Oh so you guys didn’t give a fuck about China’s superior railway system, their better electric cars, and their other areas where they have on par, or superior tech than we do. But when they have better AI you guys want the country to bend over and get fist fucked.
Get the fuck out of here.
But when they have better AI you guys want the country to bend over and get fist fucked.
It’s legit infuriating to see the Chinese economy investing in bluesky R&D, which has the long term benefit of better software, cheaper hardware, and more useful technology. All while American politicians insist “We need to build more hand cranks and charcoal fire pits to power our billionaire sponsored CSAM engines!”
All this while US Tech Companies turn increasingly to religious hacks to launder their shitty apps and platforms.
Yep we’re a nation that’s captured by venture capitalists and they are draining the country dry.
The rest of the world should not do business with these vultures.
We don’t care about better EVs, we will protect our buggy whip industry at all costs to our own consumers
Then they will cry for a bailout when they inevitably fail. Again.
Fucking vultures!
Probably, yeah. I wouldn’t put it past them.
Release the files!
As an aside, these types love to see ML development as a money problem: the more you throw at it, the more results you get.
That’s not how it’s been working in practice, though.
More resource constrained companies have gotten thrifty or creative. They’re forced to be efficient and realistic, and to look at interesting papers to fold into their stuff.
At the other extreme, there’s mounting anecdotes that Meta, XAI, and maybe others are spending many man hours simply trying to scale across huge clusters, or even giving GPUs “busywork” to meet resource utilization contracts. That they’re using old architectures. And even if that’s overblown, their leaders are making terrible decisions, with nutty machinations, and aren’t getting punished for it because they have too much money.
It’s also fueling literal sociopaths like Altman as they do their best to snuff out competition.
All this capital is poisoning the AI space in the US. And it’s going to the wrong places.
Regardless of how everyone feels about “AI,” I believe most of the US is going to fall behind because of this. Except maybe Google.
Counterpoint, America has essentially brute-forced its way into every major technical advancement it has made in the past 100 years.
Last game-breaking invention that didn’t adhere to this was probably out of the industrial revolution.
Atomic bomb? Throw some money at it.
Computers/Transistors? Throw some money at it.
Space race (and everything from it)? Throw some money at it.
Everything to ever come out of Bell Labs? Throw some money at it.
Honestly Bell is a unique case in industry monopolies. They put tons into R&D despite having practically 0 competition.
Point is, it’s worked well for us so far, and nobody seems to realize that the bulk of America’s success in the past 100 years was actually due to pure blind luck because the entire rest of the northern hemisphere was rebuilding from war. Why change now?
Remember when transistors were invented, and the rest of the world shrugged and said “we lost the race” and then never invented them and still plow fields by horse and candlelight?
Of course not.
Framing this as a race introduces the idea that if you don’t win you’re fucked. As if time stops. It’s a bad metaphor and it only serves to undermine rational thinking. It’s designed to convince people they need to sacrifice something. Datacenters spiked your electricity bill? That’s ok because we have to win.
The space race is pretty similar. Also worth pointing out that by every metric besides man foot+moon, the USSR won. First suborbital flight? Orbital? Satellite? Animal in space? Man in space? Moon flyby? Moon landing? USSR. Did the USA quit? Did it matter?
You can throw money at whatever you want. Framing it as a race is nonsense designed to convince people to work against thier own interests so someone else can get rich.
I think the “race” part of it is somewhat necessary as long as we have a world that revolves around a handful of economic powerhouse nation-states.
It’s a conditional requirement of capitalism. If we were unified in working towards the advancement of humanity as a whole, money be damned…sure, that’d be great. Got a little work to do before we’re there, though. In the meantime, we’re competing towards pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. And yeah, that will always mean that the individual loses out, because dollars gotta come from somewhere.
But as long as we have a capitalistic society, we are always going to be at odds with the competition, i.e. China, which means no cooperation.
Furthermore, they seem to be way better at not giving a fuck about stealing IP than we are…if we make something, they clone it and make it cheap, but that never, ever happens in reverse.
