We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps.
If it wasn't for China, I would probably have to spend $100/mo on AI instead of $10 like I do currently while using DeepSeek and MiMo (opencode Go plan).
And while I could do so comfortably, I feel for those who can't. It must feel incredibly isolating to only watch others have access to expensive models to leverage their careers.
I hope SoTA AI becomes an universal right because it will contribute to too much income disparity otherwise.
I have unlimited tokens at work than i go home what do i do? Spend 200$ per month? No def not.
When Anthropic increased the limits for their 20$ plan, i started again coding with it on a private project and it was fun and i did a lot in that 4 weeks.
Not sure what I read, but sounded like a lunch meeting description; felt void of actual information, with the restaurant replaced by the office. I am in China and can tell it is either Kimi, DeepSeek or Claude (proxied or actually deepseek/fake). The bigger push for the general public died down a lot since last year; kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.
> kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.
in the early 2000s in california universities you'd get marked down for citing wikipedia. so the good souls told everyone "see the number in brackets[2] after what you're trying to cite the article for? just click that then click the archive.org or whatever link there, then cite that."
Now? i think wiki is considered a valid source? or has it flopped back to being "unreliable"?
It's not that it's unreliable, it's just lazy research. Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is a tertiary source, but ideally your essay should be a mix of primary and secondary sources, while Wikipedia discourages original research and prefers only secondary sources. Wikipedia itself recommends against citing it as research[0] for this reason.
I remember reading a similar tweet explaining DeepSeek breaks the insane Chinese work culture. They are against 996 and brutally grinding employees. They feel like a big family and that is their hedge against poaching by Chinese Big Tech with bigger salaries. Liang Wenfeng seems to be the only AI CEO down to earth. I want to believe.
Why would the agent send the results of the query "Show me my recent transactions" to LLM? This pretty deterministic results which involve no LLM interpretation or decision making.
"National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration."
China is probably more capitalist in many respects than the west these days. AI, robotics and automation is a way to push into the future. In the west we have endless researchers stuck in a psychosis that they are talking to a sentient being.
The CCP knows, whatever the heck this technology will bring with itself, the current power dynamic inside of the country is on their side, and AI will solidify it.
I hypothesize that, rather than slowly having it disperse in society and allow people to harness it in ways they don't want, they might as well accelerate everything until AI becomes the totalitarian swiss knife - which they can make use of in the best way of course.
I don't really see how open weights models further what you're talking about.
It's trivial for me to download one of their models and run it on my Spark, and there's all sorts of ways to strip out their Tiananmen-denialism or whatever.
If/when the memory price crunch dissipates, even more so. And so far it's only China I see as making moves to increase production capacity on memory, too.
If anything the centralization of capital into US-based Anthropic and OpenAI is far more terrifying from the perspective you're outlining.
Altman used to talk about making a religion and Dario Amodei constantly talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders including the Vatican.
> It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so. [1]
I would argue the US providers have gone full tilt into sales culture with respect to AI. Anything is said on a whim to redirect attention back from whomever is in the limelight. Initially I thought Anthropic was more pragmatic, but the constant release cycles of things that don't exist for most people, the gatekeeping, the statements made by Dario, it's all a part of large brand toxic sales and marketing.
From the notes this part sat with me as the real difference:
> As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment. National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration.
Meanwhile... In the fantasy land over here in the US we're constantly being told that it's "coming", "almost here", "too powerful for us to give you access to", "of national security importance!". Or... FUD.
And while there may be trace amounts of truth in those overzealous statements we haven't seen a significant improvement in much outside of software development comparative to the spend and environmental impact.
"Their Head of Infrastructure, in particular, was young; maybe 30 years old and apparently one of the best AI buildout and energy experts in the country"
What's wrong with distillation? Wasn't GPT a distillation of the world's internet? That's how technology levels proceed, by recursively consuming the previous ones.
