China now has better cars and better AI. When they take Taiwan they will control most microprocessor manufacturing. The US has squandered its post WW2 advantages and fiddled away everything via bad leadership, low standards, and our tolerance for industry grift.
When they take Taiwan they will control most microprocessor manufacturing
The don’t even need to, as they are evolving their semiconductor technologies by leaps and bounds for quite some time. They even managed to reverse engineer the latest lithography machines that the taiwanese host.
Can someone explain to me why I, as an American, should be angry that China is making something better than us that it is also releasing for free to the world? I mean, we still get to use it if we want, and so does everyone else.
I don’t see why putting more money into the pockets of a few AI billionaires is considered a national priority.
Who told you to be angry about it?
Note though that the article is pitting open-weight models against each other, not open-weight models vs closed models. The latter still remain quite a lot better from the US labs.
Nvidia wants everyone to believe it’s evil when someone else is making AI money. Chinas models tend to be less picky about hardware so Nvidia is pissy.
You absolutely shouldn’t be angry!
The existence of powerful open-weight models is the single thing that’s going to prevent us from descending into the full corporate dystopia everyone’s afraid of.
It’s going to hit the stock market hard once everyone figures out what’s going on though.
You absolutely should be angry! Just towards different people
Anger is overrated, it’s a motivator but it makes you sloppy. You should be focused and resolute towards different people.
There is absolutely no reason to be angry. If China develops better AI and releases it freely, Americans benefit just like everyone else. The only people with a reason to panic are billionaires.
Americans benefit just like everyone else. The only people with a reason to panic are billionaires.
Assuming the business model around AI stays consistent with the unsustainable way it runs now, sure. But thinking longer term, once a winner is entrenched and control and usage patterns emerge and become general, China will possibly leverage AI dominance in the software space. Our tech middle class will become theirs.
I mean, if you have no problems using a tool that says Chinese allies like Russia are the good guys and war against Europe is fully justified, then sure, simply stop caring, just like about Palestine.
What if I do normal things with an LLM like code and write porn? Russia doesn’t come up.
Yes, best to stick with non-biased AI like Grok.
What? “Oh, this AI is bad, therefore we should use an AI that is arguibly even worse”
Maybe just don’t?
implied /s
My argument stands. Most online AIs, including open-weight, are biased or controlled. It’s mine and your duty to make sure we never use them. If you think whatever musk makes is bad, you should apply the same thinking to whatever CCP makes.
The fact that my original comment got downvoted is kind of worry some to me. It’s like Lemmy is against AI, but not Chinese AI
EDIT: I assumed at least this platform would not be fine with using products from Israel, Russia, China, etc., but I guess not.
And open models regularly have versions released that remove these restrictions. Qwen won’t answer any questions June 1989 in Tianmen square, but the unrestricted version does.
You asked why you should care, not who you should trust. You have a good point; everyone building þese þings has an agenda.
I wonder if the Chinese are better at it that Musk is, because Grok really will revert back to its training data if pushed just slightly. I’m guessing that, yes, the Chinese are much better at it.
But, really, if you’re talking to an AI to form your worldview, you’ve sort of already lost… that’s not really a core use case.
I think the real reason might be that we want AI to make war, so ours needs to be better; and we can’t use theirs for our military because maybe there’s backdoors we don’t know about… which is the same reason nobody in the world wants to buy US military hardware.
But, really, if you’re talking to an AI to form your worldview, you’ve sort of already lost
Amen, comrade.
Silicon Valley spent billions building AI tollbooths while Chinese labs made models people can actually download and run. Then Washington restricted chips, and China got better at doing more with less. It’s almost poetic: America tried to corner the future of AI and accidentally made efficiency China’s competitive advantage.
It’s worse than that even… frontier models now have guardrails restrictive enough that I can’t use them for legitimate work. And the ones that DO work have token prices at exorbitant rates, and chew through them like there’s no tomorrow.
Meanwhile, I can download Qwen3 and run it on my own hardware, and it’s about as good as the last generation US model without the annoying guardrails.
Hmm… which model am I going to choose to use?
I don’t know, but how many backdoors do each model have?
LLM weights aren’t code; the engines that run them are completely separate, so they don’t have traditional “backdoors.”
It’s possible some elaborate prompt trigger was trained into the weights, but there’s never been any evidence of that, for years. I’d say worrying about that is paranoid unless you work at the DoD or something, and some full-weights finetuning would scramble it anyway.
An infinite number of. With models, the concept of backdoors becomes a bit fuzzy.
Did you mean qwen 3.8 max? Or qwen 3 coder next? They are very different.
I’ve been rocking Qwen 3.8 27b for programming, anyone have an opinion if Coder Next is a better alternative?
