Surprised nobody has pointed this out yet — this is not a GPT 4.5 level model.
The source for this claim is apparently a chart in the second tweet in the thread, which compares ERNIE-4.5 to GPT-4.5 across 15 benchmarks and shows that ERNIE-4.5 scores an average of 79.6 vs 79.14 for GPT-4.5.
The problem is that the benchmarks they included in the average are cherry-picked.
They included benchmarks on 6 Chinese language datasets (C-Eval, CMMLU, Chinese SimpleQA, CNMO2024, CMath, and CLUEWSC) along with many of the standard datasets that all of the labs report results for. On 4 of these Chinese benchmarks, ERNIE-4.5 outperforms GPT-4.5 by a big margin, which skews the whole average.
This is not how results are normally reported and (together with the name) seems like a deliberate attempt to misrepresent how strong the model is.
Bottom line, ERNIE-4.5 is substantially worse than GPT-4.5 on most of the difficult benchmarks, matches GPT-4.5 and other top models on saturated benchmarks, and is better only on (some) Chinese datasets.
To try to avoid the inevitable long arguments about which benchmarks or sets of them are universally better: there is no such thing anymore. And even within benchmarks, we're increasingly squinting to see the difference.
Do the benchmarks reflect real-world usability? My feeling is that the benchmark result numbers stop working above 75%.
In a real problem you may need to get 100 things right in a chain which means a 99% chance of getting each single one correct results in only 37% change of getting the correct end result. But creating a diverse test that can correctly identify 99% correct results in complex domains sounds very hard since the answers are often nuanced in details where correctness is hard to define and determine. From working in complex domains as a human, it often is not very clear if something is right or wrong or in a somewhat undefined and underexplored grey area. Yet we have to operate in those areas and then over many iterations converge on a result that works.
Not sure how such complex domains should be benchmarked and how we objectively would compare the results.
It doesn't really matter what nationality or ethnicity you are, but if you communicate with the model in Chinese you might get better results from this model.
Then again, if they've misrepresented the strength of the model overall, there might be some other shenanigans with their results. The fact that their results show their model is worse than GPT-4.5 on 2 Chinese language benchmarks, while it's so much stronger on some of the others, is a bit weird.
GPT-4.5's advantages are supposed to be in aspects that aren't being captured well in current benchmarks, so the claim would be shaky even if ERNIE's benchmarks actually showed better performance.
I guess this is the end of OpenAI? No more dreaming of Universal Basic Compute for AI, Multi Trillion for Fabs and Semi?
This is just like everything in China. They will find ways to drive down cost to below anyone previously imagined, subsidised or not. And even just competing among themselves with DeepSeek vs ERNIE and Open sourcing them meant there is very little to no space for most.
Both DRAM and NAND industry for Samsung / Micron may soon be gone, I thought this was going to happen sooner but it seems finally happening. GPU and CPU Designs are already in the pipelines with RISC-V, IMG and ARM-China. OLED is catching up, LCD is already taken over. Batteries we know. The only thing left is foundries.
Huawei may release its own Open Source PC OS soon. We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene.
> We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene
Generally, I’ve found that almost no founders or friends I speak with have any vision for the future anymore. They care only about making money and do not care how. It’s a spectacular collapse of vision and purpose—these people have always existed but it feels incredibly pervasive now.
With that, I realize your comment is much broader than AI so below is too domain specific but…
VC has been investing in AI as-if it were a winner takes all market, but it has been obvious that isn’t the case.
Not only that, but the massive amount of cash thrown to anyone with even marginal credentials has undermined the constraints that often lead to innovation.
There is 0 reason that Safe Superintelligence should be raising for the second time at a 30 B valuation with no product.
> VC has been investing in AI as-if it were a winner takes all market, but it has been obvious that isn’t the case.
I really don't see how this was supposed to go, and I've never heard an explanation.
I don't see any kind of coherent vision from any of these types.
Most normal folks (i.e not SV/HN types that seem to desire to replace their marketable programming skills with LLM output) really don't "want" LLMs in any real sense.
Sure, people use them like a search engine, kids cheat on homework with them etc, but there's not this overwhelming universal desire for them like there was for, say iPhones.
I never once have heard any sort of proposed roadmap for how LLMs were supposed to work as a product.
They were just going to get, uh "really good" and take everyone's office job or something?*
Normal F500 organizations that are obviously a target for LLM use (via hyperscaler sales) are still yet to see a clear path to "revolutionizing" their workforce or whatever via LLMs-it's just not there. Costs are too high, there's no obvious use case, "hallucinations" are a real impediment etc.
I'll add many of the public usecases for this (i.e those a hyperscaler would blog about as a sales promo) are seriously weak ("we reduced onboarding time by 20% with $MODEL")
I would really like to hear a proposal for how this is all supposed to come together. Does anyone have a concrete plan for the future for all this stuff?
*I'll note, this is NOT the way to sell a product to the masses, either.
Addendum: I'm not an "LLM hater" by any means. I pay for GH Copilot, and have been running local LLMs since it's been a thing (granted with limited hardware, and limited quality)--I intend to wait a bit and buy better hardware with one motivating factor being running local LLMs in a year or so when the open-source offerings stabilize"
I have changed from Copilot to Cline with Claude 3.7 and it is a total gamechanger. For some one like me being able to describe a multi file edit is really empowering. I hate that kind of busy work
You're looking for a proposal for how it's supposed to come together in the future, but VCs are living in the world where it already has come together. Normal F500 organizations have widely adopted LLMs, with OpenAI reporting that 92% of them are customers. (https://www.axios.com/2024/08/29/openai-chatgpt-200-million-...) Determining individual business usage is always a bit sketchy, but at least one survey run by a major staffing firm indicates that a majority of workers and almost all executives use generative AI for their jobs. (https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/01/ai-training-workforc...)
This is one of the most finest and most accurate things that I have read in a long time.
This really could be a blog post which I encourage you to make! (I would prefer github pages but if you really want , I have a domain name on cloudflare and I am more than willing to host the static page of such blog on my own domain name for absolutely free (lets go , cloudflare!)
Its just facts. Pure facts.
""
Generally, I’ve found that almost no founders or friends I speak with have any vision for the future anymore. They care only about making money and do not care how. It’s a spectacular collapse of vision and purpose—these people have always existed but it feels incredibly pervasive now.
""
Why did I read it in a monotonous way as if a student from the future understands the current scenario.
I felt as if it was the same level of sadness in my heart as that when you listen to some video which has raining background and he reads the dark comedy (something like burialgoods oats shitposting but this time more serious and real!)
Currently saving this on wayback machine just for this comment. Internet needs to preserve this comment , no matter what.
There used to be significant alignment between engineers, founders and certain VCs: lots of excitement around building software that genuinely made things better/easier/cheaper. Each group naturally wanted a different thing out of this arrangement but each camp was on the same page.
Now I feel like everything is more top-down. The tech sector feels less like market capitalism and more like something being centrally planned: we all must chase trends that come from various industry thought-leaders. And it all must be done a very specific way (this in particular is why Chinese companies are likely going to disrupt the AI market: they’re free from this burden)
VCs are happy to throw money at something if they believe they can corner a market. It just doesn't have to do much with reality. Until of course, it becomes self fulfilling. But in this case it seems like it's not going to happen because nobody has a moat.
Founder risk has been nil for a long time either because they pay themselves six figures out the gate or because the job market has been hot enough that they can market utter failure to get another job.
There’s a lot of opportunity to make low cost software that out competes big tech just because it doesn’t demand 10000x returns on every if statement.
I’d encourage Europeans to start replacing American software vendors with small teams today. You won’t become the next American oligarch but you’ll be able to clean up millions from the incompetent Americans.
