Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.

China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.

It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.

But two products that provide essentially the same benefit, and one is significantly cheaper? Corporations maximize profit, my friend. What the model has to say about Tianammmen Square doesn't matter when we're using it to write code.

The notion of comparing this to Chinese bikesharing is comically absurd.

"Allegedly".

Plus with a lot of accounting tricks, and this not being recurring to make their books look nice for the eventual IPO.

It's super simple.

Gigantic hyper margin ad network = artificial subsidization of cost for various tiers = put the boot on the neck of Chinese competitors. There's no scenario where they can compete with what advertising margins make possible in terms of artificially lowering prices charged.

I think so too. To me the so-called Chinese local models are a clear move to prevent US companies to establish a foothold and build a moat around their business. US companies are clearly invested in a strategy to make themselves relevant with claims of major impressive achievements with the so called frontier models, and how these and only these are unblocking whole ranges of applications. At the same time, they are heavily invested in pushing AI on all absurd types of mundane tasks, such as transcribing meetings and... talking to your own kids?

In the meantime it's rather obvious that, in spite of all the propaganda, frontier models are required only in ultra niche applications, whereas the ability to run any model at all already provides most of the value. In fact, US companies have been renownee by dumbing down older generation models in what seems to be a desperate attempt to make newer models look better and influence their uptake rate.

So there is no better way to take the wind out of the US AI companies' sail than pulling a two-punch attack consisting of not inly releasing capable models that refute the "only US frontier will do the job" thesis but also releasing them for free to commodities them and eliminate the business impact of dumbing down models.

i don't doubt they're pushing for using AI for that, but i'm curious of examples of where they're doing this. commercials, ads, etc.

You just be living under a rock. Not do long ago Sam Altman was floating this fantastic usecases for AI was to have it explain to you your kids interests, and have it create a podcast for you to be able to keep in touch.

In any case, over the past few years, the only thing that has gotten more expensive is the hardware to run local models while API and Subs have gotten more affordable or feature rich while remaining same price.

They can compete because they have the compute to run the volume and if it's good on agentic work, people will be less incentivised to use other models for "Tasky-y" work.

It's literally increasing their market opportunity

They are buying Huawei accelerators in bulk to serve their local customers. The whole system is currently optimized to deliver a lot of cheap LLMs and hardware for them to run on.

OpenAI is sitting on a $100+ billion ad network, incoming.

They're not going to need a government bailout, they're going to be a spigot of cash production.

Every single thread on HN keeps saying the same ridiculous thing, going on a year now. It's like they've never heard of advertising, which SV specializes in. It's like they're oblivious to the fact that every mega platform with so many users becomes an ad goldmine, and GPT's context positioning is even richer than search.

How can you make this sort of claim with a straight face, knowing that a chinese model downloaded for free from ollama works as well if not better than OpenAI's models, without costing you a cent.

GPT is still 20 a month for most people, 50-100 or 200 for pros.

Meanwhile, for local LLM's - everyone is chasing hardware that is crazy expensiv eand to get around it they're leasing it or putting it on credit card. DGX Sparks are insane, and you need 2 for most people talking in this thread. Mac Ultra 5 is amazing but 6k minimum 12k for the build most want so many people lease it for 240 a month which doesn't even include electricity or time in setup so instead of talking about facts, we get into weird arguments like console wars where people give APple a 5 trillion dollar company 250 a month for 36 months and don't even own their hardware money "because they can run local models" vs just paying for output from their choice of frontier.

I say this fully loving local llms and embracing them, but the reality is, local llms have gotten so expensive and continue to get expensive while we keep talking about this "Threat" of apis - where there are a lot more than openai and anthropic available much cheaper and competitive priced.

Oh, and they don't work better than OpenAI or else we wouldn't even have these discussions.

And sorry to the parent commenter if I’m making a bad assumption.

Don't travel through the US.

See: what they did with personal computers and smartphones. They have access to Fable and Astra right now, and they're not interested what-so-ever despite what these systems can now do. Instead they'll promptly go vaporize $50k on a giant pile of metal garbage (autos) that will rapidly depreciate. They have no practical use for Fable as is.

For the same reason people didn't rush off to their local public library to teach themselves JavaScript to acquire a better life for the cost of renting library books. They can't easily go against their restraints, their biological potential. To do so is extraordinarily taxing.

Originators generate most of the extreme wealth, and extreme outcomes. Mimics can be exceptionally successful however, most doctors are mimics for example, they won't ever originate anything.

Amplifiers are the teachers, they - ideally - shuttle what works to the mimics for reproduction across society. The mimics are largely just trying to keep up with the Joneses. They go out of their way to not risk anything most of the time. They're ideally following pre-set paths to biological success. It's why mass, rapid de-industrialization for one example is such a wipeout, the mimics don't adapt very quickly, they followed the path they were told would work and then they feel betrayed, they become like abandoned programs and don't know what to do next.

As a system you don't want too much of your population in the originator category: it's very expensive and highly prone to spectacular failure. You want the extreme majority of your biological entities following successful paths that have already been proven to work.

Humans aren't special, we're animals. Apply the patterns accordingly.

You pad the text.

Oh, my god.