| ▲ | bonplan23 3 hours ago |
| I saw the same kind of comments when the first Deepseek model was initially released. However the relevance that investors assign to something like this does not seem to match the excitement expressed here. I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns. |
|
| ▲ | jacquesm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns. They'd be wrong. Especially about Europe. Many companies are in a bind about this: they can't upload their confidential files to a service provider but they do want AI. So right now they end up with a choice: do nothing, breach their contracts, use a service provider that pinky promises not to share their data (which we have already seen they will violate) and run local models. The latter is the reason you can't buy powerful GPUs for reasonable prices because a local model (GLM 5.3, DS 4, etc) + some hardware is all you need to solve the problem in a way that avoids the legal issues. |
| |
| ▲ | ivanovm 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can’t buy gpus at reasonable prices because US frontier labs are spending nearly a trillion dollars this year on data center buildout, not because some mid tier European insurance co needs to serve deepseek | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, well, you're wrong about that. They're buying GPUs by the pallet here. Mid tier insurance co is working with local inference providers and some of these now have thousands of GPUs up and running. Don't drink the HN cool aid that the EU is a backwater where nothing happens too much or you'll end up surprised one day. The one thing where Europe really does lag is in training, that would be fair. But inference providers are popping out of the ground like mushrooms and there are some billion euro+ projects underway. We -unfortunately- also have some scammers that are bilking (or attempting to bilk) investors pretending they have more than they do, this is annoying but I would expect that other countries have similar players as well. | | |
| ▲ | senordevnyc 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wow, whole pallets!? There are roughly 70 GW of datacenters under construction in the US right now, and a GW is roughly 500k GPUs, so 35 million GPUs. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm an hour ago | parent [-] | | The 'by the pallet' buys are for small local projects, not data center size projects (of which we have more than a couple as well), as you probably already knew. This isn't some silly dick measuring contest. The point was: they're buying them from the retail channels in relatively high volume because there is a massive shortage of GPUs in general, but that does not seem to stop parties with smaller projects who do not qualify for buying directly from NV (assuming NV even has stock to sell). 5090's now sell for the same amount (or more) that you could buy an RTX 6000 for a few months ago, and RTX 6000's are ~19K and up. I found a stash somewhere, bought two, then two more and when I was ready to buy the remainder they were all gone. Serves me right for being too careful. | | |
| ▲ | senordevnyc an hour ago | parent [-] | | No, the point is that US demand is what's driving up GPU prices, as GP asserted. Europe's purchases are a rounding error. And even then, most of the data centers under construction in the EU are from American companies. | | |
| ▲ | LunaSea 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The US has never cancelled as many data center projects as now. | |
| ▲ | jacquesm an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | A rounding error is taken to be sub 1%. Anyway, I shouldn't engage, good luck. |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | benjiro29 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can’t buy gpus at reasonable prices because US frontier labs are spending nearly a trillion dollars this year on data center build Its not just the US ... Where do you think all those 5090's end up? Its just crypto mining all over again. Most people do not realize that China was the biggest crypto mining operation because of its cheap electricity and people willingness to take big risks. The same happens now also, with people buying up 5090's (and lower class cards) in bulk, to strap into AI rigs. With Nvidia discontinuing the 32GB 5090s, we already see pressure on the lower end cards that had a better price / performance for a while now. China will do China things *lol* ... People there are just more willing to take bigger gambles (and the cheap elec helps a ton). But that is also a factor why a lot of consumer level hardware gets under pressure. Its not just the supply chain to the enterprise market that is eating a lot for AI. | |
| ▲ | geraneum an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > US frontier labs are spending nearly a trillion dollars this year They are not, not even close. I wonder if you're aware how money is being "spent" between Nvidia and US AI corporations! |
|
|
|
| ▲ | nicce 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns. Quite failure by someone to assume that EU businesses would use US over Chinese, based on the current political atmosphere. US causes even bigger concerns than Chinese labs. |
| |
| ▲ | diegolas 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | i am amazed they expect everyone else to see the chinese as these fiction-like evil corrupt dictators | | |
| ▲ | Propelloni 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It is flabbergasting, indeed. I'm no friend of China, because it is an evil dictatorship, but as a business man I prefer dealing with China over the USA nowadays. At least China is predictable, even in its corruption. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | petcat 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models This is exactly right. The only AI that matters from an investor perspective is the AI that is built into your phone, your car, ships with Windows and Mac, and built into legal and business tools like Lexus Nexus and Salesforce. Everything else is hobby. |
| |
| ▲ | rafaelmn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's why OpenAI hard pivoted from consumer tech into enterprise ? The only AI that makes money is enterprise. Being open weights/self-hostable is a huge win before the pricing even enters the conversation, but pricing is also adding a ceiling on what US labs get to charge. And stuff like powering other software also works better with fine-tunes, hence legal models, etc. | | |
| ▲ | busssard 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | European companies are more and more considering and planning to deploy Sovereign local models. Currently the price sovereignty is still not outweighing the cost of US dependency. But big providers are already working on finding ways to ensure customers independence of the cloud act. |
| |
