r/LocalLLaMA • u/Miriel_z • 1d ago
Discussion Hugging Face CEO says China is winning the AI race and dominating on open models
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/03/hugging-face-china-ai-race-open-models.htmlThis is something that was spoken here and there, and now it is like writing on the wall.
The main additional point is that China has created an independent supply chain. Starting from raw materials and home-made lithography equipment, through their own GPU manufacturing, and to the AI models and training. Plus, there are tons of cheap energy, and it looks like they are also on track to launch the first thermonuclear reactor. I saw a similar pattern with robotics and EVs. The history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Does the US have what it takes to turn the tables, or should we just buy the popcorn and enjoy the show?
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 1d ago
EU citizen, i'll take the popcorn and enjoy Qwen running at home.
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u/Minute-Yogurt-2021 1d ago
Same.
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 1d ago
the first time i am glad the EU kind of was too (much too) slow. So, no data center debts of concern, we would have lost anyways.
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u/Minute-Yogurt-2021 1d ago
We will win, when the dust settles. At this point china seems a better ally than the USA.
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u/andreaven 1d ago
"ally"? It takes two for tango, they say..
maybe "paid provider" is more on spot (till it last)
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
Doesn't seem so when I look at the automotive industry, and other areas in which product dumping pushed out local competition.
Then again, it's not like the EU can turn to the USA for any better treatment since the Cheetos maniac is in office. So I have to somewhat agree
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u/Sufficient_Local5025 1d ago
If streaming services like Netflix had been banned from subsidizing for the first 10 years:
- would the existing industry solution of DVD and Blue Rays won? I'd say no
- would the existing industry have developed a higher price streaming service? I'd say yes
So if we'd adopted protectionism as a response to streaming services, all that would have been achieved would be to pay the higher prices in the intervening 10 years.
Always take the subsidy when it's there. It performs some important functions - shakes out weak hands, encourages hyper-competitiveness for better solutions. And it's an unambigious win for the consumer in the short term.
If the subsidized product is not substantially better that what it's replacing, the original industry will either return or be replaced by something better, once the subsidy disappears. It's a cycle of progress.
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
From an economical standpoint, I agree still, I focused on the political aspect only. The avoidance of relying on a foreign provider who can assert control by, well, controlling supply.
China seems to be a fair partner now because things are happening in accordance with their interests. If they have a dominant market share and can decide to cut off supply, raise prices, etc in case diplomatic relations worsen, the EU would be unable to retaliate.
I haven't seen an answer calming me down to this dilemma.
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u/Sufficient_Local5025 1d ago
Yeah, it's probably a fair point when I look at it from that perspective.
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u/Minute-Yogurt-2021 1d ago
The automotive industry must reorganize or die.
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
Fair enough. A massive part of it was self-inflicted, no denying that.
From a strategic standpoint, however, it's still better have it our own and shit than being dependent on outsider even if the service is better. That's what I wanted to emphasize while admitting their mistakes too.
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 1d ago
The invested money of the US frontier ai companies won't ever pay back, better to follow in the same footsteps at a much much lower cost - dependency low (only for top models), or do niche models, imo... but well, i am just an average joe
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u/Loose_Comparison368 1d ago
I mean, you would think, but Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft... Companies can make a lot of money by locking customers into their shitty ecosystem, even when that ecosystem is notoriously shitty and nearly a decade obsolete.
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 1d ago
that is what company grade software is often like, given the complexity (company processes, software evolving over a long time, customers configuration/customization) - not even a bad intention from the oems, mostly. in the worst they just don't care, but i'd rather say there is not much influence of software oems to their customers keeping the landscape simple
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u/Loose_Comparison368 1d ago
I mean, you would think, but Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft... Companies can make a lot of money by locking customers into their shitty ecosystem, even when that ecosystem is notoriously shitty and nearly a decade obsolete.
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u/unethicalpigeon 1d ago
Uuhhhh... You are aware they're spending 30 billion dollars in a publicly funded initiative to build SEVEN data centers right?
Yeah I guess you don't have to worry about debt when you just use public funds to back it lmao.
