[hodgehog11]

I think it is pretty safe to say at this point that having large open LLM models available is better for humanity than them remaining proprietary. Echoing Linus Torvalds' recent comments, AI is genuinely useful right now, and is here to stay in one form or another.

[DanielHB]

The fear is not about the models open weights it is the erosion of training capability in other countries. Why train models when they do it for free? Until they don't of course, or they start doing what the US is doing right now by locking out some models to government only or internal market only.

What people should be afraid is the rug pull.

[revolvingthrow]

While a valid point, China also produces plenty of whitepapers going about the architecture and know how about the training and inference itself.

There’s also the fact that unless LLMs do get to AGI (which seems… doubtful, still) there comes a point where a model is good enough for what you need. Fable and gpt 5.6 are certainly pretty neat, but I’ve been happy since opus 4.6. I’d still choose a better model, obviously, but it’s not the end of the world if I was stuck with 4.6 for a while when it already lets me get the end result at acceptable quality.

It also needs to be said that the "erosion of training capability in other countries" is largely theoretical, given that Mistral hasn’t been keeping up and other countries don’t even have anything worth mentioning. You’d first need to _have_ training capability to lose it.

[CamperBob2]

What people should be afraid is the rug pull.

How exactly do you plan to pull a rug that's in my basement? The only people who are in a position to pull rugs are closed-model vendors.

And if a nation-state or other entity can't train a model that outperforms the open-weight SotA in a given respect, then they shouldn't waste electricity trying. A more-enlightened civilization would join forces and make the combined result available to all.

[DanielHB]

China has been known to set up local industry, destroy competition through subsidies, jack up prices repeatedly. US does it all the time too with tech services (uber, airbnb, are the more notorious, but all big tech is doing it now), but China is better at capex which is why they seem to be winning this race.

The main difference is that the subsidies in China usually come from the gov, while in the US it comes from VC money or anti-competition practices from established big-tech companies.

If China were setting up international funds and institutions for training with participation from other countries I would be 100% on board. Other countries could provide funding and workforce too and have a say in how the models are trained and safe-guarded. I am not saying China should bear the burden of open-weight models alone.

[rikima_]

So either you openweight it, or not. Neither is good for other countries, according to this logic.

[DanielHB]

Ideally there would be open weight models from multiple geopolitical areas. It is not that different from telecom really, you don't want the whole world to be dependent on a single provider from a single country on this kind of stuff.