

just happy to have more models that I could eventually play with if hardware ever becomes cheaper.

[theplumber]

>> Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity

It’s really BS. Comunist China Party is mostly interested in control above all. Forget humanity, human rights, what is good or what is bad or even financials. The most important thing to them is to keep the people on a short leash. Of course once they feel they have that under control they think about the “humanity” stuff as well but that’s just extra.

[epolanski]

Which part of releasing ai research in the open or open weight models reflect that exactly?

[inigyou]

It's trained to reflect CCP propaganda positions? What does it tell you about Tiananmen Square, Taiwanese sovereignty, the South China Sea or Israel?

[epolanski]

1. Nobody gives a damn about that. Frontier models are for work, not asking pointless stuff you can find on wikipedia.

2. The models themselves are not trained for anything, it's a prompt-level filter when you use chinese models as providers. I've just asked Kimi 2.6 and it answered without issues.

3. US models sugarcoat a lot topics about Israel. So don't be naive thinking there's no propaganda or sugarcoating in other providers. But again, nobody cares about this use case.