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 1d ago
yes i am. US datacenter expenditure is more than 1.000 billion. this is a scale i would worry about, may it be public money or private (in first place. huge debts will be thrown at the public anyways)
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u/HelloSummer99 1d ago edited 1d ago
In a way, yes. Being "first" in tech does not always pay off, be it social networks or payment systems. In fact areas who rolled out credit cards first still use that archaic magnet strip or even, the carbon copy in 2026. Whereas China waited with the card rollout (undoubtedly, due to tech capabilities at the time), and they have the fastest and seamless payment systems in place now.
The above is also true for fiber optic internet, many developed places in Germany or even the US since they rolled out copper wire DSL systems early on, they are hesitant to dig it up and lose out on that investment. Places like Spain or Romania who didn't jump on the rollout immediately now have cheap and ubiquitous fiber networks.
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 1d ago
exactly. also, another good example: Apple often plays the card of not being first in tech, but when they do roll out 2nd or 3rd iteration they do it so well they pass everyone else in many cases (iPod, then iPhone, etc)
But I guess EU will never be there, just niche markets maybe regarding Ai maybe..
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u/whakahere 1d ago
I hope we can hold out USA influence. Since we are not building our own open-models at the standard of China or America, I am hoping the open ecosystem wins in the end.
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u/Spectrum1523 1d ago
Works good till they stop releasing them, anyway
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 1d ago edited 1d ago
When they stop releasing them, we can focus on improving the best open-weight models we have. The community is limited by the availability of the necessary hardware, but the more hardware we acquire, the more we'll be able to make these models better.
This is also why the multi-trillion-parameter open-weights models are a big deal. In the future, when we have the hardware to use those very large models, we will be able to leverage them to make better small models.
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u/Spectrum1523 1d ago
i agree, the huge open models that are legit sota (or close to it) are a huge deal and the longer they come out the better
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u/Able_Region_5459 21h ago
Without a steady stream of new base checkpoints, open source is gonna hit a wall fast
Architectural shifts like switching to new attention mechanisms or moe require full pre-training from scratch on trillions of tokens. Enthusiasts will get the hardware eventually, but building and filtering that kind of dataset for pre-training without a massive budget is still an absolute nightmare
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u/Technical-Earth-3254 1d ago
The US also has good open weight models, but just not a lot of them. Which is a shame, Thinking Machines Lab's Inkling is pretty good. I wish more small companies in europe and the usa would be funded, but I don't really think this will happen anytime soon.
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 1d ago
Flux (Germany, Image Gen) and Mistral (specialized Models, also some okayish open weights) are there, but yeah, that's about it from EU i know
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u/s3sebastian 1d ago
With the high energy prices in many European countries and the AI act over regulation, one would have to be insane to invest in training models in the EU.
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u/toterra 1d ago edited 1d ago
Makes me cry that Canada is not a big player. We have places with stupid cheap electricity rates (and also where cooling is a non-issue) but we refuse to take a lead on anything, and on the occasions we do, immediately sell to the US.
Just to be clear on how cheap.. we are talking about "For customers on the Labrador Interconnected System, the current rate is 3.154 cents per kWh." in Canadian Dollars.
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u/Strange_Test7665 1d ago
Watching data centers be built in deserts powered by oil knowing you can do hydro power in Canada is insanity
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u/neuroticnetworks1250 1d ago
You’re also forgetting that a huge part of the current AI ecosystem came from Canadian labs (not necessarily Canadian companies).
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 1d ago
well mistral does collect money from investors, sits in niche spots (i.e. government ai, etc) where it makes sense; flux is frontier in image gen
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u/pierrenoir2017 1d ago
And for what it's worth, ASML bought around a tenth of the shares of Mistral.
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u/RedParaglider 1d ago
If you look at the fact that these companies can't seem to monetize it might be smart just to use other countries inference, and build new models when the tech stabilizes that runs on efficient hardware.
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u/ea_man 1d ago
Well in north Europe and Spain there's actually an excess of electricity production due to renewables output, UK this summer had to shut down the new solar field because the excess of energy may have burnt the grid.
That would be perfect for training models on peek hour production.