I think there's huge opportunity for software that replicates the 80% most used features from big tech companies/packages, but at half the price and a tiny fraction of the overall complexity. Think of Python Anywhere, offering a very simple Python-focused VPS/PaaS platform, but so so much easier to use than AWS.
> I’ve found that almost no founders or friends I speak with have any vision for the future anymore.
I think in general there is a feeling that the time to get your bag is rapidly shrinking.
Once everything is built by these things there will be no reason to create anything as the platform owners (big tech) will be able to take everything for themselves and no longer have to share 70% with those pesky creators/small business/startups etc.
When it comes to hardware who pioneered all those technologies? Definitely not China. They’ve stolen unimaginable amounts of IP and will continue to do so. But yes you’re right, they surprise everyone with how well they can scale the stolen innovation.
Possible, but if you look at the graduate students and lecturers behind many of these IPs you will find they are Chinese (or Russians or Iranians).
This is the paradox in those who are championing barring Chinese students from the US to prevent them from stealing IP, they don't see that at least 50% of this IP is generated by students from China, in a way they will be handing the CCP a gift by incentivising those students to remain in China.
>They’ve stolen unimaginable amounts of IP and will continue to do so.
All AI models are built on the back of massive amounts of "IP stealing". Either we consider IP to be valid and then all western companies in this space are just as bad, or we go with the direction the western companies are claiming and then China is not doing anything wrong.
All developing markets "steal" until they've caught up with the competition. Just look at the US and how they "stole" innovations and tech from Europe.
“he brought British textile technology to the United States, modifying it for American use. He memorized the textile factory machinery designs as an apprentice to a pioneer in the British industry before migrating to the U.S. at the age of 21.”
in case of TSMC, having 80% most advance chip manufacturing concentrated in 1 small island for an entire world is clearly problematic (corona teach us a lot), no matter how you look at this
These sour grapes comments are so goofy, and honestly a little racist. The millions of Chinese engineers working out in China are extremely talented, and to downplay their achievements like this and to chalk them all up as thieves is ridiculous. They have the skills, the man power, and the vision, and they’re eating the West’s lunch regardless of your feelings on how fair it is.
I don't think it's that, so much as the average western citizen isn't able to go and create a knock off of a new invention / product and have it sold without legal consequences. That has been available to many Chinese citizens though.
It is entirely irrelevant who pioneered the tech. This is why no one gives a crap about xerox anymore.
Dismissing Chinese tech is foolish. They are tech leaders in many areas and moving to new ones every day. Solar, Nuclear, Batteries, EVs, Drones, Robotics etc. They have no one to copy in those fields because they have left the rest of the world behind.
By the 1890s both the US and Germany had surpassed Britain when it came to industrial output, I don’t think it was any consolation for the Brits that they had invented it (almost) all.
I’m replying to myself to address multiple other replies.
First of all, it’s really sad to see people saying it doesn’t matter the journey of how one achieves success, and all that matters is your current state.
Brushing the CCPs countless acts of IP theft under the rug is like saying it doesn’t matter that the Trump family committed financial fraud for decades. All that matters is that they’ve managed to become billionaires today. Would the Trump family be anywhere near as wealthy if they hadn’t cheated for so long? Would China be much further behind than they are now if the CCP hadn’t stolen so much IP? I see multiple people here implying those questions are irrelevant, which I absolutely disagree with. Ignoring all that history is a huge injustice to everyone else who didn’t resort to that kind of behavior.
I also want to be clear I’m not trying to make some ridiculous claim that Chinese individuals have been working independently to hack and steal IP. It’s their government and that same government is to blame for the many people like me who really look down on them despite what they’ve ultimately been able to achieve. They undoubtedly have huge numbers of brilliant citizens. When I make comments about China’s shameful history of tech IP theft, I’m talking about their government.
Is it really theft when an American company sends over the CAD files to a Chinese manufacturer to make it for them?
I know there's some about of corporate espionage where trade secrets got exfilled, but what makes you so certain the majority of Chinese success is from stolen IP, as if electrical engineering grad students can't figure out how to make solar panels from first principals?
This is the old way of doing it, and probably the way the US is going to go with, at the detriment of its own population. - I would posit that since we are talking about digital goods, there is a better way:
Require open source / open weights of any company that used data to it doesn't own to train its models. If chinese companies do not comply, their copyright becomes void in the US, and these models are very easy to copy. Treat advances in architecture as a utility, and let the utilization of those architectures be the market for companies to compete in.
A copyright exemption would just put them at the level of deepseek officially, but they've been working around that anyway in practice. I'm not sure that change would make any difference.
It's similar to how China dominated manufacturing in prior decades.
They have massive amounts of low cost labor and, unfortunately, the US has pretty large walls up preventing mass in-migration of white collar workers.
H1B is capped and also more of a lottery than a points based system.
If the US allowed mass white collar immigration, wages would decline materially which would make our industries more competitive for the next generation of software.
Right now the system is geared around protectionism (intended or not) and wage inflation for US local workers.
The current market wages in software are far far above what a global equilibrium would be. Though myself and I'm sure most others here have benefited from it in the short term.
To be clear, established companies with an existing market are fine for now and can do well with high wages.
But the next generation of companies that are chasing smaller markets and margins, ones that require more elbow grease to out-compete are underserved.
e.g. the entire DeepSeek team was paid less than a few Meta engineers (with 7 figure comp each)
"The firm offers 14-month pay for various positions and the highest offer is for deep learning researchers for artificial general intelligence (AGI), with a monthly salary between 80,000 yuan ($10,983) and 110,000 yuan, which could mean an annual income of up to 1.54 million yuan, the report said."
Correct answer, never think about the future in terms of linear extrapolations. It's a non-linear differential equation with lots of variables and expect complex feedback loops. Systems react to change.
When the cost of training a model goes down, it doesn't simply become cheaper to the end user. In addition to that, the provider will train even larger and more capable models.
We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene.
I think you're witnessing it rather getting back in touch with reality than collapsing. Multi-trillion out of jsx generator was too much from the beginning. You folks just don't know what to do with too much money you have.
> I think you're witnessing it rather getting back in touch with reality than collapsing.
You're witnessing the USA tech scene getting in back to reality. Software engineers in other western countries looked at the salaries the Tech scene was paying in the USA, and scratched their heads.
Its a collapse from fictional reality to real reality , but a collapse nonetheless.
Sometimes reality acts more weird than fiction itself. I have just now decided to call this "fictional reality"
Like yesterday when I realized that nuclear bombs weren't that far away from the creation of chemical resonance & they happened after world war I and I think , just really 5-6 years before nuclear bombs but still!
It actually gave me a lot of hope because I felt that a lot of people were focusing on AI , so I can use AI (sometimes , if I want) to focus on a passion project that I want , to maybe earn some money.
I have also thought of creating AI projects but that too for fun. I don't know two shits but I just want to know what the hype is about from a theoretical standpoint.
What user experience are you talking about? Chatbot? Or software in general? Cause Tiktok beats Facebook out of water. Chatbot for English communities sure, I also prefer Claude over Deepseek in terms of project support and UI. But this is because they are focusing on Chinese communities, Doubao has much better features that is used by Chinese. It's not really comparable even if all US chatbots were accessible in China. Once LLM tech slows, I am sure Chinese chatbots would beat the American ones in terms of user experience.
So far. China has been focused on becoming a world's factory for 30 years. They started moving up the food chain fairly recently.
Give it another generation and if China will not walk off the ledge with either government or societal issues (which, granted, is where they are slowly going IMO) they will own the UX and design as well. My 2c.
They’ve been moving up the food chain for 30 years. The only difference is recently that upward movement has begun to surpass the US.
Given that the US has been number one for a really long time now it doesn’t sit well with a lot of the patriotic identity people have about the US. People either can’t accept reality or the make up some excuse about unfair economic practices.
The last thing they want to admit is that China is more competent or more superior.
