[pseudony]

Relevant, I would definitely be sleeping uneasy if I was at “Open”AI.

Some insist that Chinese models are a few generations behind, how many probably depends more on patriotism rather than fact.

Those people typically also insist that Chinese models are just distillations and often neglect to see how many of these companies contribute to the theory of designing efficient and capable models. It is somehow thought that they will always trail US models.

Well. i would say look at recent history. China worked up the ladder of manufacturing from simple, bad stuff to highly complex things - exactly what westerners then claimed they’d never be able to. Then as that was conquered, westerners comforted themselves by insisting that China could copy, but trail-blazing would always still be our thing. Well, Baidu and Alibaba face scaling issues few western companies do and BYD seems to match Tesla or VW just fine.

I am unsure why anyone would think US models are destined to remain in the lead forever.

At “best”, I see a fragmented world where each major region (yes also Europe) will eventually have their own models - exactly because no one wants to give any competitive power a chokehold over their society. But beyond that, models will largely be so good that this “generation”/universal superiority idea becomes completely obsolete.

[Yizahi]

Thing is, China has the same problems as OAI. Just looks at these two startups, they are one of the first LLM corpos where we have some actual numbers from accounting and not BS from marketing department or Sam's xitter. The situation looks dire.

https://imgshare.cc/wzw6jzm5

[maxglute]

> China has the same problems as OAI

PRC pureplay AI only companies has same problems as openAI, that's not the same as huge tech companies like Baidu or Alibaba or Tencent (i.e. Google/Microsoft tier) who can afford to lose money on AI. And ultimately they are also not sinking 100s of billions in capex, they can't even if they tried due to sanctions. Their financial exposure is magnitude less, i.e. it matters if you're losing 500m a year vs 5 billion per year especially as systemic economic contagion risk - PRC and US bubble sizes as % of economy not the same.

[glimshe]

A few months ago we were hearing that it was game over because of Deepseek. Today it has a mind share close to zero on the developed world. Being 90% as good (which Deepseek isn't) doesn't cut it...

US models might not be "destined" to stay in the lead, but I see no reason to believe that won't at the moment.