The post hits it spot on with unequal access to the models in terms of security. I'm developing OSS where security is important for the user ... but the frontier models like GPT 5.6 and Fable flake out and state that I cannot get the info/access.
This is extremely lopsided I'll have to resort to GLM 5.2/K3 to ensure that those security issues (hopefully) are resolved properly.
For OSS, this is one of the most counterintuitive experiences I have ever had. More than ever I'm convinced that open weight and open pipelines models are 100% critical for progress on the AI and societal fronts.
astrobiased
The 2 things people need to remember:
1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.
2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via model providers in the US ( either frontier or model hosts like fireworks.ai ) then please let me know your bank details so I can poke around.
ballon_monkey
Datapoint from the cheap end of the market: I run local models on a couple of
Orange Pi SBCs and a decade-old Optiplex with no GPU. What runs usably on that
class of hardware is almost entirely Chinese open weights — Qwen's MoE builds
(35B total, ~3B active) are the only thing that gives me acceptable speed on
CPU, with Gemma as about the only western exception. I evaluated Kimi too and
ruled it out purely on size.
Whatever the strategic picture is at the top, at the bottom of the market
"weights you can download and run on hardware you already own" is the whole
ballgame, and right now that's mostly Alibaba's to lose.
nmthornhill
> The defining characteristic of a commodity is that it is fungible: a gallon of oil is a gallon of oil; a ton of copper is a ton of copper; a bushel of wheat is a bushel of wheat.
The concept of “commodity” as defined above is a model, a simplified abstract representation of reality, but that does not match the reality perfectly (the map != the territory).
The author claims that a token isn't literally an ideal commodity, but neither is oil or wheat, many factors influence their real value (intrinsic properties, location, available storage at production, expected delivery date, etc.) so that no two gallons of oil in different contracts have the same price.
Is treating “tokens” as a commodity a worse model than treating oil this way? It depends who you ask! I'm pretty sure that a chemist working at a refinery would be more happy to see tokens being felt with like a commodity by his company than if they started viewing crude oil like one.
(Overall, there's way too much economism in that post, and way too few facts, and as a result the argument makes very little sense, the author basically wrote that both OpenAI and Anthropic are drowning in cash right now because compute scarcity means the price must be significantly higher than the marginal cost…)
stymaar
Releasing open weights that can approach frontier level intelligence (irrespective of number of tokens burned) is just a way of telling the world that anyone, even China, can serve frontier level inference if they have the chips and warm shells to do so.
What is stopping China from gaining a majority market share, then, in terms of serving inference?
AI Sovereignty -- yes
Cybersecurity concerns -- yes
Latency -- no, unlike previous emerging IT workload types , inference does not have strong latency requirements. eg 1s of additional network latency doesn't matter to a 15 min, 10-turn agent session.
Cost -- ultimately this comes down to a nations ability to plug chips into warm shells. which forks into geopolitical / trade on the chips side and energy scalability and modularity on the warm-shell side. Even if you call geopolitical / trade a toss-up, China has the US beat HANDILY on the energy front, yearly they are deploying 10x power to their grid relative to the US, which is shooting itself in the foot at every possible moment.
IMHO chip tech will travel across borders, absent a breakthrough in analog inference, energy scalability will ultimately dominate.
nateburke
People seem to conflate "made in China" with "can't be trusted." id argue the bigger distinction is open vs. closed. An open model can be audited, fine-tuned, and technically run entirely on your own hardware. A closed model is basically "trust us."
jke_kang
Lets do "who's afraid of US models" version:
* Me, as an individual, because I might not be able to pay price hikes, because my revenue (salary) is much lower than what they want and I can't support my expenses via huge bank loans.
* Again, me as a new entrant to the industry, LLMs are basically pay-to-play games, again related to price hikes, new entrants might not be able to afford paying those prices 24/7 - which you need when learning new things.
* Any non-US company, US can block the models which can disrupt the whole business.
* Even some US companies, for example if you operate in EU and EU somewhat changes their mind and follow the ICC and require you to stop working with Netanyahu (war criminal as per ICC), then following laws in EU, might create trouble to your whole business.
throwaw12
I am afraid — if Chinese models go mainstream it has a clear way of pushing its narrative way beyond its otherwise borders. More like a Trojan horse it is for the Chinese.