The moment I realized this was going to be the truth was when the Chinese government essentially purged a bunch of unicorn social media companies overnight, erasing billions of wealth on paper. It seemed like the motive was to value and encourage actual economic value over worshipping whatever makes the line go up. When I saw they had the guts and wisdom to do that I realized that they may have a better grasp on philosophy.
Previously I always thought democracy was a slow but eventually correct system of producing wisdom. And to a degree there’s been truth to this. However the missing ingredient has been what do we do with that success once we’ve had it.
The west would never have the guts to delete a billion dollar industry even if they realized it was a net negative. We simply don’t know how to guard against our passions, pleasures, and handle success in a responsible way. I think cccp has many flaws but taking bold action against this kind of problem isn’t one of them.
I do hope that I’m wrong about this though and that a democratic system can see its way out of a local maximum built upon an unsustainable way of doing things. I think the belief in the market as some kind of oracle that knows value and price is its language has a lot to do with this track we’re on.
I agree with your comments about the West. The fact that we continue to expand legal gambling is evidence enough that we don't care about the negative consequences of an industry.
But let's not pretend China is perfect. The purge had much more to do with a) eliminating a potential competing power to the CCCP, and b) Xi's boomer-era gut instinct that new media forms are bad.
Yeah, good points. Definitely not my intention to say China's perfect, and I'm probably reading too much into the wisdom of this vs. good ol' preservation of power.
>When I saw they had the guts and wisdom to do that I realized that they may have a better grasp on philosophy.
It's not a better grasp on philosophy. It's a logistical issue. A centralized government can wipe this out because control is centralized. In a democracy the control is spread out among people who understand, people who don't understand and among people who have business interest in said topic.
Think about it this way. The very people responsible for the unicorn social media companies in a democracy have a say in whether or not there own companies can be wiped out. If they're rich they can influence the game even more with advertising and propaganda. They influence the outcome and thus self interest actually pollutes the decision making process in a democracy.
It's not about guts. It's literally that in a democracy even the conflicting business interests can stop the right thing from happening because of they are self interested in the bad thing to happen. It is a logistical issue. When business interests influence government then government decisions favor business interests. It's that simple. And right now since businesses are more centralized and have more power then individuals then the government actually favors big corporations. That's the eventual outcome of most capitalist societies.
In a dictatorship, the dictator is usually well removed from such things and thus can make decisions very impartially and with no resistance. But like an evil dictator can do stuff like behead your entire family if you talk shit about him. Good sides and bad sides. The problem is you live in a democracy so everyone talks about how shitty the alternative is because of bias. The reality is democracy and dictatorship are simply two sides of a coin.
> They’ve been moving up the food chain for 30 years.
Organically, sure. If a company has an opportunity to build higher value components profitably it would likely take it. But that is slow.
What I mean is state pouring massive amounts of money, every year for many years, into as-is unprofitable areas to build not just the products but education, infrastructure and support needed for the local companies to become competitive.
WSJ had a good article in the last few days on China's containership building which AFACR said the government poured over 10 billion at the time to become the world's shipbuilder. This is the time of effort I am talking about and, as far as I know, it is fairly new.
$10B is a drop in the ocean. If all it took was a bit of money the US could have stayed ahead. For perspective, they’ve earmarked $800B for clean energy subsidies, that AI fund is $500B.
You can’t buy back entire supply chains and a workforce, it takes generations.
It was 10B 20 years ago when China was significantly poorer. And it is not just money. It is planning, oversight and various care and feeding activities (china-style, including executing officials for corruption) for almost 10 years before that part of the system became mature and economically self-supporting.
A lot of consumer tech with very competitive UX is coming out of China. They are also getting very strongly into e.g. web frontend tech. I see no reason why the west would have any special advantage in this.
They are ahead of Europe (at least in car UX) but quite behind of the US. This is the last stronghold that the US has but given the recent layoffs and transition toward "AI everything", I am not sure if the US tech industry will survive this too.
I would rate Europe over US by far for car UX. My north American vehicles universally have the worst interfaces. My European Cars typically the best and Japanese/others in between.
Thus demonstrating the point I was making with (and demonstrated by) the "attemped Chinese": machine translation isn't good enough yet. (This Chinese is from Google Translate).
Software is more trivial than hardware. That’s why you see bootcamps for software but not for hardware. China can easily eclipse the US on the software front. And they have.
> We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene
Is economy a zero sum game now?
Isn't economic development supposed to be a good thing?
Can the West only exist in a world of poverty and underdevelopment?
That doesn't make sense. Consumer goods have become cheaper and more accessible because the third world has become more productive and richer. If they become richer still it will be because they become more productive still, which will mean their exports will be more competitive (cheaper).
Let's just hope they contribute back as much as the west has contributed to spreading knowledge and knowledge-tools to the world instead of just free-riding on it and then pretending it wasn't foundational. Linux, Wikipedia, RISC-V, ...
It's not just the Chinese who are lacking the acknowledgment of these contributions.
That is because they want to undercut the US and prevent them from making money. It remains to be seen if they'll be as benevolent in making tech open-source if they are the clear winners. Frankly, I don't see why they will.
I'm sorry but your comment comes off as racist. You've given no reason as to why they wouldn't do the same and your opinion seems entirely coming from assumption of ill-will. Why would you think the West have shared their knowledge while China won't? I suggest you reevaluate your biases.
FWIW I am not American or even from the west. At a nation-state level, the west (US) shared knowledge with the intention of offshoring production for cheaper goods, not out of the kindness of their hearts. They still protect key technologies like the jet engine and bleeding edge fab tech. It is the same when it comes to Chinese companies that are at the top of their game - DJI or Bambu labs don't open source their designs last I checked, and their track record when it comes to software is also not great. Simply put, companies only open source when it makes business sense.
I am simply assuming that China follows the same principle - try to wring maximum advantage out of their industrial might and commoditize their complement wherever possible. Because of China's unique single party system, their strategies are very top-down coming straight from the CCP in key areas like AI and robotics. It is not racism, simply realpolitik.
The CCP strictly controls knowledge and information access within China through rigorous censorship. It would be surprising if Chinese companies were allowed to just make their advancements open source without review, if those advancements would have a meaningful impact on the state of technology.
It is strange and inappropriate to call that observation racist.
I don't think it's intentional racism, but a lot of what many western folks think of China come from propaganda. China has visa-free policy for many countries now. Go check it out in person.
We can discuss the reasons why they might or might not open source things, or we can agree not to because someone might call us racist for discussing corporate and wcenomic motivations.
The West mostly has not shared their knowledge. Most software is not open source.
Chinese complete supply chain is ramping up. Previously they could achieve the Frontier but hampered by tools sanctions. Now Chinese indigenous tools are catching up.
> Huawei may release its own Open Source PC OS soon. We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene.
The US has been so used to being number one that not being number one equates to “collapse”.
No the US Will NOT collapse. They just won’t be number one in economic/military/technological might. Similar to how many countries like the UK, Japan, and more have not existed as the number one economic super power.
It will be (arguably already is) societally rough though. The west has been riding the asian cheap labor for decades (and the cheap colonial labor before that). People are not gonna be happy falling down the "value chain".
Probably explains Trump's moves: Force out all the illegal immigrants doing low value work, kill off as much fluff in the government as you can to cut the debt load, those unemployed people are forced to fill in the low value labor. You've solved all the problems and everyone except the capital owners are worse off..but at least the capital owners live to see another day.
Or (speaking as an American) we could just criminalize the use of Chinese LLMs.
/s ... but... maybe not?
Wherever you sit on the political spectrum the fact that this idea will almost certainly be seriously discussed in the coming months should be concerning to you.
They effectively are banned for a lot of the commercial world already. I cannot imagine most businesses American or European would be willing to use Chinese services.