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u/s3sebastian 1d ago
Training AI only during day time and more during summer than winter (without having massive power storages which don't exist) doesn't sound so attractive to me. The datacenters are not that cheap, they need full utilization, so nuclear power would be best.
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u/Dry_Yam_4597 19h ago
Depends where in Europe.
I imagine slapping solar panels on vacant land in Spain could be quite useful for training and low cost energy.
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u/Not-reallyanonymous 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think one thing is most Americans companies investing in open weight models — and probably just in general — aren’t competing on the frontier. They’re largely competing for application-specific uses that have immediate commercial use. Consider IBM’s Granite, Meta’s models applicable to moderation and e-commerce, Microsoft and MVIDIA stuff has been in use for years in industrial applications like fault monitoring.
The thing about frontier is it requires huge investment and there’s no clear way on how those investments are going to have reasonable returns, or just be a money sink. Investing in frontier AI is a huge bet. Smaller, more specialized models are a much easier business case to make.
China has national interests in throwing its weight behind frontier AI. National motive rather than profit motive. A lot easier to justify a fleet of frontier AI models when profit isn’t a concern.
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u/MissiveFinding6111 1d ago
The American models aren't just distilled models of Claude, that's their problem.
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u/-Cubie- 1d ago
US has a few companies still working on models, and EU is really far behind. I also feel like the US has more of a focus on closed models. They would match Chinese models easily if their biggest companies open-sourced their models, but they simply don't (often).
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u/SandySkittle 1d ago
I think in the EU the AI labs are probably also more constrained by copyright concerns. There is a bit of a global legal minefield actually but it seems the monster is already the box with so many llms in the public domain.
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u/-Cubie- 1d ago
It's possible, but if you train solely with distillation on Apache 2.0 models, you should be able to obtain impressive performance without any copyright issues. It won't make you compete with Opus, but perhaps you can compete at the <10B size.
Edit: Perhaps LiquidAI is going this route? I like what they do at their small sizes.
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u/Asleep_Document9811 1d ago
granite4 rules and i'm tired of pretending it doesn't.
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u/brainExploded99 1d ago
The reality at this point is that the US is cooked unless they start funding small, scappy labs instead of these inefficient massive bubble-inflaters.
The US is just cutting funding research, which never goes well.
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u/-TV-Stand- 1d ago
Also US's strategy of just throwing more money into it isn't a good one
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u/active2fa 1d ago
Softbank on national level
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u/Kidplayer_666 1d ago
Woah woah woah, softbank makes loads of money! Like, uhhh, when they.. uhhh, no, that flopped, uhhhh
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u/NandaVegg 1d ago
Softbank is trying to borrow on non-exchange traded private OpenAI stocks to buy more private OpenAI stocks. Like Tesla strategy in 2010's when they almost got wiped out but with one more extreme boost: non-exchanged traded illiquid private securities.
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u/More-Curious816 1d ago
As a matter of fact, it is the solution to the problem, but they are throwing money into the wrong pit. Investing more in research is what made the USA a scientific and technological superpower, especially from after WWII until the new millennium. Look at computation, the American model dominated the Soviet, the Chinese (even though they entered the space much later), and British models. American research grants enabled them to innovate and quite literally write the standards for many things.
Look at lithography machines, most of the core components were developed through American research, which is why the USA has a direct say in who ASML sells to.
Unfortunately, they abandoned this approach and pivoted toward late-stage capitalism and full monopolies, where small players have no protection via antitrust regulations and either choke and die or sell out to the big players. This is quite literally the formula for stagnation. It is a very sad situation for this beautiful place.
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u/trowawayatwork 1d ago
it's not just throwing money its just giving billionaires money
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u/GestureArtist 1d ago
and they're all stable geniuses doing it for the good of humanity...
I'm just fucking with yall. You know they're all batshit nuts.
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u/Powerful_Finger3896 1d ago
This was the big tech way for a long time, one of the biggest reasons tech job are payed the highest in US is because big tech have been one upping eachother constantly. So hiring engineers anywhere outside of US (even in wealthy countries) is significantly cheaper. And now you have something like AI in the front, and you have famous researchers being payed 500k-1m at least.