| ▲ | bonplan23 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Also the concern that open weights models could contain dormant adversarial behavior (i.e. they are sleeper agents) is more popular amongst decision makers than one would think. In that regard it was a clever marketing move by Anthropic to release their paper "Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training" .... | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, they do. So you review the output. Models should be treated as juniors, not a line of code or legalese they write should be used without review by a human, not another AI. | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > In that regard it was a clever marketing move by Anthropic to release their paper "Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training" .... I find such claims a bit like if 3M/DuPont released a paper on the carcinogen dangers of PFAS and someone said this was "a clever marketing move". Like, great, this can have hidden dangers we only learn about years after it's irreversible… how does this make "our"* companies the good guys? A lot of us were already concerned about backdoors mandated by the US government, but that was just encryption and this is everything that AI ends up being able to do. * in the sense of "the G7" until the start of this year, because why would other nations prefer us over China in the first place, and thanks to Trump vs. Canada, Greenland, Iceland also now the rest of the G7 has to treat seriously the possibility that the US is more of an expansionist threat than China is. | |
| ▲ | cowboylowrez 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I love how Anthropic has created Frankensteins monster security wise and then pointing at it and yelling "DANGEROUS" haha |
| |
| ▲ | layer8 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don’t know about investors, but EU businesses with regulatory requirements are favoring EU-hosted Chinese open-weight model over US closed-weight services. | |
| ▲ | willsmith72 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | to be honest anything built into my phone, car, ships with mac is a hobby what's important is where big enterprise point their budgets. and there we agree, it's not to chinese models (as hopeful as I am that we can avoid a duopoly and great local models) |
|
|
| ▲ | Haven880 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you believe those investor, I assume you mortgage and bet all your wealth on it. SpaceX? Anthropic? Chinese has talents, electricity and Huawei. I really believe those investors are tulip blind to pile money into those western AI. China even now world number 3 ssd+ram ahead of SK Hynix. So armageddon of RAM SSD LLM model at dirt cheap price. And as time progress, large ram and small gpu will be built into handphone (which again dominate by Chinese). |
|
| ▲ | traceroute66 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > the relevance that investors assign I think there is also a perhaps the need to assign air-quotes to "investors" when talking about the US markets. There's too much fluff and noise there. Too much (over)leveraged trading. Too much speculation. What the real investors think is hidden behind the actions of the speculative traders. > I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models The Chinese models are open-weight. You can download them and run them on your own servers. Or you can outsource to Mistral, Privatemode or any of the many other US/EU inference hosters. So the "security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns" arguments are effectively non-existent. And whatever argument does possibly remain, also applies equally to Anthropic, OpenAI & co. |
|
| ▲ | c7b 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There were pretty specific rumors about IPOs happening early this year, up to apparent insider bets on prediction platforms. Don't you think the apparent delays in IPOs could have something to do with the open weights/open source competition? The monetary conditions (interest rates,...) were better early in the year, arguably predictably so, so what would be your alternative explanation why they chose to postpone? |
|
| ▲ | minraws 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This isn't true, especially not with the inference engine becoming public, now you can build your on models on the same or similar architecture and ship massive gains on top of these stacks. I think people don't realize the Salesforce SAP Palantir would love to ship these models, and they have/are shipping them. The threat of exfilteration of data via these models is high but it's nowhere near as high as the margins. For instance if you could cut your ai input bill by over 90% would you do it? Can you put some of that extra margin say 10-20% to make it more secure. I know of atleast 10 fortune 500 companies that are entirely planning to or have moved to Chinese models for a large portion of their work. It's insane people in finance are delusional enough to think that won't happen. Maybe Govt will try to de-risk with bans on using open models but I don't think that's going to work at scale, people will literally spawn labs to launder DeepSeek/GLM models into a US model by some novel training etc approach or something. I still don't think that it's as much a kami-kaze rather it's an attempt to normalize the world around the Chinese stack. If DeepInfer is supported by everyone, it will be much easier to export stuff aka hardware that only supports it for now or is optimized for it. Assume china starts selling hyper optimized Asics for inference at some point. This feels like a race to the bottom as soon as possible because they have much lower costs, if there is a Wipeout in AI Labs in US chinese labs are largely insulated, and they can hopefully buy Nvidia chips for cheap if that does happen. |
|
| ▲ | pella 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns. European business users (+ consumers) can access GLM-5.3 via Mistral.ai hosting. (with GDPR) https://docs.mistral.ai/models/zai-glm-5-3 https://legal.mistral.ai/terms/get-started/ |
| |
| ▲ | jacquesm 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but that does not preclude the model from containing adversarial payloads so you still have to review everything. Of course the same goes for any other model that you haven't trained up yourself. |
|
|
| ▲ | enaaem 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If they are open sourced, it means any random data center could host it domestically and AI becomes a utility. |
|
| ▲ | Traster 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Europe is going to be just as worried about using US models for large parts of government related functions and they're going to feel alot better about open source self-hosted chinese models than US models which can literally get turned off on a whim by Trump. They'd prefere home grown models if they can, but if they can't they'll go self-hosted and that'll be Chinese at this rate. |
| |
|
| ▲ | realusername 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I think they do not believe that big corporations in the US or Europe would actually use chinese models in their business operations due to security, regulatory and/or business continuity concerns. Well they are wrong, I'm at a large EU startup and they are currently considering Deepseek as their default model, Opus/Fable would still be available for complex tasks. |
|
| ▲ | glimshe 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's very little understanding of business operations on HN, especially outside the tech echo chamber. The "software will eat the world" mindset. Based on HN comments, every company would be running Gentoo and developing line of business applications in Haskell or OCaml. |
| |
| ▲ | cramer4next 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I concur. Everything is such a hard left turn. The reality is what ever better and cheaper is where the money flows. Especially from an international corporation perspective. |
|
|
| ▲ | inSumErgoCogito 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [dead] |