Then you should bet on it if you are so confident.
Even if casual usage happens with employees which is questionable already, the real money would be from corporate adoption which is highly unlikely even from a European country, the risks are too high for data leaks.
I have two SO-DIMM sticks of a domestically produced Chinese brand named FASPEED, with chips bearing logos and markings that I don't recognize from anywhere else. These sticks' mfg. datestamp is "44-24" and from what I've learned they cost little in China but come with a salted price tag when sold through channels aimed at Western customers. I'm not sure if they come in fast-enough variants to compete, and not sure about the quality or longevity otherwise. FASPEED makes SSDs, too, but I have no data on those. I also have an M.2 SSD from another Chinese brand called XINCUU which I previously had never heard about. The label of that SSD is in parity with expectations of Chinese business morals - it claims to be PCIe NVMe with "1000 MB/s speed" but is in reality a SATA device, and it does not perform even close to the ~550 MB/s limit of SATA 3.0. Both of these run unusually warm for DDR4 memory and M.2 flash storage, leading me to believe they are wholly designed and produced in China.
China is building an entirely independent semi conductor supply chain and if they are not competitive now, they will be in the near future. US sanctions forced them into turbo charging their efforts.
Based on what Altman says and leaked reports, OpenAI is actually losing money on every new user. Unlike traditional software, maintaining a SOTA AI service doesn't scale. The conundrum he faces is he can either quantize models and slash R&D to try to turn a profit now but lose the SOTA race, or keep pumping money and hope the rest bleed out. He's opted for the second, having raised 10B in 2023, 6.6B in 2024 and reports of another raise in 2025. He's probably trying desperately for the middle ground where an explosion of high price subscriptions replacing workers massively boost his revenue. So he's also reportedly projecting revenue 4x to 13B this year.
I wouldn't necessarily think so. There's still enormous room for quantization and hardware optimization, which China has proven to be world class at. And a lot of spend is really on R&D. For the same reason I believe if OpenAI waned to they could break even in a year
That vast majority of conversations with AI is irrelevant to censorship. Well, I can only speak for myself, but surely you can see questions like "phone A vs phone B", and "how do I use feature X on product Y" or almost any programming question isn't concerned with censorship.
Is censorship a thing for models? Of course. Does it matter? Probably not, unless you either specifically have chats on those specific topics, or if you are trying to create a meme.
The concern of censorship is way overblown by some people. Most users only care about "does it work?", then some "is the answer correct?", and at the bottom is "is the answer censored, and according to what ideology?". Seriously, think about these models/products like a normal person.
But crucially not biased by RLHF being applied afterwards to stop the models from making basic biological observations, telling jokes about left wing politics, or saying anything nonnegative about European historical impact on the world, and so on.
What's interesting about Baidu's AI model Ernie is that Baidu and its founder, Robin Li, have been working on AI for a long time. Robin Li has a strong background in AI research going back many years. Also notable is that some of the key early research on scaling laws—important for understanding how AI models improve as they get bigger—was done by Baidu's AI lab. This shows Baidu's significant role in the ongoing development of AI.
Here’s a true story I find funny about scaling laws at Baidu.
From 2016-17 I did a projection using our scaling law equation with my coauthors about how many GPUs it would take to train an LLM with a step function in capability. Joel Hestness in particular did excellent experimental work to enable this.
I came out with a projection of about a $1 Billion GPU budget.
Baidu was in the middle of downsizing the US research center (SVAIL) in favor of AI in China and I was participating in the layoff of many of my colleagues while trying to keep the lights on long enough to finish our scaling law experiments, which I personally thought would change the world.
I actually wrote a report to Robin explaining the implications of scaling laws and asking for a $1 billion budget to train a Baidu LLM in 2016 and sat on it through 2017.
But I never sent it because I thought it would never have been supported in that environment. I sometimes wonder what Robin would have thought about it and how the world may have been different if Baidu had released ChatGPT.
We may be about to find out because the AI moat filled with simple algorithms and scale seems to be much more shallow than the processor and systems moat.
I have a huge amount of respect for Dario and Ilya for carrying on scaling laws at OpenAI or it may have never seen the light of day.
If there is one problem for the AI community to solve by 2030 I think it is the moat problem.
Do most people feel the way you do? This is one factor out of multitudes of factors representing Chinas rise as a super power that will eclipse the US in technological, economical and military might.
I’m excited but most people are patriotic and I feel things like this or even the whole situation with BYD producing better cars then Tesla is something people take as an attack to their identity. If not an attack it’s definitely represents an eroding of their patriotic identity.
Unfortunately Trump can’t slap a tariff on this. Maybe he can ban it like he was going to do with TikTok? The US really needs to get off its high horse and not associate its identity with being the sole economic super power in the world.
It's not about patriotism. Many people outside the US, myself included, see a problem with authoritarian superpowers per se. Although now that the US is rapidly drifting towards authoritarianism, that just seems like an inevitable future to prepare for.
Agreed. Within the US though a lot of it is definitely patriotism. But even for Europe a new super power on the block is not necessarily a good thing.
Would you prepare for such a future by banning TikTok and placing tariffs on all goods like BYD cars? I would say no. Those acts are done out of patriotism.
I think (hope) most folks care less about the “attack on patriotic identity” and are more concerned that what is essentially a dictatorship is rising in power significantly. History has shown dictatorships rarely end well for the general populace and the rest of the world.
Democracy has its flaws, but one of the features that most people prefer is that it can significantly change how it looks and operates to reflect the will of its people without violence.
I don't think this is really true. History mostly just shows that hegemonic powers rarely end well for other countries, and ultimately even for the people under said hegemony. The same will obviously be written of the US in the history books. We've invaded, overthrown, or tried to overthrow so many countries that you'd have a far easier time counting the countries we haven't tried to dominate in one way or the other.
And historically many of the greatest eras under Ancient Greece and Rome were under autocratic systems that advanced humanity by essentially every single metric. For that matter China has been among the most powerful countries in the world countless times - yet I think relatively few would ever know this because it's always been a quite insular nation, and never pursued hegemony in the same way as Western empires. Of course that could change but it seems extremely unlikely. Pursuing the perpetuation of global hegemony has been anything but fruitful for the US, and it should be a great lesson for the rest of the world. Those times, not just of the US - but of any global hegemon, are probably behind us.
We can agree to disagree on hegemonic power being a bigger deal than dictators. But regardless, saying China is insular is ridiculous. They have a very public plan to expand their hegemony by taking over the infrastructure of other nations by way of “developmental loans”.
IMF forces countries to adopt austerity politics[1], causing lower economic activity and often leading to economy shrinkage[2], and forces countries to open their markets to foreign capital, which leads to surplus extraction abroad. Both of those measures lead to impoverishing the country that is taking the loan.
That article says the exact opposite of what you are claiming. This is the lede paragraph:
"In December 2018, a leaked letter from the Kenyan auditor-general’s office sparked a rumour that Kenya had staked its bustling Mombasa Port as collateral for the Chinese-financed Standard Gauge Railway. Our new research shows why the collateral rumour is wrong."
Honestly I'm more worried about the US backsliding to full authoritarianism with the usually "spicier" foreign policy. The more politically insular China from the current regime seems stable enough. Xi could have even 15 years left in the tank before succession shenanigans start. Obviously this from a LATAM perspective, I'm not in Taiwan or South Korea, I would be considerably more spooked then.
That has been falsely taught to you but the real fight has never been about the type of rule. But rather on the type of economy US and the west hate China not because of how its dictatorship but rather because its economy is not private capital economy that is showing it can succeed without private citizens completely taking over the country.
As in the last 40-50 years is has been the US and western countries that have been involved in bringing down democracies that had slightest socialist tendencies and propped up dictatorships that allowed the companies to exploit the countries resources. So it is not about the type of government rather the type of economy.