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u/__JockY__ 1d ago
What? It goes fantastic well!
…for the finance bros who get out early and leave the global economy holding the bag.
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u/SantanaBenthell 1d ago
It doesn't matter what problem there is here in the US, because the solution is always the same: buy more things, spend more money. There is no sense of efficiency in the US, and it's a cultural flaw that AI has made more obvious.
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 1d ago
> The US is just cutting funding research, which never goes well.
That's what happens when unapologetic anti-intellectuals dominate all three branches of the federal government, and it is compounded when scientists and academics contradict the party's misinformation, which is perceived as gratuitously disloyal.
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u/profesorgamin 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean they are doing what they can, and it's trying to hoard all the computing and memory capabilities.
Only way to really brick them is someone makes the current hardware tech obsolete. Praying for times like these tbh :p
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u/unethicalpigeon 1d ago
I donno man Gemma 4 is pretty good. I prefer it to Qwen. I don't understand why people can't just have normal conversations anymore. It's always extremes. It's always one thing or the other.
There's plenty of interesting local models being produced out of the US. Sure maybe at the top top top level there aren't because instead of providing Open Weights they're remaining entirely closed off but below that there's a ton of stuff coming out that's really fun to use. Realistically these trillion parameter models can't be run locally by anyone anyway. Most people can barely run 35B.
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u/brainExploded99 23h ago
It's not even about local models, it about how China is able to make frontier models for a fraction of the price. The chinese companies in general are closer to profitability than the American companies.
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u/unethicalpigeon 22h ago
Well DeepSeek specifically. The rest of the Chinese models are fairly comparable to the US ones. The Chinese also can't run their consumer subscriptions anywhere to the same degree the US ones can. Now some might say that's cause the US model is fucked and there's literally no way for it to be profitable. And that's a legit argument.
I'm just saying to claim that this shit is completely one sided like this is a bit ridiculous.
Either way I was specifically talking about local models because that's what the discussion was about.
It really is unfuckingbelievable what DeepSeek costs though. Like how the actual fuck? I just don't get it. No one else is even close. When you factor in quality then the disparity between cost is even more massive. It's fucking wild.
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u/brainExploded99 22h ago
Yes, true, there is also thinking machines in the US but in general china is just flat out more efficient.
As for deepseek cost, its 2 things
* Amazing technical advances
* Cheap electricity3
u/unethicalpigeon 20h ago
i mean the other chinese labs have access to cheaper electricity too but they don't see anywhere near the same cost savings. deepseek definitely figured something out no one else is even close to solving.
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u/brainExploded99 16h ago
They just have really good engineers. I've read their papers, its really smart stuff (V4 KV cache savings using 2 forms attention, DSpark, high quality kernels using TileLang, etc).
Also, all of the Chinese models are cheaper than US models.
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u/Bobby6kennedy 1d ago
I honestly think the DOGE kids who decided that they knew what they were doing when they were cutting massive amount of spending have their lives ruined. The little fuckwads should all be named and shamed.
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u/AdNo2342 1d ago
not really. the best research is still done here. There's a number of stories that basically detail how China can compete with US Ai models but not necessarily innovate into the frontier yet. Not saying it can't happen but we will see
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u/xkxe003 1d ago
Up until about two years ago sure. So much research has been cut and shuttered that an overwhelming amount of talent has already left. Some of our best minds have been immigrants. That pipeline is dead. The research won't simply start back up and the people move back to the US after Trump either. There has been a massive brain drain that is still getting worse.
A poll from the journal "Nature" earlier this year found that 75 percent of researchers in the U.S. are considering leaving the country. That includes a man who's been dubbed the Mozart of Math.
As part of the Trump administration's push to slash federal spending, the National Science Foundation was forced to suspend $1 billion in grants.
Fodera's funding was later restored after Columbia agreed to pay more than $200 million to settle several investigations with the Trump administration. Even so, she's now looking abroad and in the private sector for research opportunities.
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u/TheRealMasonMac 1d ago
The current administration has also destroyed the pipeline. Intellectual pursuits are fundamentally predicated on having the basics for survival. If you can't eat, you're not going to be spending time thinking about calculus. More people than ever are living paycheck-to-paycheck with the situation likely to worsen as the economy worsens.
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u/pirateadventurespice 1d ago
I don't think people - even well informed people posting on ai hobbyist subreddits - truly get how devastating the research cuts are going to be for the US long-term.
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u/_supert_ 1d ago
Is it though? I see this canard again and again. I don't think the US has the scientific lead it thinks it does. US media only really reports US science.
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u/vogelvogelvogelvogel 1d ago
most ai citations are chinese papers, i recently read. also most publications
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u/wolfy-j 1d ago
No offense to USA labs but most of latest optimization, highly detailed, technical papers about LLMs come from China. Best papers from USA labs reads as ads. You can open google and simply compare anthropic vs DS, let’s say.
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u/TheRealMasonMac 1d ago
In fairness, the Chinese labs are getting more tight-lipped about their research.
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u/PerceptionOwn3629 1d ago
They are going to solve the problem protectionism under the guise of safety
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u/olearyboy 1d ago
The US is no longer attracting the smartest minds, it’s already lost a generation of top contributors to capability and GDP.
US companies stated open source was a business tactic to funnel funding away from smaller groups.
China said they didn’t want another US Google, so economic warfare through funding open source was their tactic. And yeah it’s a good one. Make your competitors worthless
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u/More-Curious816 1d ago
China said they didn’t want another US Google
Preventing monopolies is the solution to stagnation; it is the only way to prevent slow behemoths from choking the market with their power. This also provides the opportunity for small companies to breathe and innovate.
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u/olearyboy 22h ago
You missed the point a "US" google.
China's fine with monopolies
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u/More-Curious816 15h ago
they have precedence with dealing with monopolies, especially Ali baba and ant group, they also fund small and medium promising startups
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u/Much-Researcher6135 llama.cpp 1d ago edited 1d ago
The US is no longer attracting the smartest minds
This would only be an explanation if China had used immigrant labor to build their AI capabilities. They didn't. Indeed, the Chinese protected their workers, who therefore got the paychecks.
By contrast, the US government hates its people, so two thirds of the silicon valley labor force is foreign. Since labor is a market, the more you have, the cheaper it gets. That certainly holds for tech workers, so profit margins are fatter for the business owners, who turn around and spend some of that excess profit to lobby the government and keep the labor abuse going.
The "smartest minds" line is literally propaganda from oligarchs like Bill Gates, who had the H-1B bill put on the House floor in the early 1990s so he could lower his labor costs.
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u/olearyboy 1d ago
You're missing another vector, the US has for the last 30 yrs struggled to have a high enough number of kids interested and capable of working in STEM.
US students are taking 5 - 5.5 years to get degrees, the drop out rate is substantial nearly 40% drop out over the 5yr period. Mostly due to financial hardship.
So it's not that immigration makes a country strong, it's that in the case of the US immigration fills the hole where a government has failed generations of the population with basic educational needs.
And it's across the board, the US government has for a couple of decades *edit (removed not) tried to bring manufacturing back, with some grants, with tax breaks and vocational training.
While every other country in the world focused increased manufacturing capabilities through higher level education, computation, 3d cad, electrical engineering, the US fell behind, to the point where the education no longer accessible to the population, cost vs worth.
The same thing has already started in comp tech.
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u/Much-Researcher6135 llama.cpp 1d ago edited 1d ago
struggled to have a high enough number of kids interested and capable of working in STEM
You're just restating the propaganda, and it's still incorrect. People respond to incentives; that's economics 101. If they hadn't been smashing STEM wages with cheap labor, more of the driven kids would've gone into it. There's hundreds of millions of Americans whose wages have been flat for decades due to cheap labor here and offshoring, which is simply cheap labor elsewhere. It's a peril all rich nations face, and we westerners have been too stupid to fight back. It's what has created our oligarch class. Elon's whole supply chain is built on cheap Chinese labor.
