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- Hacker News
- by avipars
- If Chinese companies are able to just reliably rent the damn GPUs then I really don't see how these restrictions are meant to be effective in the slightest. I guess it makes it less convenient and supply less certain, and retains some optionality for cutting off supply later?
If Alibaba can't bring the chips into China, but can buy a whole bunch in Thailand or Singapore or whereever (or secure exclusive rights via JV partners where relevant) and then just provide them as a service to its customers in China - what is the point? I'm sure many customers would actually prefer such an arrangement.
by sho - "what is the point?" There is no point, just zero-sum thinking which isn't compatible with reality.
- I read this as if they purchased it from Alibaba the marketplace.....by ericcholis
- "2.8TB model, fast shipping!"by astrodust
- I would not minimize the extent to which AI progress depends on things like the effort that goes into training material acquisition and data labeling. In those areas, improvement is a direct function of how much you invest.
I wonder how much spending is motivated by the phenomenon of sudden emergent performance in LLMs. Clearly some people who are smarter than me expect something like emergent AGI, or at least they think the odds justify spending whatever it takes to see if that would happen.
That leaves a lot of room for efficient aggressive followers.
by Zigurd - K3 is natively trained to mxfp4, if they cannot get a hold of Blackwell chip, it is meaningless. Hopper does not do native 4-bit floating math.
Either they have Blackwell with native 4-bit floating math, or they use have Chinese domestic NPU that support mxfp4 natively.
The article’s statement does not make sense.
by ycui7 - What do you mean by "it's meaningless" can you expand?by orliesaurus
- > Either they have Blackwell
From the article:
A person familiar with Moonshot’s procurement strategy confirmed that the company does indeed have a channel for accessing Blackwell processors via Southeast Asia. They didn’t specify whether this was a rental channel...
by Tempest1981 - Weights will be fetched 4-bit from memory, but compute happens in FP8 (W4A8) or BF16 (W4A16). This is still better than fetching 8-bit weights from memory.
Both W4A8 and W4A16 schemes are supported by Hopper GPUs and commonly used to serve mxfp4 Kimi models on Hopper.
- Huawei A910 is supposed to have native support for MXFP4. The problem is that huawei doesn't have the capacity to build more GPUs right now. Those yield numbers must be really terrible.
Personally, I think 20K nvidias is a stop gap solution because they really don't have the capacity to serve their models to earn any money right now.
by throwa356262 - It's also built on the back of downloading all the content of the top ten sites on the list, the fact that all the independent content sites with their "pre-war" steel haven't been acquired at top dollar by U.S. companies shows the existential threat / stop China posturing is a total joke.
- No one is using that dataset for any serious models. It’s way too small and old.by blazarquasar
- by idoxer
- Thank youby ftkftk
- My thesis is still that model building has no moat. Folks continue to migrate around between the big labs. There is a lot of value in having good taste around the harness and how the models are used. The medium to long term winners will be the folks that control the compute.by infecto
- You can only control the compute if it is not commoditized, which at the current moment, it is not, leading to industry players having 75-80% margins.
Someone will find a way to make cheaper compute, and since nothing fundamental changed there (LLM didn't change how silicon were made), that's bound to happen.
by Aperocky - It kind of confirms a hypothesis I have that the next phase of AI development will be about getting smaller (in terms of model size and compute), because smaller is more capital efficient for training (allowing faster iteration and more iteration cycles for a given amount of capital), allows for denser inference (more inference for a given amount of compute hardware), and allows for more edge inference applications.
The goal will be to develop smaller models with more efficient architectures, that have similar or even better performance than larger models.
by a-priori - Getting smaller is how the last revolution in computing happened.
A VAX 11/780 was good, but an 80386 was a lot better, since the latter could run on 3 AA batteries and the former needed 6,000 watts of 3 phase.
by trollbridge - > It kind of confirms a hypothesis I have that the next phase of AI development will be about getting smaller
isn't that, in the end, the case with all/most technologies?
i can get a petaflop of compute capacity in a dgx spark for relatively cheap nowadays. that used to be a whole supercomputer like 20 years ago.
by znpy - This is likely what Google has been doing, as it suites them best to have small fast models rather than hulking slow giants. Lower intelligence but way more ability to serve. Anthropic would probably need a datacenter the size of a small country to serve Fable on a Google search/services scale.by WarmWash
- It feels like we're not really bottlenecked by model performance now anyway. Most cases I find where a model is being an idiot can be remedied by rethinking the context and tooling available to that model.
