China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning

Article URL: https://werd.io/american-ai-is-locked-down-and-proprietary-its-losing/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979269

Points: 1181

# Comments: 894

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1187 points · 902 comments · 查看原帖

geophile
The lesson of the last 50 years of the computer and software marketplace is that free and low-end eventually wins. - PCs destroyed minicomputers. Mainframes survive, but serving a much tinier portion of the market than they used to. - PC office productivity software destroyed expensive professional products. - Windows (low end) and Linux (free) completely destroyed the UNIX marketplace, and again, have taken huge market share from the mainframe world. Ignoring the huge Chinese open-weight models for a moment: - The training costs and resource requirements for frontier models are unsustainable. The high price, and social pushback, mean that the American companies producing these models are precarious. - There are enormous financial incentives for research results allowing for cheaper, less resource-intensive models of high quality. - Local LLMs on consumer hardware are akin to the PC hobb
tyleo
I’m suspicious of some quotes here, “80% of startups using Chinese models,” doesn’t seem quite right to me. I just interviewed at several startups and they were all using the US models. Maybe they have some minor use of Chinese models but the bread-and-butter of most of these businesses model use is the Claude and Codex subscriptions.
postalcoder
This is a very strange article considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta. Also, enterprises don't give a rip if models are open. They care about zero data retention (and sticking with whatever vendor they're already using). This blog post is suspiciously close to being a restatement of what Alex Karp recently said on CNBC[0]. It's important to remember he's the CEO of Palantir and hardly a neutral observer. There are many reasons to celebrate open models, I run them myself. However there's not yet enough evidence that 1. America is losing the AI race (pardon jingo-ey phraseology) and 2. American AI labs are losing because their models are not open-weight. 0: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/palantir-karp-open-ai-anthro...
overgard
I do think open-weights models are going to "win" in the sense that they're probably going to be dominant when the hardware to run them becomes affordable. (which might be a while). Although I guess you could probably rent the GPU's yourself to hypothetically save on costs. (I'm a little skeptical -- I've heard of companies doing this and the inference bills are surprisingly high -- assuming the sources are correct. I don't know if a lot of people really want to be advertising "oh god our bill is horrible") I'm sort of baffled by what the entities that train the open-weights models get out of it though. Is it just a direct play to undercut the US providers because they view them as a threat? I just don't really understand the business model behind it.
Varelion
I do not understand the logic going into these companies. Flagrantly violate all IP in Human history, essentially claiming domain over the heritage of Humanity... And... Try to privatize it? When the technology -- and data -- are both public domain to begin with? It is ming-boggling stupidity. If there is talk of bailouts as the dust settles, there it would just be further evidence the system is ethically, financially, and intellectually bankrupt. EDIT: Spelling mistakes
giancarlostoro
I still wonder why some of our key universities in the US aren't building Open Weight Models. To this day we have "BSD" and "MIT" as key licenses for a lot of software (I know weird tangent but still... this emphasizes how significant these institutions were once!), but these top schools don't really build anything the way they used to anymore. I'm sure someone will say students build LLMs all the time, and this and that, but there's no reason these universities cannot build their own LLM "labs" and work on a common LLM that their university builds, maintains and students and faculty can manage, and release, maybe even sell API access to. It would be a key selling point for any student who wants a serious job in AI to work on such a project too. Universities could easily sell access to pre-hosted models mostly at-cost maybe a smidgen on top of costs, and fund the project as it gets bette
bg24
There is no coming back. After all, open-weight is NOT open-source. It is basically free model. And you pay to host it. The value proposition is that 100's of providers and host and sell it. 1000s of businesses (eg. Microsoft, Databricks, Palantir to small startups) can run it, finetune it and own the IP and pay only for hosting. On the other hand, you have OpenAI and Anthropic, who need to charge at 90%+ inference margin. It is because of 1) sunk cost, 2) sky-high salaries that they paid to keep the talent. Companies like Meta screwed things up badly by paying billions of $ for chief engineers. Chinese labs are doing a favor to the world. But I can also say with 100% certainty that if US labs were to close shops next year, Chinese labs would immediately start charging $$. In fact, I think it might happen with open weights model soon. But still these fees will be one-fifth or one-tenth p
simonw
Interesting detail from Ben Thompson's piece on Chinese models - https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/ - apparently Xi Jinping gave this speech recently http://english.scio.gov.cn/topnews/2026-07/18/content_118605... which included support for open source models: > We should seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing.