Skip Navigation

Posts
20
Comments
116
Joined
3 wk. ago

  • Interesting that Microsoft is effectively running a portfolio strategy instead of betting on a single lab. Anthropic is already paying off on paper while OpenAI looks much more volatile. That alone suggests the AI race is far less settled than the headlines usually imply, even for the company funding both sides. And now the Chinese Open Weight AI models are coming onto the scene too, offering almost the same quality.

  • Pragmatic, but revealing. If Meta truly believed Llama would stay ahead, it would not be preparing for a future where competitors power its products. It also makes business sense for Meta because it already rents out compute capacity instead of using it for its own models: supporting multiple leading models could attract more customers to its infrastructure.

  • That’s a more realistic ask than hoping everyone slows down: If alignment methods can be made accessible to engineers without deep math, more people can stress test, critique and improve them. Knowledge spreads far more easily than voluntary restraint, especially when geopolitical incentives point the other way.

  • Interestingly, China doesn’t need this computing power, yet Kimi has now unveiled a competitive model all the same. I wonder how this will pan out?

  • So have they been getting better and better?

  • How much more effective have the large models become for you over the last three years? Do you think development might come to a halt in China, for example, if US providers were indeed to stop developing or releasing them?

  • Absolutely. At the very least, everything of relevance, that is, anything that has been catalogued in libraries, for example, should be almost entirely digitised. We may well find out soon whether AI companies can still uncover anything of relevance amongst the other books, i.e. those that have not been widely published or catalogued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning

  • True. I suppose I’m being a bit too hopeful there.

  • To be honest, what surprises me most of all is that, after three decades of intensive digitisation of analogue media, there are still purely analogue copies in existence at all!? In that respect, I see this more as a benefit than a threat, as some people here are suggesting.

  • Hehe… 🤣

  • Exactly. In my view, this serves no other purpose than to avoid having to engage with an unpopular opinion. It’s a cheap way of dressing up a personal attack as a supposed argument.

  • Reposted in the correct thread...

  • It’s not about who deserves to win, it’s about incentives. If one side unilaterally slows development while others don’t, the likely outcome is a shift in technological leadership, not a slower pace overall. Whether that’s the US, China, or anyone else is a separate political question from whether voluntary restraint is an effective strategy.

  • »Slow down AI« sounds noble until you ask who actually slows down: Democracies and companies that comply simply hand the advantage to rivals that don’t. History suggests voluntary technological restraint rarely wins against geopolitical competition. The race doesn’t stop: it just changes leaders.

  • A $250 billion backstop is an extraordinary amount of financial engineering for an industry that’s supposed to be the next industrial revolution: If AI demand is as inevitable as claimed, why does every new data centre seem to require increasingly creative financing and ever larger guarantees?

  • Ever since facts have been replaced by ideologies, the obvious has increasingly become a mystery.

  • Funny how »open is dangerous« only became the dominant narrative once Chinese models caught up: If your competitive moat depends on governments blocking free alternatives instead of building better products, maybe your moat isn’t technology at all.