It's absolutely mind boggling to see claims of model distillation being theft, a class of attack, and all sorts of claims all the while Meta is in court for copyright violation, anthropic has had to settle a case with authors. With distillation "attacks" at least they paid API fees.
As you rightly point out, that's not a great argument.
2) China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent.
I think that makes sense. If they only catch up to the frontier through distillation then 1) Their model will never be as good as the model they are distilling from. 2) They will never reach the frontier - they need someone else to do it first.
You're correct and I shouldn't have used the word competent. Perhaps "and is therefore not elite enough to be state of the art"?
I also have a soft spot for deepseek because they write such readable papers. I don't have a degree in anything but with a little work I can understand their papers - which I really appreciate.
But I still think my point stands - if you need distillation you won't be SOTA
Both. Both are good. Anyway this shows how full of shit Anthropic are - if Mythos was so advanced as they claim - distillation attacks just wouldn't work.
From the notes, they seem humble and empathic.
We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps.
If it wasn't for China, I would probably have to spend $100/mo on AI instead of $10 like I do currently while using DeepSeek and MiMo (opencode Go plan).
And while I could do so comfortably, I feel for those who can't. It must feel incredibly isolating to only watch others have access to expensive models to leverage their careers.
I hope SoTA AI becomes an universal right because it will contribute to too much income disparity otherwise.
> We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps.
The second they get a hold of the market, Chinese Big Tech will be as bad or worse than US Big Tech.
We're lucky to have DeepSeek.
In every market China dominates, Chinese products are still inexpensive. Solar panels, batteries, EVs, drones,..
I see this problem already for me.
I have unlimited tokens at work than i go home what do i do? Spend 200$ per month? No def not.
When Anthropic increased the limits for their 20$ plan, i started again coding with it on a private project and it was fun and i did a lot in that 4 weeks.
Yep. After yesterday's moves around "Fable 5" even twice as much.
We've had a taste, and damned if I'm going to have the "means of production" snatched from me already?
approximately how many months/years until there are "illegal models"?
Post appears to have been removed, I caught a copy of it: https://pastebin.com/rcAqEFG1
I assume it will get reposted at some point.
Not sure what I read, but sounded like a lunch meeting description; felt void of actual information, with the restaurant replaced by the office. I am in China and can tell it is either Kimi, DeepSeek or Claude (proxied or actually deepseek/fake). The bigger push for the general public died down a lot since last year; kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.
> kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.
in the early 2000s in california universities you'd get marked down for citing wikipedia. so the good souls told everyone "see the number in brackets[2] after what you're trying to cite the article for? just click that then click the archive.org or whatever link there, then cite that."
Now? i think wiki is considered a valid source? or has it flopped back to being "unreliable"?
It's not that it's unreliable, it's just lazy research. Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is a tertiary source, but ideally your essay should be a mix of primary and secondary sources, while Wikipedia discourages original research and prefers only secondary sources. Wikipedia itself recommends against citing it as research[0] for this reason.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
It’s a puff piece written by someone who didn’t know (or didn’t care) they were being managed.
"Like this, read my blog" — said DeepSeek
I remember reading a similar tweet explaining DeepSeek breaks the insane Chinese work culture. They are against 996 and brutally grinding employees. They feel like a big family and that is their hedge against poaching by Chinese Big Tech with bigger salaries. Liang Wenfeng seems to be the only AI CEO down to earth. I want to believe.
Why would the agent send the results of the query "Show me my recent transactions" to LLM? This pretty deterministic results which involve no LLM interpretation or decision making.
It seems the OP has removed the tweet somehow.
"As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment."
This is a refreshing perspective.
"National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration."
Further on. Refreshing indeed.
China is probably more capitalist in many respects than the west these days. AI, robotics and automation is a way to push into the future. In the west we have endless researchers stuck in a psychosis that they are talking to a sentient being.
The CCP knows, whatever the heck this technology will bring with itself, the current power dynamic inside of the country is on their side, and AI will solidify it.