>its economy is not private capital economy that is showing it can succeed without private citizens completely taking over the country.
Its economy absolutely is private capital. What it has shown is the dictator is still stronger than the private capital and will react to any threats to the dictator with violence (see: Jack Ma)
> As in the last 40-50 years is has been the US and western countries that have been involved in bringing down democracies that had slightest socialist tendencies and propped up dictatorships that allowed the companies to exploit the countries resources. So it is not about the type of government rather the type of economy.
Ahhh, yes, the Great War of 2021 when the US invaded Sweden, Finland, and Norway for having governments in power that have far more than “even the slightest socialist tendencies”.
> Ahhh, yes, the Great War of 2021 when the US invaded Sweden, Finland, and Norway for having governments in power that have far more than “even the slightest socialist tendencies”.
No, the Great Stupidity of 2025, when the US started officially endorsing the extreme right-wing in the EU and calling for its dismantlement.
How is Sweden, Finland or Norway in any way socialist? I haven't heard anything about seizing the means of production or overthrowing of the capitalist class from them. Unless you treat governments doings stuff as socialism, then I guess they may be.
China started rising when it allowed capitalism in its special economic zones. Private capital had a big part in it. Shenzhen was given that status in the early 80s.
That's like 10% of the story. There are dozens of countries that moved to a more capital oriented economy yet there is only one China. The philipines, Indonesia, Malasia, the whole continent of Africa or South America. All capitalist economies, even neoliberal. Yet none of those countries that "allowed capitalism" come close to 1% of China's GDP. What's the difference? The difference is that in China the Communist Party governs. Society rules over Capital, not the other way around. That made the whole difference.
>Democracy has its flaws, but one of the features that most people prefer is that it can significantly change how it looks and operates to reflect the will of its people without violence.
Internally, maybe. But China becoming a de facto supowerpower doesn't mean everyone else becomes Chinese any more than America being a superpower means everyone else becomes American. The salient point for most people is how that superpower balances the carrot of trade and the stick of violence to maintain its hegemony. To that end the US has far worse of a track record than does China.
Unless the implication is that China intends to directly colonize Western countries, which is something only the US is currently threatening to do.
Like 95% of the planet, I'm not American. Like 82% of the planet, I'm not Chinese.
BYD being better than Tesla isn't a matter of patriotism in most of the world. DeepSeek and Baidu can spend as long as they want playing musical chairs/rap battles with Anthropic and OpenAI, it makes no odds to me which wins.
America and China both have politics that have no reason to care for people like me, nor people like my friends, that they are for different reasons and differ in penalties for being an out-group doesn't matter when I'm a foreigner to both, when my antecedent are who the 13 Colonies rebelled against and more recent antecedent forced unwanted opium sales on China.
It has nothing to do with just giving up and going 'Wellp, I guess China wins.'
China and the US are obviously very different culturally in just about every way possible. This difference makes for great competition. Someone in another topic mentioned something that seemed pretty insightful to me - in that where LLM companies failed in the US was in basically becoming clones of each other, whereas DeepSeek (and now perhaps Baidu) were going in a different way, and that way turned out to be better.
US companies will inevitably copy these strategies, one way or the other, as will Chinese companies copy what ends up working well from the US (see their latest rockets looking more than a little inspired by Starship). And the true competitiveness ensures in the end that the main people who will win will not be whichever guy ended up founding an AI company first, but you and I. It's how capitalism is supposed to work - companies beat themselves down into a race to the bottom, and society reaps the rewards. It only gets really messed up when there's no "real" competition, which is an increasingly frequent state of affairs. But that definitely will not be the case here.
Expect the same thing from India in the future as well. Their economy is advancing rapidly, and soon enough we're going to have another 1.4 billion people able to fully utilize the outliers such a population entails to similarly drive things forward in their own unique way. It's a great future for the world as a whole.
I feel like Deepseek had such good media reception, and SOTA models are so close that "GPT4x performance at y% the price" is an easy tagline that companies will be using in the coming 6 months. It's an easy goal to achieve because of diminishing returns in compute and game-able benchmarking, cherry-picking, distilling etc.
Not to say there can't be actual interesting improvements in performance/cost, but in many cases it will be more of a marketing angle.
Just tried it. Not sure exactly what model is behind the scenes but it was cringe. I provided specs for a coding task, it told me that the specs are possible but too complex so it just gave me an alternative naive way of doing it. I use LLMs as a tool so I'm trying to be very exact with my requirements and wording, this felt like it was basically negotiating the requirements with me...kinda annoyed me, lol. My suspicion is that it was trained too much on chinese forums and the data was not refined enough.
You get one free question answered without a login. You can dismiss the login prompt which appears after submitting your question and use copy/paste with keyboard shortcuts or browser debug tools to retrieve the full answer (including the part hidden with CSS rules). Either use XPath of '//div[@id="answer_text_id"]//text()' or copy the text/eventstream response for the API call to https://yiyan.baidu.com/eb/chat/conversation/v2 once the SSE session has closed.[1] Clear cookies and site data and you'll get a new session and can keep going.
It can take about 20 seconds to return all tokens so it appears likely the login prompt is there to minimise resource consumption.
Surely, this is as inevitable as not being able to use Wechat as an American.
The models aren't what worry me anyway. China is going to kick our ass when it comes to AI integration into society and the economy.
Imagine the difficulties faced by America vs China in integrating AI into healthcare.
We are just too worried about winning this AI model sporting event even though the entire concept is flawed and doomed to failure. We actually have to figure out how to use these models for more than how many Rs are in strawberry. That appears to be the actual hard part.
Of course, none of this is helped by having wasted an entire generation of some of America's best minds on javascript programming for obscene profit.
An entire generation is not wasted. The bigger issue is that China has no concern wiping out whole classes of jobs to be replaced by the next iteration and America struggles with keeping those voters happy. Think about things like our lack of dock work automation in favor of keeping some labor unions happy.
I'm trying to figure out the same thing. They make claums about it being totally free, but everything is in Chinese and you appear to need a Chinese mobile number to register.
GTP 4.5 is not a reasoning model. Reasoning models outperform it clearly. Even OpenAIs o3-mini is smarter while being magnitudes cheaper. Those 2 should be compared in my opinion.
GPT 4.5 feels like a failed experiment to see how far you can push non-thinking models.
Outperform in what way? Reasoning models may be able to solve problems correctly a bigger percentage of time, but they burn many tokens to get there. So they’re much less efficient, both in latency and ultimately environmental cost.
>GPT 4.5 feels like a failed experiment to see how far you can push non-thinking models
It's not a failed experiment, it's a very good experiment, because it produced a very useful piece of information for the world (that there's limited return to further size scaling).
Baidu have a long history in the scalable distributed deep learning space.
PaddlePaddle (so good they named it twice) predates Ray and supports both data parallel and model-parallel training. It is still being developed.
Cheap means small, small means low Q&A scores. I know that this isn't that important for the majority of applications, but I feel that over-reliance on RAG whenever Q&A performance is discussed is quite misleading.
Being able to clearly and correctly discuss science topics, to write about art, to understand nuances in (previously unseen) literature, etc. is impossible simply through powerful-reasoning + RAG, and so many advanced use cases would be enabled by this. Sonnet 3.5+ and GPT 4.5 are still unparalleled here, and it's not even close.
Lmarena.ai is a very accurate eval (with stylecontrol). Other benchmarks like AIME and whatever can be trained on/optimized for and therefore should not be trusted. Most ai companies do something fishy to boost their benchmark scores.
What use cases? We are still in the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" phase, which might end before anything of value is found (if previous fads serve as a lesson here).
I doubt diffusion algorithms are a good fit for the kind of real time computer vision processing that self driving cars depend upon, do you have good sources for that?