Partly because they are a bit better equipped at this point for obtaining raw materials (to put it lightly) and they have a much less expensive labor force (to put it lightly).
China is where it is very explicitly because it spent a lot of time not trying to win any race. They’re still not trying to win it.
It’s massively more cost effective to fast follow in the wake of whomever is breaking new ground. Orders of magnitude.
China has been strategically losing races. Over and over. They understand there is no value in getting there first if you can be there 6 months later cheaper.
The race is made up. It’s an excuse to fuck YOU. YOU.
That’s fair, but in all those cases I think money was flowing to the right engineers, and the resources they need.
That’s not what’s happening now.
Yes, to be competitive, keeping our people (checks notes) GREAT, we need to access the very money that they already don’t have enough of to live safely in later life.
Thats why NASDAQ recently updated rules to allow faster entry into index funds. SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI all will get into index funds and 401k’s in 15 days from their IPO now, which means their price collapse will use our retirement accounts as a cushion. Which is pretty on-par for these people.
Can’t wait for every index to have spacex and other ai companies so the retirement funds I can’t change the investments for without taking a massive tax hit can have their value diverted into the pockets of the richest men in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJeFrqBJF6E
Carlin was only 2 decades early
Yeah, he was right on the money. Too bad he was a night club comedian and not a senator with a strong ethical foundation and a chip on his shoulder.
AI is a fascist scam.
China wins
Paging Luigi…
The thing is the West and China are not really using AI in the same way so saying we are in a race with them is incorrect and using old Cold War tactics to scare the West into spending more money on this technology.
Example of the differences:
The US and China are taking very different paths in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence. In the US, innovation has largely focused on large language models (LLMs) and the virtual world, resulting in chatbots, image generators, and digital assistants like ChatGPT and Copilot. These tools have captured the imagination of both consumers and investors, but questions are now emerging about their real economic value. A recent MIT study, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, found that while more than 80% of organizations are experimenting with generative AI, only about 5% of pilots are delivering measurable value. Most remain stuck in early phases, hindered by fragile workflows, poor integration, and a lack of systemic readiness. Meanwhile, informal ‘shadow AI’ usage, that is employees using tools outside official channels, has exploded, thereby creating a mismatch between official adoption and actual productivity gains.
By contrast, China’s approach to AI is more grounded in real-world applications. As Chinese economist Andy Xie recently explained on Tegenlicht, AI development in China is focused on practical domains such as mining, electric vehicles, and industrial efficiency. Unlike the high-cost, high-hype American model, China’s AI strategy emphasizes low-cost, scalable technology that delivers tangible utility. This makes it particularly attractive to the Global South, where cost and accessibility often outweigh cutting-edge innovation. A striking example is DeepSeek, a Chinese open-source chatbot that was developed with limited funding and no ties to elite academic institutions. Despite this, it is 10× more energy-efficient than OpenAI’s models and is already being integrated into consumer products like cars.
https://freedomlab.com/posts/the-ai-narrative-divide-between-the-us-and-china
Oh boy, when dedolarization comes, it’s going to hit the US like a wall of radioactive bricks.
One of the ways the Soviets lost the cold war was that the USSR was just straight up a smaller country than the US. The US just had more resources to throw at whatever dick measuring contest they decided to engage in.
With the new cold war with China that shoe is on the other foot.
Its already here more or less
All that money couldn’t pay for a better human suit?
Larry Fink is just another evil out of touch billionaire.
Off to the guillotine and nationalize his assets!
He deserves to be stripped of his riches and dropped in a desert somewhere
But China isn’t spending trillions on their AI…
Why do we need to spend trillions to stay ahead of someone who is only spending billions? Might be worth looking into whatever leak in the system is extracting so much money we need to spend 1000x what our competitors are spending just to keep up. We could start by looking at people who have hundreds of billions of dollars at the heads of the AI companies, looks like a few hundred billions might have slipped into their wallets by accident. I’m sure they’ll be happy to give it back to the people.
