Destroying the growth story of overvalued stocks is an interesting investment strategy. It's not even new. Shortsellers understandably get terrible rep from execs, but their actions are more often in the public interest than you'd think. Normally it's exposing fraud, but here we get the really fortunate side benefit of what could eventually amount to the most significant contribution to the general software community since Linux.
Its revealing that they always seem to publish after some big announcement by American AI companies. But regardless, this is one of the benefits of a duopoly.
Chinese AI companies also face a domestic market where open-source distribution is often the only way to reach enterprise clients who won't pay SaaS premiums. The business logic aligns with openness in a way that US labs' VC-funded models don't.
That used to be true, but now they've raised ~7B$, so we'll see how / if that changes.
Chinese companies understand this and they're treating models as shared infrastructure akin to Linux. The money is going to be in customization niches. Companies will charge to tune models for specific use cases and charge support for that. There's also going to be money at the bottom for hardware vendors making chips and memory. But the middle tier of generic LLMs is seeing involution where there's relentless competition driving profits towards the bottom.
Wikipedia is altruistic, and serves humanity quite well.
Contributing to it might not necessarily be. Most open source development is funded by large companies after all and from their perspective it can function as a cost saving measure. Allowing them to focus on their core products and removing the possibility of their rivals from getting a competitive advantage due to having a superior low level stack under their product.
Which is why open source is so successful in areas where software is a cost-center but mostly failed for consumer products (since spending resources on them would actually be altruistic unlike e.g. Linux kernel development)
any altruistic act can be perceived as self serving
Software engineers need money to survive. If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive? Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.
From open source. You can earn money from open source. Open source is not opposed to capitalism, idk where you got that idea.
I said open source is derivative to capitalism. Meaning open source cannot exist without capitalism. I never said they oppose each other.
Second I said you need to follow the money trail. Money given to people who work on open source comes from non-open source places.
These are orthogonal. One can have a paid job while contributing to open source for entirely altruistic reasons.
> Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.
BS. Humans do things for altruistic reasons devoid of individual reward all the time.
I, myself, maintain multiple OSS projects entirely for fun and with the hope that others will find it useful. That's it, that's all. I also donate entirely anonymously to charities simply because I believe others deserve support and dignity.
This form of cold, American libertarianism you espouse is pure poison in the body politic, both in this US and globally. It degrades all of human interaction to transactions. Its no wonder that the US is where sociopaths like Zuck were birthed.
They are absolutely not orthogonal. You missed the point. You cannot ONLY work on open source for altruism. You need money to survive so you need money from a non altruistic source. Otherwise you’re not even able survive. You need to be alive to work on altruism right? So altruism REQUIRES incentive based money to exist BUT incentive based money does NOT require altruism to exist. That is the entire point of what I wrote. That is the intent and meaning behind my post. You didn’t in actuality fully understand that.
> BS. Humans do things for altruistic reasons devoid of individual reward all the time.
I never said they didn’t. Read what I fucking wrote before writing such a vile response. Don’t call BS on something I didn’t say.
I’m saying that a human being needs money to survive. If a human simply did altruistic jobs for no pay all his life he would die. It is a fucking logistical requirement that a human needs to work for pay to get money to buy food to SURVIVE. He needs to be alive to do open source right?
> I, myself, maintain multiple OSS projects entirely for fun and with the hope that others will find it useful. That's it, that's all. I also donate entirely anonymously to charities simply because I believe others deserve support and dignity.
Good for you. And none of this is possible without incentive based non altruistic work funding your leisure time to do this. You need money for food and rent and electricity so you can do your charity work for the world. That’s the only way. What I said is absolutely true and you’ve done nothing to prove otherwise.
> This form of cold, American libertarianism you espouse is pure poison in the body politic, both in this US and globally. It degrades all of human interaction to transactions. Its no wonder that the US is where sociopaths like Zuck were birthed.
Talking like this is not only against the rules here but it is some of the most vile and direct insults I’ve ever fucking read. And it doesn’t even stem from us disagreeing. It stems from you misunderstanding what was said. Why don’t you read over what I wrote and my explanation before making such a stupid comment. Let me be clear. You’re not stupid, but your reply is stupid. And your reply is stupid because of a misunderstanding. So make yourself understand and clean up your act because shit like this does worse damage for the world than psychopaths. More wars are started over misunderstanding and uncalibrated anger than actual psychopathic tendencies.
That I misunderstood your point in context is a different issue, in which case, yup, my mistake.
I suggest you practice a much greater degree of self awareness.
I’d rather speak the truth and what I believe in rather than cater to the feelings of people who cannot face objective reality.
And I didn’t openly or directly insult anyone. I criticize where it’s deserved and where it is true. He personally attacked me and I criticized his attack as appropriately as I could.