About writing assistance, based on our office/copilot recent rollout, I don't see that getting past the novelty effect and turning into something most people will want to pay for (besides for programming and niche use cases).
Intelligence can not be a commodity, because complexity is infinite. By definition the top 1% in understanding complexity are the top 1% in intelligence.
What does Trump have to do with Sam Altman's management of OpenAI? If Harris was president, what race to the bottom do you imagine she would engage in so Sam Altman could undercut China?
That's not the argument they were making. What they're stating is that the Trump administration is directly facilitating the slow death of American intellectualism, and that this will have downstream consequences for what advances come out of the US in the future.
Trump can pretty much reduce Sam Altman's talent pool, his voter base seems to have an appetite for that.
Also let's not pretend like private sector R&D has not been built over public sector research since forever. Seems like Trump wants to make public science more "efficient". Results still to be seen, but the perspective is not encouraging given the common wisdom on how basic science grows.
> With anti-science sentiment in America, I think China will take over everything.
Look at what the current Trump administration has been doing to research institutions in the US. Nature published an article outright calling it "siege of science".
At a point in time where the US should step on the gas to prevent China to catch up, it's actually stepping hard on the breaks. I don't think this is even up for discussion.
They are the modern age robbers barrons, money coming before a sense of morals, ethics or patriotism is all the signalling there is here. Oh, and it sounds like your information bubble isn't the healthiest.
(and since this is met with downvotes, I will substantiate the last part by saying that people employing "woke" effortlessly like it's a real and casual word, tend to be exposed to it a lot while not realising that it is a carefully engineered derogatory word meant to sow division and derail discussions)
I wonder what's the excuse for keeping the OpenAI models closed "for the benefit of all humanity" now that models as powerful are widely available as open weights.
We need to raise 1.63 Gazillion dollars to stay ahead of the game, to make sure that the newest models remain in the hands of an independent nonprofit acting for the benefit of all humanity, rather than some authoritarian regime... And investors willing to write a check for 1.63 Gazillion dollars require the prospect of profitability and hence a closed-source product.
Lots of people want Altman to lose for reasons completely unrelated to the partisan political posturing in the United States. Wonder if some of the early LLM "leaks" from other entities happened because they wanted to keep Altman from achieving his dream of LLMs being hidden behind large thick walls under the control of a select few.
Hijacking this thread: what's currently the cheapest way to get structured data out of a PDF?
I assume there's some reasonable tool out there to convert PDFs to Markup and than feed it to some LLM API with okay costs (Gemini? DeepSeek?). Any suggestions?
I’m feeding pdfs directly to Gemini to extract tables and so far the results are pretty good. There was a post on HN a few days ago about using Gemini for this task.
Surprised nobody has pointed this out yet — this is not a GPT 4.5 level model.
The source for this claim is apparently a chart in the second tweet in the thread, which compares ERNIE-4.5 to GPT-4.5 across 15 benchmarks and shows that ERNIE-4.5 scores an average of 79.6 vs 79.14 for GPT-4.5.
The problem is that the benchmarks they included in the average are cherry-picked.
They included benchmarks on 6 Chinese language datasets (C-Eval, CMMLU, Chinese SimpleQA, CNMO2024, CMath, and CLUEWSC) along with many of the standard datasets that all of the labs report results for. On 4 of these Chinese benchmarks, ERNIE-4.5 outperforms GPT-4.5 by a big margin, which skews the whole average.
This is not how results are normally reported and (together with the name) seems like a deliberate attempt to misrepresent how strong the model is.
Bottom line, ERNIE-4.5 is substantially worse than GPT-4.5 on most of the difficult benchmarks, matches GPT-4.5 and other top models on saturated benchmarks, and is better only on (some) Chinese datasets.
To try to avoid the inevitable long arguments about which benchmarks or sets of them are universally better: there is no such thing anymore. And even within benchmarks, we're increasingly squinting to see the difference.
Do the benchmarks reflect real-world usability? My feeling is that the benchmark result numbers stop working above 75%.
In a real problem you may need to get 100 things right in a chain which means a 99% chance of getting each single one correct results in only 37% change of getting the correct end result. But creating a diverse test that can correctly identify 99% correct results in complex domains sounds very hard since the answers are often nuanced in details where correctness is hard to define and determine. From working in complex domains as a human, it often is not very clear if something is right or wrong or in a somewhat undefined and underexplored grey area. Yet we have to operate in those areas and then over many iterations converge on a result that works.
Not sure how such complex domains should be benchmarked and how we objectively would compare the results.
So, fairly accurate if you're Chinese?
It doesn't really matter what nationality or ethnicity you are, but if you communicate with the model in Chinese you might get better results from this model.
Then again, if they've misrepresented the strength of the model overall, there might be some other shenanigans with their results. The fact that their results show their model is worse than GPT-4.5 on 2 Chinese language benchmarks, while it's so much stronger on some of the others, is a bit weird.
GPT-4.5's advantages are supposed to be in aspects that aren't being captured well in current benchmarks, so the claim would be shaky even if ERNIE's benchmarks actually showed better performance.
You know what's sad? Every Western company has been using this technique for a long time...
I guess this is the end of OpenAI? No more dreaming of Universal Basic Compute for AI, Multi Trillion for Fabs and Semi?
This is just like everything in China. They will find ways to drive down cost to below anyone previously imagined, subsidised or not. And even just competing among themselves with DeepSeek vs ERNIE and Open sourcing them meant there is very little to no space for most.
Both DRAM and NAND industry for Samsung / Micron may soon be gone, I thought this was going to happen sooner but it seems finally happening. GPU and CPU Designs are already in the pipelines with RISC-V, IMG and ARM-China. OLED is catching up, LCD is already taken over. Batteries we know. The only thing left is foundries.
Huawei may release its own Open Source PC OS soon. We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene.
> We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene
Generally, I’ve found that almost no founders or friends I speak with have any vision for the future anymore. They care only about making money and do not care how. It’s a spectacular collapse of vision and purpose—these people have always existed but it feels incredibly pervasive now.
With that, I realize your comment is much broader than AI so below is too domain specific but…
VC has been investing in AI as-if it were a winner takes all market, but it has been obvious that isn’t the case.
Not only that, but the massive amount of cash thrown to anyone with even marginal credentials has undermined the constraints that often lead to innovation.
There is 0 reason that Safe Superintelligence should be raising for the second time at a 30 B valuation with no product.
> VC has been investing in AI as-if it were a winner takes all market, but it has been obvious that isn’t the case.
I really don't see how this was supposed to go, and I've never heard an explanation.
I don't see any kind of coherent vision from any of these types.
Most normal folks (i.e not SV/HN types that seem to desire to replace their marketable programming skills with LLM output) really don't "want" LLMs in any real sense.
Sure, people use them like a search engine, kids cheat on homework with them etc, but there's not this overwhelming universal desire for them like there was for, say iPhones.
I never once have heard any sort of proposed roadmap for how LLMs were supposed to work as a product.
They were just going to get, uh "really good" and take everyone's office job or something?*
Normal F500 organizations that are obviously a target for LLM use (via hyperscaler sales) are still yet to see a clear path to "revolutionizing" their workforce or whatever via LLMs-it's just not there. Costs are too high, there's no obvious use case, "hallucinations" are a real impediment etc.
I'll add many of the public usecases for this (i.e those a hyperscaler would blog about as a sales promo) are seriously weak ("we reduced onboarding time by 20% with $MODEL")
I would really like to hear a proposal for how this is all supposed to come together. Does anyone have a concrete plan for the future for all this stuff?
*I'll note, this is NOT the way to sell a product to the masses, either.