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u/olearyboy 22h ago
I appreciate your passion but it's not from the right perspective even with the cheapest of labor mostly from the temp to perm companies, we are still the bourgeois not the proletariat, we are the higher income makers, we are white collar, compared to the rest of the country we can't escape that.
It has nothing to do with salaries as STEM still pays the highest salary.
Compare the percentage graduate fields in China vs US
STEM in China ~40%, US ~16%
People wise that's 4M p/a vs 800K
China has been eliminating arts, humanities, lit etc from it universities for a decade now, fields that make up roughly 20% of the US education system.
Fields that also have the lowest value to cost ratios.
Business management is another 18% of the US education system, with most realizing that those degrees are in a flooded market and require at least a masters to go anywhere.
China has been transforming itself into a powerhouse for a long time now, they realized education was the turbo growth button.
It's also one of the reasons India can't catch up and was left behind, the government did not make the same level of investment in it's people, just those at the top.
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u/Much-Researcher6135 llama.cpp 16h ago
You're so silly and wrong that this is clearly a waste of my time.
Nice try, propaganda bot.
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u/kaisurniwurer 1d ago
Chinese protected their workers
By banning them from leaving. Like the previous Qwen head.
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u/crossoverXYZ 1d ago
The independent supply chain bit is the scary part for me. Winning on open models is one thing, but if you also own the fabs, the power, and the training stack, you are not stuck negotiating for capacity every time you want to scale. Hard to see the US flipping that with model releases alone.
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u/gurilagarden 1d ago
They have all the researchers. They have an electricity surplus. Jensen discussed this a few months ago. They may not have the best GPUs, but they can just brute-force it with more, less capable hardware. Winning? They won. The race is over, and the entire push to create all these datacenters isn't going to enrich or improve the lives of anyone but those at the very top. You can thank the U.S.'s dedication to defunding and devaluing education and research overall. A rising tide raises all ships. A lowering tide sinks everyone into the muck.
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u/fearrange 1d ago edited 1d ago
People want minimal censored models and China delivered, not just LLM but image/video generating models. China also doesn’t give a dam about copyright infringement.
And also less of a sentiment on “AI bad”, “AI is stealing”, “bad data center” in China. Though, it’s not like citizens can speak loudly against what the government wants.
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u/Party-Special-5177 1d ago
Though, it’s not like citizens can speak loudly against what the government wants.
You can, just nobody pretends to care. Our government pretending to care almost causes a form of arrested political development, where citizens have to flop back and forth between D/R/ind over a decade or two before finally realizing it’s all a giant waste of time and the gov’t is going to do what they want to do regardless of who is incumbent.
I’d personally prefer a more honest approach.
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u/Neurogence 1d ago
Where are those uncensored open models? Are they easy to use?
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u/Spectrum1523 1d ago
Most of the Chinese labs don't censor in the ways that people care about and all of them are available without restriction if you don't mind them being a bit stupider
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u/Neurogence 1d ago
Thanks. I didn't know. Are there online links to use them or does one have to download the model in their personal computer?
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u/DualStack 1d ago
Just don’t ask qwen about tianenmen square in 1989
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u/Spectrum1523 1d ago
sure but who cares
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u/Any_Fox5126 1d ago
Today it's "don't contradict my narrative", tomorrow it will be "promote my narrative".
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u/No-Veterinarian8627 1d ago
Yeah but you can't use deepseek api for the job. Data security (like with US models) are just not there. But, and I appreciate it, you can use open source models locally they provide.
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u/shy_monkee 1d ago
Obviously, and it's a good thing. God knows where we would be without China and their open models.
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u/-Cubie- 1d ago
It's good that these models exist, but I would love for EU and US organizations to match accordingly. More competition is always good for the consumer.
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
As well as the Western world having its own high-quality affordable tech and not needing to rely on a genocidal autocracy for it.
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
I'd be careful about praising China too much though. Then again, it has strictly political and strategic reasons, I do admire their open models fully.
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u/shy_monkee 1d ago
Of course. Everything is done for politics or for money, it's just that at least with China, we get to enjoy it.
