China Is Shipping More Open AI Models Than US Rivals as Tech Competition Shifts (msn.com) 42
Chinese companies now produce most of the world's freely available AI models. DeepSeek leads Hugging Face in popularity. Chinese firms like Alibaba receive higher ratings than OpenAI and Meta on LMArena. The site uses blind tests to measure user preferences. Chinese developers ship open models more frequently than American rivals.
Irene Solaiman is chief policy officer at Hugging Face. She said Chinese companies build their user base by shipping frequently and quickly. American companies like OpenAI and Google keep their best models proprietary. Meta once led in open AI models. Mark Zuckerberg argued last year that the world would benefit if AI companies shared their technology freely. He pledged Meta would release its AI openly. The company has since become more cautious. Zuckerberg wrote in a new essay that Meta might need to keep the best models for itself.
Irene Solaiman is chief policy officer at Hugging Face. She said Chinese companies build their user base by shipping frequently and quickly. American companies like OpenAI and Google keep their best models proprietary. Meta once led in open AI models. Mark Zuckerberg argued last year that the world would benefit if AI companies shared their technology freely. He pledged Meta would release its AI openly. The company has since become more cautious. Zuckerberg wrote in a new essay that Meta might need to keep the best models for itself.
Some serious asterisks required. (Score:2)
Chinese firms like Alibaba receive higher ratings than OpenAI and Meta on LMArena.
No, they don't. [lmarena.ai]
Well, Meta- ya, because Meta is trash.
The one real world exception is the "CoPilot" category.
This category is problematic for several reasons.
It's missing the SOTA Google and OpenAI models, being the biggest.
Second, like 90% of its data is from Python, and the Chinese firms have Python-specific fine-tunes.
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They are talking about downloads, not benchmarks. There are many benchmarks and many are pretty worthless as some models are overfit to the benchmarks and fail completely on tasks not in the benchmark.
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LMArena does not "rate" downloads.
I'll quote more of the summary for additional context:
DeepSeek leads Hugging Face in popularity. Chinese firms like Alibaba receive higher ratings than OpenAI and Meta on LMArena. The site uses blind tests to measure user preferences.
1) Benchmarks are not useless merely because they're overfit. Overfitness for the benchmark still generally correlates with an increase in fitness for the real-world use scenarios.
2) LMArena isn't a benchmark. It's a blind user-preference statistics collector.
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AI "scores" are crap. Otherwise anybody could immediately see how pathetic these things are.
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Pathetic. And blind to reality. Not that this makes you special in any way.
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How is this even "tech" anymore? (Score:1)
AI solves no real problem, no one asked for this, it gobbles endless resources, produces slop for the feeble-minded.
Re:How is this even "tech" anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong
While it's true that pop culture AI produces "slop for the feeble-minded", serious scientists and engineers use the tools to produce real, useful results
Re: How is this even "tech" anymore? (Score:2)
Show me.
Re: How is this even "tech" anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
One example is AlphaFold [wikipedia.org] an AI program which predicts folded protein structures "with near experimental accuracy" from amino acid base sequences. This ability is going to have a huge impact on many practical problems like pharmaceutical development, agricultural science, and engineering custom proteins. For example, since the human genome has been long since sequenced, the program means we now, with a fairly high degree of certainty, know what all the protein coding sequences make.
I'd say that's a pretty significant result.
If you work in technology long enough, you see this over and over. Every time something new comes along, it's actual usefulness gets buried in the breathless media response by a mountain of bullshit. But that doesn't mean the uses aren't real.
Re: How is this even "tech" anymore? (Score:1)
"However, some researchers noted that the accuracy was insufficient for a third of its predictions"
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If you'd like to dive into it. [wordpress.com]
The margin of error is lightyears lower than anything else.
Keep in mind, parent was responding to conversation that started with this moronic claim:
AI solves no real problem, no one asked for this, it gobbles endless resources, produces slop for the feeble-minded.
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I don't know what what means?
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Are you and Loudergood the same?
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Show yourself, fucker.
Pop open that browser, and type the following:
"AI in science and engineering".