Addendum: I'm not an "LLM hater" by any means. I pay for GH Copilot, and have been running local LLMs since it's been a thing (granted with limited hardware, and limited quality)--I intend to wait a bit and buy better hardware with one motivating factor being running local LLMs in a year or so when the open-source offerings stabilize"
I have changed from Copilot to Cline with Claude 3.7 and it is a total gamechanger. For some one like me being able to describe a multi file edit is really empowering. I hate that kind of busy work
You're looking for a proposal for how it's supposed to come together in the future, but VCs are living in the world where it already has come together. Normal F500 organizations have widely adopted LLMs, with OpenAI reporting that 92% of them are customers. (https://www.axios.com/2024/08/29/openai-chatgpt-200-million-...) Determining individual business usage is always a bit sketchy, but at least one survey run by a major staffing firm indicates that a majority of workers and almost all executives use generative AI for their jobs. (https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/01/ai-training-workforc...)
can I say something.
This is one of the most finest and most accurate things that I have read in a long time.
This really could be a blog post which I encourage you to make! (I would prefer github pages but if you really want , I have a domain name on cloudflare and I am more than willing to host the static page of such blog on my own domain name for absolutely free (lets go , cloudflare!)
Its just facts. Pure facts. "" Generally, I’ve found that almost no founders or friends I speak with have any vision for the future anymore. They care only about making money and do not care how. It’s a spectacular collapse of vision and purpose—these people have always existed but it feels incredibly pervasive now. ""
Why did I read it in a monotonous way as if a student from the future understands the current scenario. I felt as if it was the same level of sadness in my heart as that when you listen to some video which has raining background and he reads the dark comedy (something like burialgoods oats shitposting but this time more serious and real!)
Currently saving this on wayback machine just for this comment. Internet needs to preserve this comment , no matter what.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250316121222/https://news.ycom...
May archive never go down!
There used to be significant alignment between engineers, founders and certain VCs: lots of excitement around building software that genuinely made things better/easier/cheaper. Each group naturally wanted a different thing out of this arrangement but each camp was on the same page.
Now I feel like everything is more top-down. The tech sector feels less like market capitalism and more like something being centrally planned: we all must chase trends that come from various industry thought-leaders. And it all must be done a very specific way (this in particular is why Chinese companies are likely going to disrupt the AI market: they’re free from this burden)
VCs are happy to throw money at something if they believe they can corner a market. It just doesn't have to do much with reality. Until of course, it becomes self fulfilling. But in this case it seems like it's not going to happen because nobody has a moat.
Founder risk has been nil for a long time either because they pay themselves six figures out the gate or because the job market has been hot enough that they can market utter failure to get another job.
There’s a lot of opportunity to make low cost software that out competes big tech just because it doesn’t demand 10000x returns on every if statement.
I’d encourage Europeans to start replacing American software vendors with small teams today. You won’t become the next American oligarch but you’ll be able to clean up millions from the incompetent Americans.
I think there's huge opportunity for software that replicates the 80% most used features from big tech companies/packages, but at half the price and a tiny fraction of the overall complexity. Think of Python Anywhere, offering a very simple Python-focused VPS/PaaS platform, but so so much easier to use than AWS.
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> I’ve found that almost no founders or friends I speak with have any vision for the future anymore.
I think in general there is a feeling that the time to get your bag is rapidly shrinking.
Once everything is built by these things there will be no reason to create anything as the platform owners (big tech) will be able to take everything for themselves and no longer have to share 70% with those pesky creators/small business/startups etc.
When it comes to hardware who pioneered all those technologies? Definitely not China. They’ve stolen unimaginable amounts of IP and will continue to do so. But yes you’re right, they surprise everyone with how well they can scale the stolen innovation.
Possible, but if you look at the graduate students and lecturers behind many of these IPs you will find they are Chinese (or Russians or Iranians).
This is the paradox in those who are championing barring Chinese students from the US to prevent them from stealing IP, they don't see that at least 50% of this IP is generated by students from China, in a way they will be handing the CCP a gift by incentivising those students to remain in China.
I don't see how this is a proper reply to the prior comment; which Chinese lecturer has a Nobel prize in AI?
>They’ve stolen unimaginable amounts of IP and will continue to do so.
All AI models are built on the back of massive amounts of "IP stealing". Either we consider IP to be valid and then all western companies in this space are just as bad, or we go with the direction the western companies are claiming and then China is not doing anything wrong.
All developing markets "steal" until they've caught up with the competition. Just look at the US and how they "stole" innovations and tech from Europe.
"Just look at the US and how they "stole" innovations and tech from Europe."
except that they are not
Alexander Hamilton oversaw an explicit program to steal technology from England. https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88...
I believe that is what is being referenced.
most of these case are european that steal from another european then who emigrated to the state in colonial days to found their own bussiness
I think parent was thinking of events like …
“he brought British textile technology to the United States, modifying it for American use. He memorized the textile factory machinery designs as an apprentice to a pioneer in the British industry before migrating to the U.S. at the age of 21.”
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
in defence of US, US didn't steal anything lol
the European themselves bringing this industry to the US
that's what western companies did with china too
right now trying to steal back semi manufacturing from taiwan through tariffs and trade restrictions
in case of TSMC, having 80% most advance chip manufacturing concentrated in 1 small island for an entire world is clearly problematic (corona teach us a lot), no matter how you look at this
Would you say the west “stole” the IP for paper , ice cream, tea and noodle? Weird notion.
These sour grapes comments are so goofy, and honestly a little racist. The millions of Chinese engineers working out in China are extremely talented, and to downplay their achievements like this and to chalk them all up as thieves is ridiculous. They have the skills, the man power, and the vision, and they’re eating the West’s lunch regardless of your feelings on how fair it is.
I don't think it's that, so much as the average western citizen isn't able to go and create a knock off of a new invention / product and have it sold without legal consequences. That has been available to many Chinese citizens though.
It is entirely irrelevant who pioneered the tech. This is why no one gives a crap about xerox anymore.
Dismissing Chinese tech is foolish. They are tech leaders in many areas and moving to new ones every day. Solar, Nuclear, Batteries, EVs, Drones, Robotics etc. They have no one to copy in those fields because they have left the rest of the world behind.
Expertise in HVDC is entirely contained in China it's incredible. They're definitely capable of innovations when needed.
Every year China produces about as many stem graduates as the rest of the world combined.
>When it comes to hardware who pioneered all those technologies?
Not sure that matters anymore in the new world order.
Frontier tokens are largely fungible now. The details of how they came about doesn't make them any less useful.
By the 1890s both the US and Germany had surpassed Britain when it came to industrial output, I don’t think it was any consolation for the Brits that they had invented it (almost) all.
I’m replying to myself to address multiple other replies.
First of all, it’s really sad to see people saying it doesn’t matter the journey of how one achieves success, and all that matters is your current state.
Brushing the CCPs countless acts of IP theft under the rug is like saying it doesn’t matter that the Trump family committed financial fraud for decades. All that matters is that they’ve managed to become billionaires today. Would the Trump family be anywhere near as wealthy if they hadn’t cheated for so long? Would China be much further behind than they are now if the CCP hadn’t stolen so much IP? I see multiple people here implying those questions are irrelevant, which I absolutely disagree with. Ignoring all that history is a huge injustice to everyone else who didn’t resort to that kind of behavior.
I also want to be clear I’m not trying to make some ridiculous claim that Chinese individuals have been working independently to hack and steal IP. It’s their government and that same government is to blame for the many people like me who really look down on them despite what they’ve ultimately been able to achieve. They undoubtedly have huge numbers of brilliant citizens. When I make comments about China’s shameful history of tech IP theft, I’m talking about their government.
Is it really theft when an American company sends over the CAD files to a Chinese manufacturer to make it for them?
I know there's some about of corporate espionage where trade secrets got exfilled, but what makes you so certain the majority of Chinese success is from stolen IP, as if electrical engineering grad students can't figure out how to make solar panels from first principals?
