Btw: with Qwen4 I mean the next large Qwen model that is based on the Qwen4 architecture (Qwen 3.8 flash next was "almost" based on the new arch but obviously was a small model)

There's a law of diminishing returns at play here, and doubling the energy cost of training to wring 2% more performance out of the technology isn't going to be very useful, because most of the problems it is capable of solving will be solvable with the previous-gen 98%-as-good model.

("there's a law of diminishing returns at play here" is an article of faith. But then, so is the belief that these models will keep getting better).

The government that removed restrictions on how private companies can access capital after a certain scale (the JOBS Act), that removed the need for private companies to report as if they were a public company after a shareholder threshold was crossed, superpowering the access of wealthy private investors to get in earlier in a growing company while at the same blocking the public from participating in funding growing enterprises at an earlier stage (since it required companies to IPO much earlier to access capital) which allowed retail investors to also reap the rewards on funding them early when they grew to become behemoths (like Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Google, etc.).

It's not fair in either place, the USA has its own model of unfairness, China has a completely different one. The difference is that in the USA the government allows private investors to become more powerful than the State (outside of the monopoly of violence) while plunging the rest of society into increasingly more precarious lives while in China the State is the power and its legitimacy only exists while the population feel they have a better life.

I think the Chinese government is backing their labs by less direct means. For example cheap electricity and investing in chip manufacturers such as Huawei and cxmt.

Deepseek specifically, is known to operate with minimal resources. The entire company has around 160 employees and every model they release must break even within ten months.

There is as much to criticize about American hyper scalers and AI labs and the lack of interest in helping humanity or contributing to open source, but that might not be as popular an opinions on this site.

The story is so much more complicated than that, to the point that this economic warfare theory is basically a meme.

Chinese models are open because they don’t have a choice. “When you trail the frontier, openness maximizes reputation per unit of capability. The moment you lead, you close.” [0]

[0] https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-ex...

DeepSeek is basically a research lab founded by a hedge fund guy, more than anything else.

There are many other reasons Chinese companies releasing models open-source or open-weight makes strategic sense.

A really easy-to-understand example is a company who has a near-monopoly on "serving video content" releasing a video model openly.

If you can be relatively certain that video content created by a model (which you have trained, using data from your own platform) will be ultimately served on your own platform, thus generating revenue from watch-hours, it makes sense to make those models as widely-available as possible.

It's also a net-positive if people use your public research to build better video models, because - again - you are reasonably certain that the even-better content those new models produce will be watched on your platform.

The alternative would making models harder to access and learn from (broadly, the current western model). Many would argue that Google, in choosing to not optimise its video generation models for "availability", is directly causing less content to be uploaded to YouTube. This is the trade-off.

I don't know much about DeepSeek's financing specifically, which obviously doesn't release video models - so I don't know how directly this analogy runs, or who directly benefits from the extremely evident rising tide that the public release of DeepSeek's research creates. However, this does not negate the broader rising-tide effect of the scientific method.

It's certainly also true that it's geopolitically beneficial to be able to undercut American labs' models. If I ran a global superpower, I would probably want my country to be technologically competitive too.

But Chinese companies are already serving a huge volume of customers in a complex, existing marketplace, before even thinking about the US market, and it's overly simplistic to assume that their entire strategy revolves around economic warfare directed specifically at the US. It's more nuanced than that.

This is, of course, without even getting into opening the can-of-worms around whether US economic policy also results in the US state functionally subsidising technological innovation, how comparable that is to China's model, etc.

It is great for everyone except for a few people who want power over everyone else, and the fact it is not charity of kindness makes it more sustainable, because charity and kindness is quick to go when big money and politics is involved.

I want more warfare like this. Building stuff instead of destroying stuff.

You put it like US has a goal of help humanity or open-source

To say that US model providers have a close relationship with their government would be putting it mildly.

Notwithstanding that Chinese publishing methods actually does help both humanity and open-source.

Does anyone think that likely? I have no clue or bias.

Yes, because everything China does is against the US. That's all they think about day and night. God forbid they want to corner the global market or have a genuine business case. How dare they provide options for those who can't afford a measly $200 a month? How can we let Chinese labs publish research for free for the whole world so that they can benefit? The nerve! To think they can use soft power instead of military might! I mean, Anthropic and OpenAI are the last bastions of human kindness and charity. Right?

Right?

As a neutral party, this characterization is crazy.

As if the AI companies - Claude and OpenAI are guardians of freedom and humanity and very charitable to the global society without any self interests… “Chinese models are subsidized by the Chinese Government, therefore they’re inherently bad for humanity” is a highly propagandist argument. The politics of US vs China may be whatever it is in reality.. You have one company releasing their models for cheap, actually open sourcing their trained weights, and publishing details of their optimizations and learnings for others to use. The other camp actively “aligning” their models, nerfing their capabilities, hyping their swarm activities from poor sandboxes, and trying their best to lock users into their harnesses and walled platforms. They are subsidized by the capitalist VCs who are essentially waiting for their payouts..

At some point, one has to see things for what they are and evaluate their own reasoning..

I’m happy to stay provider agnostic, try all models and cheer any useful progress as open as possible.

We hear this about literally every industry the Chinese excel in - that it's only because the government subsidizes them that they succeed. For chip manufacturing, for batteries, for EVs, for solar, for AI. I don't see how the chinese government can afford to subsidize all of these industries and still have them contribute to the GDP.

So were Amazon and Uber by the US, which have now established monopolies across the globe. To the countries suffering from those, there's zero difference with China doing it to solar. Actually there is, at least solar got them cheap renewable energy in return. This would never have happened in the US because big oil interests would make it take decades. That's the reality.

You need to spend 10 years outside the US, deprogram, and then go back.

US companies are burning colossal piles of cash in ways that makes it unclear if it qualifies as dumping, not to mention their deep ties with the country's regime.

Claiming that companies from a country have ties to the regime and burn through cash is a very miopic accusation.

Charity and kindness is not a motivation, it's an outcome of what you do.

Why are we assuming a strong US is necessarily good? As a European, I have seen plenty of evidence against that stance lately.

I understand that Americans might prefer a strong US. But conflating them with humanity is a leap that I don't think one can make without any backing.

You think extremely US-centric. China has a different economic model than US and your rules for a specific kind of Capitalism may not apply to them. You assume a country of 1.4 Billion people is obsessed with a couple of foreign AI companies. What if they don't care.

Ok, but so what? That's what happening so far. Even a repressive totalitarian government I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy does some good sometimes.

If the Chinese cheap/open models rise up and destroy us, thats on us for giving them access to the tools to do so.

Its very xenophobic of you to say China has zero intention of helping humanity, and just wants to "wage economic warfare".

Last time I checked, it was ourselves (USA) waging economic warfare on 2/3rds of the world.

I dont get this cope people have where people have this idea that its impossible for a Chinese company (that make billions of dollars) to have done something by their own merit, but instead its always some Chinese Communist Party conspiracy where the main goal is to destroy America.

Lay off twitter for a bit.

Its them who chose to outsource heavily, not US consumers.

There are no victims here however, both benefited from the arrangement. The consumers and capitalists.

No, it's the result of US leadership letting this happen. This is clear since China themselves would not let this happen. US leadership did nothing because they were best friends with the people who did it, and did not care one bit about their population.