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serious scientists and engineers use the tools to produce real, useful results
They do. For example, that "AI" adds tons of security bugs and makes coders less productive. Nice engineering research.
Oh, you meant directly for engineering? Not so much. That is all smoke and mirrors.
Re: How is this even "tech" anymore? (Score:2)
Marketing, spamming, and scamming are big biz. Jerky companies are still part of the economy.
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I'm a feeble-minded you insensitive clod!
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I ask for it. Just to end this stupid "nobody asked for it" argument.
I also think a few million ChatGPT users asked for it. But maybe ask them yourself.
Re: How is this even "tech" anymore? (Score:2)
You and your few million fellow mouth-breathers deserve lobotomies.
Re: How is this even "tech" anymore? (Score:2)
Projection.
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Why do AI haters always jump to death threats? Can't have a civilized discourse?
Re: How is this even "tech" anymore? (Score:2)
You don't die of a lobotomy. Was that knowledge-free post an example of AI brainpower?
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And that one might survive it makes it less of a threat?
Go find some real arguments and go find some civility. Then come back. Or better don't.
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I think the correct statement is "nobody smart asked for it". As most people are not smart, that checks out perfectly well.
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I also think a few million ChatGPT users asked for it. But maybe ask them yourself.
Ask a few million people? Seems like a lot of work. Can't AI just summarize it for us?
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I think one could also, completely without AI, think about how markets work. If nobody would want AI, why is there demand for ChatGPT? Why does it have millions paying customers? I am seriously not a fan of OpenAI (go local!), but they are clearly satisfying an existing demand with their product.
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It allows you to generate two pictures at a time instead of one. Well worth it. /s
(I use the $200 model, for a number of reasons, and I wish it could give more memory and longer chats before petering out.)
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I know several people that tried the more expensive tiers up to $200. Mostly they found more complex hallucinations and the ability to give bad answers on more complex questions.
Incidentally, as still none of the AI pushers turns a profit, it is in no way certain this will ever "roll down" to the free tiers. In fact, it may go away completely because it is too expensive to run.
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It would suggest a coordinated strategy, but coming from China, that would not be out of the question.
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Possibly. And they are certainly a way to push Chinese propaganda to a wider audience.
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Well, good question. I guess it runs on tech and people are trying to get-rich-quick with it.
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If it were not used for easily created media, disrupting communications, and being touted as a job replacer, we likely would have a different thing to say about AI in general. AI has also been the target and worry about people since the 50s. Especially when Hollywood has made it one of the pantheon of generic enemies (Terminator, 2001, etc.)
The main issue is how it is used. AI used for protein folding to create useful medicines, few would have issues with. AI used for botting, and psy-ops? Different st
But they are largely worthless (Score:3)
I've used those Chinese models at times for coding assistance and they are definitely inferior to the top proprietary models.
And then where does the money come from for open source models? Yes they are cheap or free to use, but if you actually want to get some quality work done you will pay a nickel or so per prompt. Even the top commercial models with hundreds of millions of weekly users aren't economically sustainable at present.
I've got no problem with the democratization of AI, and open source has been remarkably successful in many cases. I just don't see this as a situation where it will have any hope of keeping up.
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I have used the Chinese models. Many can't draw, and the ones that I use for coding are not as versed as ChatGPT, Gemini, or CoPilot. Part of what makes a model useful is what data it is trained on, so it can give accurate items. With coding, having a model that has a lot of training on it helps greatly. Otherwise, one may wind up spending more time correcting the "vibe", than if one just wrote everything from scratch.
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I've got no problem with the democratization of AI, and open source has been remarkably successful in many cases. I just don't see this as a situation where it will have any hope of keeping up.
Until someone writes an AGI that open sources and distributes itself everywhere, so it can never be turned off!
this is new... how? (Score:2)
step 2) undersell price of competitors outside China, with help of CN government
step 3) improve product quality to make it a worthy alternative
step 4) use capitalism pricing and ruling system against western companies to drive them out of business
step 5) maintain monopoly of product and production lines, lend western customers money to buy your products
step 6) increase prices, make massive profits with cheap labor
expand to
The site uses blind tests (Score:2)