If they got a lot cheaper and only a little dumber, and we got a little smarter about how we use them, they could appear to the bystander as much more useful than they are.
- Eventually, multi-modality might even get offloaded as workflows, which might allow models to do this at a fraction of the data and compute required.
I am adding multi-modality to https://github.com/guilt/TinyToT, and I see that dis-aggregating capabilities, very similar to how our own sensory organs work, seems to be paying off quite well.
by vkaku - It begs an interesting question as well: are frontier labs stuck in the incumbent phase of the "innovator's dilemma," where there's such intense pressure to maintain the flavor/character of their widely-loved existing models, that they dare not invest their resources into radical reimagination of their approach towards architectures for smaller models? A company like Moonshot does not have this cultural limitation.
The frontier labs would be well served in carving out 20k sub-clusters and giving research teams carte blanche in building things with radically different architectures - with full permission to distill whatever they want from the flagship models. We'd expect to see more product lines that feel "different" from the flagship models if this were already being done.
by btown - Yes, continual learning is currently a hot topic since this is what will allow an "AI intern or new employee" to learn on the job rather than be stuck on groundhog day, or pre-trained for every eventuality - needing to anticipate all the quirks and proprietary knowledge of every customer!
Continual learning tends to imply individualized models, else there is no data privacy (the secrets learned on the job at your company now being available to your competition), which really turns the current AI business model of a single centralized model served to everyone on it's head. If every customer has a different model that essentially means the end of batch processing with the same weights loaded into the GPU.
The direction this suggests is a move away from centrally served common models to locally served individual ones, which generally requires them to be smaller, even if some larger companies may be willing to invest in beefier hardware.
I think this is at least in part why the AI companies are trying NOT to implement true continual learning and see if they can instead finesse it by implementing continual compacted(?) memorization instead, since then it's "just" additional context that needs to be recalled and fed into every request, not weights that need feeding into the GPU. I don't think memorization is any substitute for learning, especially learning of practiced skills, but since it's far easier to implement, and non-disruptive to the cloud-based API business model, this is what we will see first.
The recent news of NVIDIA' investment in Sutskever's SSI has a tiny hint of this also, talking about SSI advising on NVIDIA's future architectural direction - apparently pushing it in a different direction than current (cloud-based, pre-trained) models. NVIDIA may be quite happy to see a move towards local models.
- Interesting if true - that Moonshot can train a ~3T SOTA model on only 20K NVIDIA GPUs, while others like Musk (who freely admits to distilling OpenAI's models) struggle to build a competitive 1T model (Grok 4.5) with massively more compute (Colossus-1 100-250K GPUs, Colossus-2 500K+ GPUs).
I guess at least partly a reflection of all the optimizations in the Kimi 3 architecture.
In the recent leaked DeepSeek investor meeting, they also mentioned only having a 20K GPU cluster (unclear if NVIDIA, or Huawei).
- Do we believe them? It seems there’s no reason with the resources OpenAI and Anthropic have they wouldn’t be incentivised to build equally efficient pipelines? I think it’s mostly the fine tuning with distillation that gives Chinese labs their big advantage. However I’m pretty sure all the main labs are poisoning the output now when they detect Chinese activity so while K3 looks frontier on tests when you use it it’s miles off Sol and Fable.by andy_ppp
- > Musk (who freely admits to distilling OpenAI's models) struggle to build a competitive 1T model (Grok 4.5) with massively more compute (Colossus-1 100-250K GPUs, Colossus-2 500K+ GPUs)
Are you sure they are using all of their compute on training? Didn't they rent out a ton to other AI companies?
by HawtAds - Genuine question. Is there a time factor part of that equation?by infecto
- It's not that surprising to me. Most of the innovation in Chinese models has been in efficiency gains and optimizations. K3 coming from the factory in MXFP4 weights is a pretty relevant factor. Big performance gap probably also due to Moonshot doing QAT. Throw in the fact that Musk has easier access to compute, and I think you have your answer on the disparity.by ux266478