> What makes you think there would be no alternatives, though?
There could be, they can actually come from open American companies too. Ask yourself why we aren't seeing a thousand or more American AI startups spring into life overnight to build "open" models. Follow the economics.
> What's stopping a bunch of enterprising upstarts from updating all 2.8 trillion parameters, extending them, distilling the model into very competent flash models, or applying targeted RL?
> And that would come into play if the Chinese kill every closed American provider and then go closed themselves.
What's stopping American or European tech companies from doing this today? It's economic and technical capability. I'm very suspicious of any suggestion that it is in any way not incredibly difficult to build and scale up LLMs. Maybe in the future it can be much easier, but in that case you run into a sort of tautology where it becomes easier but the leading companies continue to lead and do so by a significant margin because they're the ones that have the most talent and access to capital.
The premise seemed to be "an open China" versus a "closed USA". I'm not sure that's a great premise. If China can create open-weight models so can the US. If the US can close their models (as clearly evidenced by the article) so can the Chinese.
There could be, they can actually come from open American companies too. Ask yourself why we aren't seeing a thousand or more American AI startups spring into life overnight to build "open" models. Follow the economics.
> What's stopping a bunch of enterprising upstarts from updating all 2.8 trillion parameters, extending them, distilling the model into very competent flash models, or applying targeted RL?
> And that would come into play if the Chinese kill every closed American provider and then go closed themselves.
What's stopping American or European tech companies from doing this today? It's economic and technical capability. I'm very suspicious of any suggestion that it is in any way not incredibly difficult to build and scale up LLMs. Maybe in the future it can be much easier, but in that case you run into a sort of tautology where it becomes easier but the leading companies continue to lead and do so by a significant margin because they're the ones that have the most talent and access to capital.
The premise seemed to be "an open China" versus a "closed USA". I'm not sure that's a great premise. If China can create open-weight models so can the US. If the US can close their models (as clearly evidenced by the article) so can the Chinese.