Because China has taken the open source route with their AI and are allowing people from all over to use/contribute to their models. You cannot outspend what they are getting for free, and while our companies compete with one another to be the one true AI company, China’s companies/citizens are cooperating with one another to build their AI.
They will win the AI war simply by not playing the capitalism game, all while undermining the enormous investment the US has made into our AIs.
Uh that’s not how this works. They’re not open source, they’re open weight. Well, the smaller distillations are. The big ones are still closed. And it takes a bunch of compute to train them, but they’ve learned to be thriftier since they don’t have access to nearly as much parallel compute as the American companies right now. The models also tend to trail in performance. Takes a lot less to compete for third place than first.
DeepSeek is one of if not the most popular Chinese AI and is open source and requires a small amount of computing compared to others. Its used in numerous Chinese car brands, smart phones, and even government services throughout China.
China isn’t competing for Third they are leading the world in AI development and have already integrated it in many areas.
Again, at the very least, no, they’re not open source. Open-weights means anyone can download, use, and tinker with them a bit, but there is no access to their code, training data, or process.
It’s just as limiting as closed source software with some modding allowed, but not as limiting as an online-api-only model, as many of the most powerful modern models are.
There are no heroes in the Global Powers’ race. The USA is a comically cartoonish villain in real life, yes, but all the biggest Chinese data centres for all that training, are still built in poor areas (Inner Mongolia and the bullshit that China has apparently inflicted on them), and still fucking over those who live there.
It’s abuse all the way down.
You mean all of this code that is clearly on their github: https://github.com/deepseek-ai? They release both their model weights as well as the source code for their AI. You can literally take what they have provided to create your own LLM if you would like to and get a good understanding of their AI. Sure you can’t see the training data but that would be like putting the entirety of the internet in a github repo and just isn’t feasible, but you can contribute your own training data to a local setup of deepseek and shape it in a way you want to.
You’re talking like you know what you’re talking about, but you clearly are guessing. Knock it off. Don’t mask conjecture as fact.
The training data is as important as the source code here to replicate the end result. The weights are more like a binary distribution. You can run the model and you can technically edit it just like you can technically edit a binary file.
They also only release some libraries and tools for running the model if you have a set of weights (which they do graciously provide), but they do NOT release the source code for their training pipeline itself. That’s up to you to reverse engineer from the whitepapers. Right now even if you had the exact training data and the compute available, you could not train your own Deepseek V3.2, let alone V4.
If people on Lemmy can’t understand this I have no hope for the average person.
training data is as important as the source code here to replicate the end result
this is the nature of this flame war. Perfect replication of the end result, which is extremely opaque in how it works, is not nearly as important as the weights, that you can post train for any domain specific/general improvement with any other dataset. Which is how the authors would improve/change the weights further as well.
Haven’t they clearly documented how they did it and what they used so that anyone can replicate it? Anyone with the compute power, which of course few have. But universities could do it.
So how is it not open source in this specific domain of problems? What would a LLM model need to do to be open source then? Duplicate the whole training dataset in a big zipfile for you to download?
From what I understand you could even replicate deepseek by replacing the “cold start” with latest deepseek instead.
Haven’t they clearly documented how they did it and what they used so that anyone can replicate it?
They don’t put up the actual code for their training pipeline though. It’s more of a “if you have enough engineers, you can do this too” whitepaper, because they wouldn’t want any rando training their own model.
Right now, even if you had the exact training set (which is a CRUCIAL part of an LLM and you can NOT replicate it without it), you couldn’t rebuild the thing exactly, you’d need to do a whole lot of extra work.
So how is it not open source in this specific domain of problems?
You could call all proprietary software open source then. The UI and user manual describe what it does, you can do your own engineering to duplicate the functionality.
Why even have this discussion? Self-learning algorithms appeared more than ten years ago. AI is being used very effectively in countless areas.
The idea that there is some sort of prize waiting for whomever gets the most computing power, is highly dubious.
Why is this being downvoted? It’s factually true.
I’d love actual open source training somehow. But at the moment I don’t think an asynchronous training mechanism that would enable this exists, given that running the flagship models on even a small batch of data requires massive compute power.