I hypothesize that, rather than slowly having it disperse in society and allow people to harness it in ways they don't want, they might as well accelerate everything until AI becomes the totalitarian swiss knife - which they can make use of in the best way of course.
Let's see what will happen.
I don't really see how open weights models further what you're talking about.
It's trivial for me to download one of their models and run it on my Spark, and there's all sorts of ways to strip out their Tiananmen-denialism or whatever.
If/when the memory price crunch dissipates, even more so. And so far it's only China I see as making moves to increase production capacity on memory, too.
If anything the centralization of capital into US-based Anthropic and OpenAI is far more terrifying from the perspective you're outlining.
Especially here on HN, where AI anxiety (especially amongst those that are really nervous that it needs to succeed) is very, very tiresome.
https://xcancel.com/NikoMcCarty/status/2064686557400100884
US AI is almost a religious cult. It's devastating that they are treating it as a petty commodity
Altman used to talk about making a religion and Dario Amodei constantly talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders including the Vatican.
> It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so. [1]
[1] https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people
I would argue the US providers have gone full tilt into sales culture with respect to AI. Anything is said on a whim to redirect attention back from whomever is in the limelight. Initially I thought Anthropic was more pragmatic, but the constant release cycles of things that don't exist for most people, the gatekeeping, the statements made by Dario, it's all a part of large brand toxic sales and marketing.
From the notes this part sat with me as the real difference:
> As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment. National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration.
Meanwhile... In the fantasy land over here in the US we're constantly being told that it's "coming", "almost here", "too powerful for us to give you access to", "of national security importance!". Or... FUD.
And while there may be trace amounts of truth in those overzealous statements we haven't seen a significant improvement in much outside of software development comparative to the spend and environmental impact.
"Their Head of Infrastructure, in particular, was young; maybe 30 years old and apparently one of the best AI buildout and energy experts in the country"
Expert in buildout or expert in distillation?
What's wrong with distillation? Wasn't GPT a distillation of the world's internet? That's how technology levels proceed, by recursively consuming the previous ones.
It's absolutely mind boggling to see claims of model distillation being theft, a class of attack, and all sorts of claims all the while Meta is in court for copyright violation, anthropic has had to settle a case with authors. With distillation "attacks" at least they paid API fees.
Anthropic had to settle with authors because they literally pirated books! Their behavior regarding distillation is genuinely beyond parody.
There are 2 things worth separating.
1) China distills and is therefore morally bad.
As you rightly point out, that's not a great argument.
2) China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent.
I think that makes sense. If they only catch up to the frontier through distillation then 1) Their model will never be as good as the model they are distilling from. 2) They will never reach the frontier - they need someone else to do it first.
This is literally a repeat of the whole “China only make low quality cheap stuff” argument.
“All they do is copy.”
And now, oops they are world leaders in EVs, batteries, solar, drones, just to name a few on the biggest consumer facing things.
>2) China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent.
I think deepseek at least has done enough innovative work that you could grant them a baseline of competency.
In general, there are enough papers coming out of China to suggest that there are quite a few people there who know what they are doing.
You're correct and I shouldn't have used the word competent. Perhaps "and is therefore not elite enough to be state of the art"?
I also have a soft spot for deepseek because they write such readable papers. I don't have a degree in anything but with a little work I can understand their papers - which I really appreciate.
But I still think my point stands - if you need distillation you won't be SOTA
> China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent.
I heard that argument more than one year ago, when chain of thought and reasoning cycles started to be hudden to protect against distillation.
Meanwhile, models as DeepSeek and MiMo are nothing short of excellent nowadays.
Ever since I switched away from OpenAI to DeepSeek I never felt the need to go back.
Tell me, where did OpenAI and Anthropic got their training data? From public sources using legitimate means? Don't make me laugh.
Blaming the head of infrastructure for distillation doesn't make sense to me.
Both. Both are good. Anyway this shows how full of shit Anthropic are - if Mythos was so advanced as they claim - distillation attacks just wouldn't work.