It’s a mixed bag TBH. The issue is that Qwen 3.8 27B is so good.
It depends on the quant you are running though, and the way you are running it. If you have 16GB or less VRAM and a generous amount of CPU RAM, and you are running a regular GGUF instead of something exotic, Qwen next is probably better, with the right hybrid inference engine.
I mean both, for different purposes. They are definitely very different.
I know everyone hates on Meta but they just released an open weight 800B parameter model: Muse Spark Open.
Their smaller 30B parameter open model Muse Glimmer has also been out for a few weeks and is highly competitive with Qwen 3.8 27B.
So I hope we will start seeing more open models from US labs especially in the sub-20GB category which can be deployed on daily use machines.
In case anyone forgot, Meta was the pioneer of open weight models, with Llama 1 released/leaked February 2023.
They literally set the standard. Yes there was GPT-J before it, but basically everything in the open weights LLM space is derived from the Llama series, its footprint is still in newest Chinese models. The world was Meta’s oyster.
…And after one bad experiment, an experiment Zuckerberg allegedly meddled with (Llama 4), Zuck fired the whole Llama team, paid millions to a bunch of tech bros in their place, who proceeded to nothing for a good long while.
Muse Glimmer is obsolete, IMO.
Muse Spark is… not terrible? Its architecture (GQA + sliding window attention) is about a year or two out of date, but it… could be worse.
But this is just a reminder to anyone who thinks Zuck won’t find some way to feel insecure and fuck Muse up.
He will.
It is what he does. Zuck caused incalculable damage to his company, single-handedly, and he will do it again with zero repercussions.
Same with Musk. And Altman. Not to speak of Microsoft vacuuming up promising startups into a black hole. The U.S. AI industry was basically doomed from the beginning.
Neat! This stuff should not run in data centers anyway. And it should not be gated and controlled by billionares.
Training these models still requires massive data centers, and using any of them that at all compare to frontier models for inference requires large numbers of GPUs
It does for now, but the methods for modifying an LLM are getting increasingly sophisticated. From blending models to doing brain surgery on them to fine tune the weights, there’s a lot of new techniques being developed all the time
There’s also recently been a breakthrough that cut the ram requirement to 1/6, eventually someone is going to figure out how to train models orderes of magnitude more efficiently
Especially once the AI bubble pops and no one is willing to dump billions into constant iterations
Open-weight is not the point in the AI race so this comparison doesn‘t tell us anything about who‘s leading in whatever metrics they‘re testing right now.
I wish models had to disclose their training sets so IP holders can sue for damages. Those would get into the trillions no doubt. Hell I wish LLMs never got this much out of hand. But I don‘t understand what they‘re getting at with this or why make it a „China VS the West“ thing.
Open weight AI absolutely matters if the question is who gets to shape the AI ecosystem. A slightly better closed model wins a benchmark: a good open model can be adapted, audited and run without paying a Silicon Valley landlord. And yes, training data transparency should apply to both Chinese and Western labs. That’s not a contradiction: it’s the point. Still: FOSAI » OWAI » ClosedAI
I‘m not sure what gets to shape the AI ecosystem in the long run and I doubt anyone does but open-weights probably isn‘t it right now considering everyone uses either Claude orChatGPT. I don‘t think open-weights matters all that much in the AI race right now given that the models lack behind. Seems like an artificial race to me anyway. I think its really about building more and more of these shitty data centers everywhere because they will find use cases for them after the AI fad is over.
Who is »everyone«?
Who owns the compute? The models are irrelevant without the hardware. Leaving you stuck in corpo land.
You. Smaller models are getting more and more capable.
👌
I’m running a 4090 and barely run 32b and it isn’t half as good as what’s out there on the free tier.
Non starter for 99.9% of the population.
It’s already a starter for SMEs.
Because then Western AI companies can go to the governments, point to China and say: “see how advanced they are? See how they can apply that to the economy and military? You’d better give us money and not try to regulate us.”
That is the whole story.
Just to clarify: This is about western open-weight models being weak not closed models that are objectively more capable than anything open-weight. It‘s like saying China dominates Formula 2 racing when the rest of the world is focused in Formula 1.
You’d better give us money and not try to regulate us.
Actually, right now, the western AI companies desperately want regulation.
An unregulated environment is one where they’re forced to compete on price against the Chinese companies and startups running open-weight models. All signs point to them losing that battle.
OpenAI/Anthropic’s wish list right now is a bunch of regulation to prevent the use of foreign models, and to require expensive to implement “safety” requirements that make it hard for startups to compete.
Yes, that’s a different kind of regulation than the one I was thinking about. They do want market/economic regulation (i.e. ban Chinese model use) but not law/justice regulation (our AI made an oopsie, sorry, not our fault).
Trump (and Biden’s) legacy.
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