If you disagree with my premise, attack my argument. Don’t make it personal by telling me to be self aware and replying to a section of my comment not meant for you.
[†] Another problem with altruism: we don't all agree on whether a goal is altruistic, and what's altruistic in the enactor's eyes might not be in yours. Curating a fountain of human knowledge like Wikipedia? Probably altruistic. Protecting humanity from itself by installing your company as the stewards of frontier LLMs? Not so altruistic in my view.
The War on Drugs had the purpose (not just in its origin but in its perpetuation) of inflicting harm on elite-disfavored subsets of the population that could not be openly targeted for Constitutional reasons, which is about as far from an altruistic reason as it possible to get.
Any individual that provides free labor cannot survive off of said free labor. He must work for money to survive or get donations from someone who earned that money from incentive based labor in order to even buy the food he needs to exist as a living human being. Much of the time that labor is actually closed source.
This is a logistical reality. A lot of open source advocates are unable to get their brains out of the whole mentality that open source literally cannot exist without incentive based software supporting it. Who pays for GitHub to exist? Who pays for the food swes eat? I just code for open source all day and money falls out of the sky.
My smart friend says there are jobs that pay you to work on open source exclusively. Smart guy. In this case you follow the money trail. How does that company get enough money to pay a guy to work exclusively on open source?
Put it another away: if we removed your ability to do incentivized labor and all you can do is charity work… you would run out of money and die from starvation. If we did the opposite and we removed your ability to do charity work… you’d be fine.
All of this re-emphasizes the point of this thread: In our objective reality, the world is driven by incentive based work while altruism is a side effect of surplus wealth generated by incentive based work. That is the fundamental reality.
I don't see an inconsistency. money is pragmatic, the mission needs money
The real mission statement for most companies is to make as much money as possible.
Markets don't run on altruism.
Meanwhile we in the US are blocked from buying Huawei GPUs and retirees are boasting about the nvidia in their portfolios.
US labs in Google, Meta and SpaceX are not leading, none of them managed to build something on par with GLM 5.2.
Care to explain to me why they still don't collaborate and still choose to do it in private?
From a practical POV having all the training data, training infrastructure, and training know-how wouldn't help you either unless you could afford to spend the millions of dollars (hundreds of millions for a SOTA model) in compute to train it each time they released a new training set, in which case you're only talking about the big commercial companies. "open source for the people" just does not apply.
Those are mostly for embedded devices and the current "sponsor" is Apple.
Even if they're ahead they don't have enough GPUs to scale. Open sourcing is hence a good strategy to at least get market share (even if not $).
I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them.
A better reading (IMHO) Of the situation is that China believes that AI shouldn't be used simply to mint a few more trillionaires but the benefits should be shared with society. Why do I say this? Because we now have 70+ years of China doing exactly that. The transformation in China all the way from rural villages to Tier 1 cities has been utterly astounding. China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty.
In some ways we're at a similar point to the late 1990s and 2000s when Microsoft execs complained that Linux, being free, destroyed intellectual property value. Linux should be a perfect example of how people can and do act altruistically, or at least not in a way to bait-and-switch to enrich themselves.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1d26grm/in_the_...
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.
This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.
Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.
For something shorter, you can see Arnaud Bertrand's recent review. https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/the-book-the-west-refu... The review is behind a paywall, but not expensive.
If you want to read policy documents directly (primary source), try the State Council / Chinese government policy database: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/ and https://sousuo.www.gov.cn/zcwjk/policyDocumentLibrary
They also provide official translations: https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/
For Central Party documents: https://news.cn/politics/zywj/. It lists recent Central Committee / General Office / joint Party-State documents, e.g. 2026 documents on township duty lists, Party member development rules, carbon evaluation, long-term care insurance, and SOE leadership rules.
If you simply take what the Chinese government says at face value, you will be correct way more often than 95% of Western policy wonks, media talking heads, "analysts" and so forth. Because, like you say, they tell you everything they're doing.
In the recent US-China summit, Xi Jinping just came out and used the Thucydides Trap metaphor, which tells you everything about where China thinks it is and where it sees the US going, which is to become increasingly belligerent as their power declines. Now whether or not you agree with that assessment (I do agree), it still tells you China wants to avoid open hostilities, it sees itself as continuing to rise and it fears what a declining US might do.
But western politicians keep raising this metaphor. So at some point they're like "okay we'll speak your language". They then used this metaphor to make the point "our rise isn't the threat, your fear of it is. If you resist it you're walking right into the trap Thucydides warned about". So your conclusion is still right, they don't want open hostilities, a stable world is in their interest.
Then western media ran away with this and were like "OMG Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap", completely ignoring his point.