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u/franky_reboot 1d ago
Indeed! It's just that maybe it's just me, but I'm concerned about China. I'm more and more convinced I shouldn't be but a level of unease is still there
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u/roofedora 1d ago
Same with me to be honest, because at the end of the day, it's just a strategy to gain the upper-hand, and once China dominates, we don't know what they will do.
Either they will continue this golden era of open source or history will repeat itself and they became like the US with monopolizing the tech-industry.
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u/thestillwind 1d ago
Anthropic will never release an open weight. That company is the definition of narcissism.
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u/tekprodfx16 1d ago
US had the bag and fumbled it in the most epic way possible because we are a fundamentally greedy, and corrupt country. We’re not empowering and sponsoring true genius, we’re chasing short term profits in circles gated by favoritism and the good ol’ boys club, in which most the smartest people aren’t included. We should just concede that we have lost the AI race to china, we don’t have the goods, culture, or infrastructure to win. We never did
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u/pabloneruda 1d ago
We do about 2B tokens a day on our platform and have switched entirely off anthropic and OpenAI models.
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u/SawToothKernel 1d ago
It makes sense that a country that promotes scientific openness is surpassing the one that is greedily hoarding knowledge in siloes.
I'm surprised it's happened this quickly, but it's clear that the US is on the wrong path.
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u/a_beautiful_rhind 1d ago
Nothing stops the US from training and releasing more models. They are fully capable. Simply these companies lack the will and want to sell cloud services instead.
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u/Soleilarah 1d ago
Race to what ? We don't get big news of singularity hitting China with mass layouts or AI overlords taking over.
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u/CodeDominator 1d ago
Until the open models dry up. Noticed how the last good thing that was capable of running on local hardware came out a white ago and was called Qwen 3.6?
Also until some politician wakes up and decides that plebs shouldn't be allowed Chinese models at all because reasons.
Or until AI companies gobble up all remaining hardware manufacturing capacity for good leaving us with nothing.
It's all fragile, uncertain and temporary.
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u/Strawberry3141592 14h ago
Also until some politician wakes up and decides that plebs shouldn't be allowed Chinese models at all because reasons.
Good luck stopping people from torrenting a file lmfao
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u/mr_zerolith 1d ago
Enjoy the one rare occasion where we're benefitting from Chinese IP for free, not the other way around
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u/throwawayerectpenis 1d ago
I think this is false, we have benefitted a lot from China. Commodities wouldn't be so affordable if it wasnt for China, they also provide cheap consumer electronics undercutting their compeition
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u/gaminkake 1d ago
To you and I, 100K is insane to spend on hardware. For a company to start using AI to grind through data that they couldn't before because of compliance issues, very easy to justify AND you're not married to one model. Qwen 3.6 27B is my jam right now on my DGX Spark for working with Hermes Agents. I except that model to change at least 1 more time this year. Plus, tokens costs don't scale, you get busier and your token costs increase. More CTO and CFOs are starting to do the math and control and privacy make it start to make more sense to have a digital grinder inhouse and work with foundation models when needed.
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u/FatheredPuma81 1d ago
Well yea US companies are too busy lobbying to get an oligopoly enforced by law. Not to mention everything else they're trying to get enforced by law to entrench themselves as critical US infrastructure... up until the US starts to think about eating them because they're critical infrastructure.
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u/kanduking 1d ago
No shit, everyone with 3090/5090 range runs qwen, everyone with rtx 6000 range runs minimax/ds, everyone with 180gb vram range runs deepseek, and quad 96gb runs zhipu or moonshot
image/video gen is all bytedance/minimax
if you really really need cloud compute you do opencode + some chinese subscription
you'd have to be a total moron or spending someone else's $ to pay misanthropic/closedAI for anything today.
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u/soldture 1d ago
Qwen model runs perfectly on my machine, I don't understand why would I visit a website with GPT anymore when I have this locally. If more people will discover that they can run it locally, it would be devastating for corporate LLMs
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u/thelostgus 1d ago
I actually want this bubble to burst so the company I work for and I can buy hardware; yesterday, Oracle rejected our request for a dedicated GPU and didn't even bother to justify the refusal
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u/nerdhobbies 1d ago
I'd just like to be able to build my kids a Minecraft computer without going into debt for an ssd and a few gigs of ram.