Here is a quick example of how Chinese deepseeks agent works kn its underlying model) when asked a tough question
Try different harnesses people! I am actually preferring Chinese models at a fraction of the frontier price for coding. Yeah you need more tokens per unit of work done, but it is way cheaper still. Using CC/Opus as a staff eng / frac CTO. And Hermes/Chinese model as hopefully my team of mid levels. This way I can make good use of pro plan and then get cheap Chinese tokens for the rest and not hit a RL and know it can scale up. plus choosing your model is so cool and some are a lot less verbose.
Hermes is a better coding tool IMO. I can't put my finger on why but it just feels better. Maybe being true yolo helps.
hahahaa
I'm rather scared of US models - if Anthropic was the only AI provider in the world, it's easy to see that common people would have no access at all. Thankfully there is OpenAI which compete 1:1 with Anthropic (at a slightly lower cost) but most importantly the Chinese models keep Anthropic, but also OpenAI in checks.
And I'm saying this as someone working for American companies.
comments (10)
This is extremely lopsided I'll have to resort to GLM 5.2/K3 to ensure that those security issues (hopefully) are resolved properly.
For OSS, this is one of the most counterintuitive experiences I have ever had. More than ever I'm convinced that open weight and open pipelines models are 100% critical for progress on the AI and societal fronts.
astrobiased
1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.
2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via model providers in the US ( either frontier or model hosts like fireworks.ai ) then please let me know your bank details so I can poke around.
ballon_monkey
Whatever the strategic picture is at the top, at the bottom of the market "weights you can download and run on hardware you already own" is the whole ballgame, and right now that's mostly Alibaba's to lose.
nmthornhill
The concept of “commodity” as defined above is a model, a simplified abstract representation of reality, but that does not match the reality perfectly (the map != the territory).
The author claims that a token isn't literally an ideal commodity, but neither is oil or wheat, many factors influence their real value (intrinsic properties, location, available storage at production, expected delivery date, etc.) so that no two gallons of oil in different contracts have the same price.
Is treating “tokens” as a commodity a worse model than treating oil this way? It depends who you ask! I'm pretty sure that a chemist working at a refinery would be more happy to see tokens being felt with like a commodity by his company than if they started viewing crude oil like one.
(Overall, there's way too much economism in that post, and way too few facts, and as a result the argument makes very little sense, the author basically wrote that both OpenAI and Anthropic are drowning in cash right now because compute scarcity means the price must be significantly higher than the marginal cost…)
stymaar
What is stopping China from gaining a majority market share, then, in terms of serving inference?
AI Sovereignty -- yes
Cybersecurity concerns -- yes
Latency -- no, unlike previous emerging IT workload types , inference does not have strong latency requirements. eg 1s of additional network latency doesn't matter to a 15 min, 10-turn agent session.
Cost -- ultimately this comes down to a nations ability to plug chips into warm shells. which forks into geopolitical / trade on the chips side and energy scalability and modularity on the warm-shell side. Even if you call geopolitical / trade a toss-up, China has the US beat HANDILY on the energy front, yearly they are deploying 10x power to their grid relative to the US, which is shooting itself in the foot at every possible moment.
IMHO chip tech will travel across borders, absent a breakthrough in analog inference, energy scalability will ultimately dominate.
nateburke
jke_kang
* Me, as an individual, because I might not be able to pay price hikes, because my revenue (salary) is much lower than what they want and I can't support my expenses via huge bank loans.
* Again, me as a new entrant to the industry, LLMs are basically pay-to-play games, again related to price hikes, new entrants might not be able to afford paying those prices 24/7 - which you need when learning new things.
* Any non-US company, US can block the models which can disrupt the whole business.
* Even some US companies, for example if you operate in EU and EU somewhat changes their mind and follow the ICC and require you to stop working with Netanyahu (war criminal as per ICC), then following laws in EU, might create trouble to your whole business.
throwaw12
Here is a quick example of how Chinese deepseeks agent works kn its underlying model) when asked a tough question
https://x.com/jinen83/status/2079406993979383902?s=46&t=D7hQ...
kinj28
Hermes is a better coding tool IMO. I can't put my finger on why but it just feels better. Maybe being true yolo helps.
hahahaa
And I'm saying this as someone working for American companies.
WinstonSmith84