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- Hacker News
- Lets do "who's afraid of US models" version:
* Me, as an individual, because I might not be able to pay price hikes, because my revenue (salary) is much lower than what they want and I can't support my expenses via huge bank loans.
* Again, me as a new entrant to the industry, LLMs are basically pay-to-play games, again related to price hikes, new entrants might not be able to afford paying those prices 24/7 - which you need when learning new things.
* Any non-US company, US can block the models which can disrupt the whole business.
* Even some US companies, for example if you operate in EU and EU somewhat changes their mind and follow the ICC and require you to stop working with Netanyahu (war criminal as per ICC), then following laws in EU, might create trouble to your whole business.
by throwaw12 - The people who are most afraid of Chinese models are the VCs who poured into Anthropic and OpenAI at astronomically high valuations. Anthropic is valued at $1.2T and OpenAI is targeting $850B. These astronomical valuations were built on the premise that these labs would generate massive profits from premium API pricing, but the Chinese labs are completely undercutting this strategy by releasing excellent open models for free. If the frontier labs are forced to cut prices and join the race to the bottom in token prices, these valuations are unjustified, and VCs will face enormous (paper) losses.by tristanj
- The article makes a point about agent harnesses being sticky (the supposed moat). I have been building my own agent harness for a while, and I can tell with confidence that the harness almost does not matter, the entirety of the AI magic is the model itself. The harness can be almost barebones (like, for example, mini-swe-agent used for benchmarks), and yet the model still does the task just fine.
So from my perspective, it's doubtful that this is the moat. Besides, for example, Claude Code in particular is so buggy (and always has been).
by OleksandrC - > distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here? ... The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation
Sounds great to me; live by the sword, die by the sword.
by _aavaa_ - I am afraid — if Chinese models go mainstream it has a clear way of pushing its narrative way beyond its otherwise borders. More like a Trojan horse it is for the Chinese.
Here is a quick example of how Chinese deepseeks agent works kn its underlying model) when asked a tough question
https://x.com/jinen83/status/2079406993979383902?s=46&t=D7hQ...
by kinj28 - People seem to conflate "made in China" with "can't be trusted." id argue the bigger distinction is open vs. closed. An open model can be audited, fine-tuned, and technically run entirely on your own hardware. A closed model is basically "trust us."by jke_kang
- The post hits it spot on with unequal access to the models in terms of security. I'm developing OSS where security is important for the user ... but the frontier models like GPT 5.6 and Fable flake out and state that I cannot get the info/access.
This is extremely lopsided I'll have to resort to GLM 5.2/K3 to ensure that those security issues (hopefully) are resolved properly.
For OSS, this is one of the most counterintuitive experiences I have ever had. More than ever I'm convinced that open weight and open pipelines models are 100% critical for progress on the AI and societal fronts.
by astrobiased - The 2 things people need to remember:
1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.
2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via model providers in the US ( either frontier or model hosts like fireworks.ai ) then please let me know your bank details so I can poke around.