[yogthos]

Also, we shouldn't underestimate the power of developing things in the open. Chinese open models benefit from the wisdom of an entire global research community while American engineers working on proprietary closed models are working in their own insular silos. It should be no surprise that the scientific community at large would pull ahead of these small teams. On top of that, doing research in the open amortizes the cost. Incidentally, this is exactly the same logic that led open source to dominate in recent years.

[WASDx]

> On top of that, doing research in the open amortizes the cost.

Can you elaborate on this? I appreciate the open models but don't see the economics behind just giving them away like now.

[yogthos]

When the model is open, then anybody can download and trying doing things with it. Distill it, change its architecture, inspect how its layers work, and so on. A lot of research ends up being published as a result which the original authors of the model can integrate back to improve it. This is precisely why China now tops AI publications https://www.science.org/content/article/china-tops-world-art...

The models themselves aren't what's valuable. The goal is to get the models to become the global standard which everyone uses, and people are familiar with. This further ensures that standards and hardware will be developed around these models going forward. It ensure these models are what most people are familiar with using, and so on. This becomes common infrastructure like Linux that's effectively impossible for commercial offerings to compete with.

The money is going to come from providing custm integrations, customization, robotics applications, and operating cloud services like AWS. That's where Chinese companies are aiming. There's a good interview with Alibaba Cloud founder where he explains the strategy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPzevOpIzPg

While American companies are betting on the idea that if one model can pull away it's going to keep self improving and nobody will catch up, Chinese companies are betting there will be a plateau to this tech, and it's more important to focus on market dominance because they will catch up later.

And it's becoming clear that Chinese companies made the right bet because Chinese models are closing the gap now, which means there is no singularity effect being observed with frontier models. We are starting to get to the point of diminishing returns already where companies have to put ever more effort into squeezing just a bit more capability. The easy gains appear to be over.

[WASDx]

Great explanation, thanks!