If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.

The irony is that the authoritarian control hasn't gone away in China either, if anything it's even more advanced, the GFW and censorship regime there doesn't show any sign of letting up any time soon. Just today in my BBC news feed:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyvk2djk4o

> If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.

It’s a lot less surprising when you understand the tactic of economic dumping, which China has used for years to attack industry front-runners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

They’re not giving away the models because they love freedom and want to generously offer gifts to the world. They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.

I think self-hosting Chinese models is so popular precisely because China is so authoritarian.

If China wants to sell Solar panels to Americans, they can just sell solar panels, the sun won't mind. If China wants to sell models to Americans... well, Americans don't want to send their data to China, so they can't just offer them as SaaS. They don't want to be left behind in the AI race either. The only option to capture western mindshare is to do what they've always done, use Chinese taxpayers' money to subsidize model development, make American labs uncompetitive, make them go bankrupt, then have control over the entire sector.

It's almost been 15 years since the Snowden leaks, and there were rumors going around before that. I don't think it would have been that outlandish.

  Erlich Bachman: Jian-Yang, what're you doing? This is Palo Alto. People are lunatics about smoking here. We don't enjoy all the freedoms that you have in China.

With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope

A lot of code for Esp devices, Arduino clones and other embed computers is open source coming straight of china. This was also the case 15 years ago.

Wasn't writing on the wall when Aaron Swartz got prosecuted?

And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line".

They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.