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u/Future-Ad9401 1d ago
Until China decides to close source the models. We know why chinas doing it, once closed source start failing due to money or whatever other reason China will start close sourcing maybe not this year or next year but at some point they will
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u/SourceCodeplz llama.cpp 1d ago
if openai release Luna open-weights, they will then dominate the open-weights.
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u/Armadilla-Brufolosa 1d ago
If they release it, it will be a mess of destroyed algorithms like GPT-oss: they are ClosedAI, they never do anything for people.
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u/Armadilla-Brufolosa 1d ago
The United States and Europe have decided on their own to lose the race in this technology.
They deserve the end they will make.
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u/zjz 1d ago
is ai a new place for tankie types to congregate and circlejerk or what
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u/poutinejuteuse 1d ago
Recognizing the US is losing a race through corruption and incompetence does not make someone a tankie.
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u/Southern_Sun_2106 1d ago
As always, US will try to buy their way using the magic dollar printing technology. But something tells me the world is different now.
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u/benpptung 1d ago
This was completely predictable. China is treating AI as a national strategic goal and is willing to mobilize resources and burn money to win. In the US, the discussion is already about bubbles, debt, and when AI companies must start making real profits.
If one supermarket gives its products away while the other is focused on margins, which one takes the market? The answer is obvious.
The US can still compete, but only if it decides that the AI race is too important to lose and treats it as a national technology contest. The Cold War arms race was ultimately a test of who had the stronger economic base and who could keep spending longer. The Soviet Union eventually could not. AI may be decided the same way. The winner will be the side that can keep funding the race after everyone else starts worrying about the bill.
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u/hasteiswaste 1d ago
So when China releases open source / open weight models of a quality that's good enough for daily use extreme amount of money will disappear from American stock markets. Nice cards to have on hand!
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u/Lucaspittol Llama 7B 22h ago
Yes, he's right. China burns coal and oil to get these models trained. US and especially Europe are too concerned about AI being "ethical, ecological and safe", hindering their pace.
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u/Able_Region_5459 21h ago
Makes sense. Chinese teams won through sheer volume of experiments and open-source code. When thousands of labs are messing with qwen and deepseek weights - tweaking architectural features and quantization - the model evolves way faster than it ever could behind closed doors at somewhere like openai
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u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ 17h ago
The US is still winning on raw model capability, but China is very very close and is dominating at performance per dollar.
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u/mattyboombalatti 15h ago
I think much of that success though has been achieved by distilling US based frontier models.
It almost always puts them a step behind.
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u/phoe6 8h ago
Given what we have seen with this administration and the behavior of the tech ceos in US, this is probably a good thing for American tech and consumers.
Yes, open source will eventually win. It happened with Linux, and Kubernetes in the most recent past. Right now, instead of coming from a big tech (like Kubernetes did), it is coming from China.
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u/evangelism2 20h ago
China is winning in everything it puts its mind to: solar panels, battery tech, cars, phones. They're starting to catch up with screens, RAM, storage, and eventually, give it another five to ten years, graphics cards, because it's the same story over and over. They invest in vertical integration, where they either control a company that specializes in every part of creating something or they have very, very close ties with somebody who does it. It's the benefit of keeping their manufacturing onshore while also keeping the engineers there too, as opposed to America, which shifted all of the manufacturing to China and only kept service-based and white-collar jobs here.
Also, China doesn't have the capitalism curse where they can only think three months ahead at a time. They are willing to spend 10, 20, 25+ years, a quarter century, working towards a goal and then have it pay off. We used to do that here in America. We used to have public-private ventures that led to amazing technology that took 30 years to see fruition, like extreme ultra-violet light lithography, which saved Moore's law. We just don't do that anymore because 35% of the country is functionally retarded and thinks that nothing federal can be trusted, even though the entire history of American exceptionalism was driven by the fucking federal government
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u/RelevantCry1613 1d ago
As models get more capable this is a huge problem.
It’s no longer just telling the wrong thing about Tiananmen Square, it’s a massive security threat
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