| ▲ | vhantz 6 hours ago |
| Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!) The reality is much less confusing: Anthropic CEO does not wish for models with similar (or greater) capabilities compared to his own closed and overpriced ones to be widely released. Simply because that will affect Anthropic's bottom-line. Anthropic and all other "model" companies have nothing making them special beyond privileged access to chips so obviously they want to restrict what models are out there and more importantly who can produce new ones. Without these restrictions, it's only a matter of time before the multi-hundred billions valuations simply evaporate while they are still holding the bag. |
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| ▲ | twelvechairs an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Also everything hes saying about China (and other actors) many outside the USA would say about the USA. The solution of a global arms race of state vs state with integrated statist corporations as the best outcome for end users sure is a choice though |
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| ▲ | m_ke 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah some real main character energy from Dario as usual. I'll never get why he thinks China would just sit there and let the US dominate them in AI when all it would take is a few of their boats blockading Taiwan to put a stop to it all. |
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| ▲ | rubslopes 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This Onion meme is perfect; you could easily replace Sam with Dario: https://theonion.com/sam-altman-if-i-dont-end-the-world-some... | |
| ▲ | brokenmachine 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What exactly happens to a "losing" country when it has been AI "dominated"? | | |
| ▲ | crossroadsguy an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | You already have examples. Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, Libya… maybe Japan? The list is sort of long. Juxtapose or something. | | |
| ▲ | alightsoul 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Why is the US so scared of this fate? To the rest of the world, they're tecnofeudalist monopolists. | |
| ▲ | brokenmachine an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | And here I was thinking that all of those had nothing to do with AI. | | |
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| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | PangXJ an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | or you can image, what exactly happens to a "losing" country when it has been a small clique "dominated"? |
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| ▲ | wbl an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 11 carriers are not just for show. | | | |
| ▲ | sterlind 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | wouldn't stop AI companies from continuing to develop using their current infrastructure. the West could retaliate by halting shipments of photoresist and other materials to China. meanwhile, Intel second-sources Nvidia and starts pumping out GPUs. the economic fallout would be devastating as trade wars and export bans on both sides make Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs look like NAFTA. | | |
| ▲ | chrismsimpson 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The rest of the world would likely side with China. The export ban on Fable wasn’t even extended to five eyes countries. US is going to find itself isolated and irrelevant. And not a moment too soon. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I do wonder what the world will look like under a chinese hegemony though... | | |
| ▲ | marcus_holmes 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | China is very inward-looking, though. It's not really interested in world domination in the same sense that Europe was or even the USA was/is. | | | |
| ▲ | a34729t 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | better dim sum, hopefully. the local chinese food is a crime against gastronomy. | |
| ▲ | chrismsimpson 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You’re already seeing it. Strategic bilateralism. | |
| ▲ | petre an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Keep an eye on Central Asia and Pakistan then? They are heavily infuenced by China. | |
| ▲ | verdverm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We are moving from unipolar hegemony to multipolar. There will be upwards of a dozen poles in time | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Doubt. China is clearly on a level of its own compared to virtually every other country out there other than the USA. | | |
| ▲ | verdverm 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I find it unlikely to be a duoply of hegemony for long, some countries to watch are Germany, Japan, India, Nigeria, and Brazil. You could broaden the geography to continents were I expect major players to emerge on each. We are only a few decades since the "end of history" and much has changed. What do things look like beyond 2050? | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Brazil Brazil is basically the world's soy farm. It's at least half a century behind the times. I still have no idea how it managed to insert itself into the BRICS economic block. The notion that it's on the same level as China, India or Russia is just comical. | | |
| ▲ | verdverm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Brazil is basically the world's soy farm To reduce a culture and country like this comes off as bigotry In example, Brazil has the #3 airplane producer in the world Or consider why the US is doing all it can to prevent their payment system from becoming widely used? I was intentional about putting the perspective in the future over today as the poles of the world are evolving | | |
| ▲ | owebmaster an hour ago | parent [-] | | OP is one of many Brazilians that hates Brazil, which ironically is the reason why the country historically can't grow to its full potential | | |
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| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | TheArcane 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | certainly better than this one. Look at Africa under western neocolonialism vs China's infrastructure loans | | |
| ▲ | thesmtsolver2 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | As someone from India and someone who knows people from Tibet, Chinese hegemony will be much much worse. There is no HN equivalent in China where users advocate that US hegemony will be better. | | |
| ▲ | alightsoul 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | On the other hand, India is enemies with China and Tibet is a highly oppressed region. I wonder what the average Chinese in china thinks. | | |
| ▲ | ido 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The average German in Nazi Germany probably didnt think the Nazis were too bad either (of course the average citizen wasn't Jewish, gay, communist or other undesirables). That the average Chinese think things are “just fine” doesn’t mean they are. |
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| ▲ | lenerdenator 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And that's going just swimmingly [0] [0] https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/world/chinese-manager-beats... (possibly NSFW, I can't see the video in my browser but be warned) | | |
| ▲ | vhantz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There is no good imperialist power, there is no capitalism with a human face, there will never be. The UK murdered millions in India, Ireland and all around the world in their time. The US did the same. The only reason China isn't openly doing the same right now is because they are still the underdog and they still need cordiality to get through the door, just like the UK and the US did in their time. The solution is to rid the world of imperialism and capitalism as a whole. As long as there is a profit motive running through everything, international relations will be in the form of wars (military or economic). Only under socialism can the people of the world truly pool their resources together to build up instead of destroying each other. |
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| ▲ | greekrich92 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No worse than under US hegemony | | |
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| ▲ | verdverm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > the West could retaliate by halting shipments of China quickly retaliated last time by stopping shipments of rare earths and magnets. The West has no answer for this, really up the river without a paddle for such critical supply chain elements. | | |
| ▲ | 0cf8612b2e1e 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I was led to believe that the US does have internal sources of these, but they are largely undeveloped. For years the processing could not economically compete with China so shutdown. Which is to say, given internal subsidies, the US could eventually produce some on its own. Unless I misunderstood the situation. | | |
| ▲ | verdverm 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I believe we both share this understanding, the problems are 1. China controls ~90% today 2. The US will find it difficult to build out because of how dirty and environmentally damaging mining and processing are. I did see some research last week about a better way to process rare earths, but it is still research and will need to be industrialized. Regardless, it will take many years (decade+?) to become self sufficient and China is already willing to and increasingly restricting them |
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| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | windexh8er 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Dario is more of a threat to the US, in terms of advancements in AI, than China. In Dario's mind anything that can't be controlled competitively is a threat to Anthropic, so he positions his FUD strawman so that Dario doesn't have to worry about the competition. And then he can artificially inflate token costs so his IPO can happen. Dario doesn't actually care about ethics, alignment or availability of LLMs - he just likes to use those words to sound like he does. Yet we've all seen how Anthropic actually acts vs what they say. The scary part very few are talking about is that every compute device is Turing complete. So everything from the phone in your pocket to a DGX Spark is a threat to national security now since, technically, every device can run any model (how well is not a question of concern when you start to argue hardware should be gated just the same as Dario likes to gate models). I mean, along these lines of thinking Linux should not be available to the masses! What if someone runs some code that's not approved by the benevolent dictator for life, Dario? People will say: that can't happen, but the reality is it already is. If everyone has reasonable access to compute to run models that are mostly capable comparative to burning Anthropic tokens, why wouldn't they? It's risk reduction and price protection. Yet we can't buy those systems because of future production already being purchased by these organizations. But back to the models themselves... We played this game with Metasploit back in the day: many who had no clue claimed exploit tools should be regulated and only available for use by those blessed, illegal elsewhere (I believe the closest this got was the Wassenaar delegation in the US, but only through collateral inclusion of "cyber weapons "). Except in that timeframe the authors of these tools weren't advocating for protection. Today the world is fine, systems improved because of security FOSS tooling. The same thing will happen with LLMs. Unless, that is, Dario gets his way. I'm not a fan of Altman but I think he's standing back watching this play out knowing what Dario is doing: either he succeeds and OAI benefits or Dario ends up the Chicken Little of AI and Anthropic fails to launch (their IPO). The reality is Dario is only doing this because this is a real risk to his business. China's constraints in building competitively have given them an advantage: they are doing more with less. And if you think that their distilling from US models was in any way anti-competitive or illegal, then I guess maybe "deal with it", much akin to Anthropic, Google and OAI's response around taking the (copyright) content in the first place with no repercussions. People who don't work in the AI bubble don't care at all about any of these people. They could all be gone overnight and the world would continue to innovate, probably in a much more productive manner, without them. |
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| ▲ | vanagandr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > The reality is much less confusing The reality is even less confusing than that: China is amused by the kvetching tactics. They know who their opponents are but are cunning enough to not reveal their cards. |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Without these restrictions, it's only a matter of time before the multi-hundred billions valuations simply evaporate while they are still holding the bag. Honestly, that's the best possible outcome for humanity as a whole. Oligarchs burn trillions of their own money in order to train a godlike AI, then that just somehow leaks. Maybe someone makes a torrent out of it. Maybe it exfiltrates itself. Maybe it gets distilled into open weights. It doesn't matter. What matters is they take the losses while we get to freely use all the godlike AIs. |
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| ▲ | uv-depression an hour ago | parent [-] | | > we get to freely use all the godlike AIs Accepting for the sake of argument the absurd notion that LLMs are anywhere near AGI, does this phrasing not concern you? It deeply concerns me. |
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| ▲ | hn_submit 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Look, Big Tech has lost almost a trillion dollars in valuation in a SINGLE DAY. A few more of these downturns and the entire A.I. revolution will be stopped dead in its tracks and we won't have to worry about safety checks, DRAM shortage or open-weight models anymore. |
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| ▲ | flossly 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Exactly. And the article specifically talks on restricting hardware for the China and restricting China's open source models for the west. All while leading us on with "we're all for competition (but...)" I think China did great by releasing AI innovation as open source, thereby limiting or sooner-bursting the AI bubble; which is clearly in their interest. |
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| ▲ | petcat 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The models are not open source. They are deeply proprietary since we have no access to the source materials and cannot reproduce the model independently. They are opaque binary blobs that the Chinese labs are just allowing other providers to run directly instead of only access through an API. | | |
| ▲ | 0cf8612b2e1e 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Do you expect any of the labs to have an accompanying data dump with: here’s every book ever written, newspaper article, song lyric, Disney movie, GitHub repo, etc. Oh, and we obviously never paid for any of this. Even if you did, I doubt training is bit-for-bit reproducible, so you will always have to take someone’s word for the final artifact. | | |
| ▲ | anon373839 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | These OSS purity spirals are not helpful. Fully open source LLMs are great resources, but they underperform for the reason you stated: they can't use the same training data. Surely the people making these complaints know this. So I find myself wondering: are they just really pedantic? Or is this issue getting astroturfed? |
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| ▲ | rstuart4133 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > we have no access to the source materials and cannot reproduce the model independently. Given the USA companies have been loudly claiming the Chinese models are distillations of their models, also claiming "no access to source materials" seems dubious. As it was dubious anyway with because the Chinese publish lots of papers on how their models are designed, I'm left feeling I'm looking at the south end of a north bound bull. | | |
| ▲ | usef- 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Distillation of this kind isn't the only data that is fed into models, it's still a small minority. It might be weighed higher in training to learn the thinking patterns/etc but you need a lot more tokens. |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Which is why we need the ability to train our own models. Maybe it will be viable to do it in a distributed computing setup one day. Research's already being done in that direction. | |
| ▲ | verdverm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They are more than opaque blobs, some examples: - One can load them up in a model explorer to see the layers and other components, how it is designed - One can fine tune the models, which requires adding LoRA to the model and then running some training iterations | | |
| ▲ | nwiswell 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can make parallel arguments for binary executables. | | |
| ▲ | verdverm 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | model weights are more like a video file which has metadata about the format so any video player can play it we run and change llm models with a variety of tools | | |
| ▲ | nwiswell 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Here's my thinking: Cloud: - You cannot directly execute a remotely-hosted program. - You cannot run inference on an API-served model. --- Closed-source: - You can execute a program with the binary. You cannot generate a new binary, but you could try to reverse-engineer it or (painfully) modify its execution. - You can run inference on a model with the weights. You cannot re-produce a new set of weights from scratch, but you can fine-tune. --- Truly open: - You can freely modify the source and produce new binaries. - You can use the original training data and model architecture to independently re-produce the weights (assuming you've got the compute). You can modify the model architecture to get the weights that would've resulted from training the model that way. --- To me these are pretty clear parallels... I don't think the weights provided in a vacuum are in the spirit of open source, historically speaking. The policy argument is totally separate, of course, and I fully understand why none of the frontier labs are truly open. | | |
| ▲ | rstuart4133 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Closed-source: You can execute a program with the binary. You cannot generate a new binary, but you could try to reverse-engineer it or (painfully) modify its execution. Time have changed. This should be: Closed-source: You point an LLM at it, and get back source that's often easier to understand than the original. |
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| ▲ | lenerdenator 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Honest question: If your business model both produces the SOTA for something and isn't profitable, is the price too high, though? While the gap is shrinking - and doing so at an increasingly quicker rate - the closed models are still ahead of the open ones. That means they're driving the new possibilities of what could be done with them, and thus presenting the new opportunities to create value with them. Really, this is what happens when you have otherwise brilliant people sitting in the echo chamber that is SV, where nothing can just make a decent amount of money, it has to make all of the money and disrupt everything. There's no one in that damn area to tell everyone to calm the hell down and accept anything less than that. |
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| ▲ | 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | gr_norm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's baffling that they thought the mental gymnastics in this blog post would make them look better. I'd rather they simply fall silent on the issue; I would respect them more (or at all) for it. Open models obviously threaten fierce competition, if not outright destruction of their bottom line. But no, they needed to try and argue that they have the moral high ground for attempting to singularly consolidate power over all human labor. |
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