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I guess the majority in here would agree that without strong market intervention OpenAI will soon implode. They urgently need:
- WIPO copyright exemption
- Anti-China protectionist measures
- Hard-line hardware export control
- Multi-billion dollar government contracts
This is the old way of doing it, and probably the way the US is going to go with, at the detriment of its own population. - I would posit that since we are talking about digital goods, there is a better way:
Require open source / open weights of any company that used data to it doesn't own to train its models. If chinese companies do not comply, their copyright becomes void in the US, and these models are very easy to copy. Treat advances in architecture as a utility, and let the utilization of those architectures be the market for companies to compete in.
That one weird trick. x4.
Gold
Of course, none of this will prevent china from producing technology that's clearly as impressive, if not more so.
A copyright exemption would just put them at the level of deepseek officially, but they've been working around that anyway in practice. I'm not sure that change would make any difference.
> but they've been working around that anyway in practice
Working around how?
Flagrantly violating
Edit: Facebook torrented 81.7TB of books.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
Well there was the case of an employee leaving due to his perceived moral issues around the use of copyrighted material in the training dataset [1]
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/openai-whistleblower-who...
This is all protectionistic measures. Just let it implode, and let companies with better technology take over.
Why should people involved in some hyped company deserve all this "socialism for the rich" from the state?
Yeah sorry I worded my comment in a weird way: I'm definitively not advocating for any of those points
It's similar to how China dominated manufacturing in prior decades.
They have massive amounts of low cost labor and, unfortunately, the US has pretty large walls up preventing mass in-migration of white collar workers.
H1B is capped and also more of a lottery than a points based system.
If the US allowed mass white collar immigration, wages would decline materially which would make our industries more competitive for the next generation of software.
Right now the system is geared around protectionism (intended or not) and wage inflation for US local workers.
The current market wages in software are far far above what a global equilibrium would be. Though myself and I'm sure most others here have benefited from it in the short term.
To be clear, established companies with an existing market are fine for now and can do well with high wages.
But the next generation of companies that are chasing smaller markets and margins, ones that require more elbow grease to out-compete are underserved.
e.g. the entire DeepSeek team was paid less than a few Meta engineers (with 7 figure comp each)
"The firm offers 14-month pay for various positions and the highest offer is for deep learning researchers for artificial general intelligence (AGI), with a monthly salary between 80,000 yuan ($10,983) and 110,000 yuan, which could mean an annual income of up to 1.54 million yuan, the report said."
cheaper hardware usually means more adoption of the software and then even more demand for hardware
Correct answer, never think about the future in terms of linear extrapolations. It's a non-linear differential equation with lots of variables and expect complex feedback loops. Systems react to change.
Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
you are assuming that cost is stopping from ppl using these technologies.
These things are not actually useful. They hyper optimzed it for coding usecase but it still sucks balls at it.
When the cost of training a model goes down, it doesn't simply become cheaper to the end user. In addition to that, the provider will train even larger and more capable models.
We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene.
I think you're witnessing it rather getting back in touch with reality than collapsing. Multi-trillion out of jsx generator was too much from the beginning. You folks just don't know what to do with too much money you have.
> I think you're witnessing it rather getting back in touch with reality than collapsing.
You're witnessing the USA tech scene getting in back to reality. Software engineers in other western countries looked at the salaries the Tech scene was paying in the USA, and scratched their heads.
Its a collapse from fictional reality to real reality , but a collapse nonetheless.
Sometimes reality acts more weird than fiction itself. I have just now decided to call this "fictional reality"
Like yesterday when I realized that nuclear bombs weren't that far away from the creation of chemical resonance & they happened after world war I and I think , just really 5-6 years before nuclear bombs but still!
It actually gave me a lot of hope because I felt that a lot of people were focusing on AI , so I can use AI (sometimes , if I want) to focus on a passion project that I want , to maybe earn some money.
I have also thought of creating AI projects but that too for fun. I don't know two shits but I just want to know what the hype is about from a theoretical standpoint.
Hardware tech, to be specific. Plenty of room left in software services still. The east can compete on price but user experience is incomparable.
What user experience are you talking about? Chatbot? Or software in general? Cause Tiktok beats Facebook out of water. Chatbot for English communities sure, I also prefer Claude over Deepseek in terms of project support and UI. But this is because they are focusing on Chinese communities, Doubao has much better features that is used by Chinese. It's not really comparable even if all US chatbots were accessible in China. Once LLM tech slows, I am sure Chinese chatbots would beat the American ones in terms of user experience.
So far. China has been focused on becoming a world's factory for 30 years. They started moving up the food chain fairly recently.
Give it another generation and if China will not walk off the ledge with either government or societal issues (which, granted, is where they are slowly going IMO) they will own the UX and design as well. My 2c.
They’ve been moving up the food chain for 30 years. The only difference is recently that upward movement has begun to surpass the US.
Given that the US has been number one for a really long time now it doesn’t sit well with a lot of the patriotic identity people have about the US. People either can’t accept reality or the make up some excuse about unfair economic practices.
The last thing they want to admit is that China is more competent or more superior.
The moment I realized this was going to be the truth was when the Chinese government essentially purged a bunch of unicorn social media companies overnight, erasing billions of wealth on paper. It seemed like the motive was to value and encourage actual economic value over worshipping whatever makes the line go up. When I saw they had the guts and wisdom to do that I realized that they may have a better grasp on philosophy.
Previously I always thought democracy was a slow but eventually correct system of producing wisdom. And to a degree there’s been truth to this. However the missing ingredient has been what do we do with that success once we’ve had it.
The west would never have the guts to delete a billion dollar industry even if they realized it was a net negative. We simply don’t know how to guard against our passions, pleasures, and handle success in a responsible way. I think cccp has many flaws but taking bold action against this kind of problem isn’t one of them.
I do hope that I’m wrong about this though and that a democratic system can see its way out of a local maximum built upon an unsustainable way of doing things. I think the belief in the market as some kind of oracle that knows value and price is its language has a lot to do with this track we’re on.
I agree with your comments about the West. The fact that we continue to expand legal gambling is evidence enough that we don't care about the negative consequences of an industry.
But let's not pretend China is perfect. The purge had much more to do with a) eliminating a potential competing power to the CCCP, and b) Xi's boomer-era gut instinct that new media forms are bad.
Yeah, good points. Definitely not my intention to say China's perfect, and I'm probably reading too much into the wisdom of this vs. good ol' preservation of power.
> a) eliminating a potential competing power to the CCCP
Eliminating businesses competing with state power sounds like something that we too should have done when we still could.
Which social media companies have been removed? They still have large clear leaders at the moment.
Jack Ma’s
>When I saw they had the guts and wisdom to do that I realized that they may have a better grasp on philosophy.
It's not a better grasp on philosophy. It's a logistical issue. A centralized government can wipe this out because control is centralized. In a democracy the control is spread out among people who understand, people who don't understand and among people who have business interest in said topic.
Think about it this way. The very people responsible for the unicorn social media companies in a democracy have a say in whether or not there own companies can be wiped out. If they're rich they can influence the game even more with advertising and propaganda. They influence the outcome and thus self interest actually pollutes the decision making process in a democracy.
It's not about guts. It's literally that in a democracy even the conflicting business interests can stop the right thing from happening because of they are self interested in the bad thing to happen. It is a logistical issue. When business interests influence government then government decisions favor business interests. It's that simple. And right now since businesses are more centralized and have more power then individuals then the government actually favors big corporations. That's the eventual outcome of most capitalist societies.
In a dictatorship, the dictator is usually well removed from such things and thus can make decisions very impartially and with no resistance. But like an evil dictator can do stuff like behead your entire family if you talk shit about him. Good sides and bad sides. The problem is you live in a democracy so everyone talks about how shitty the alternative is because of bias. The reality is democracy and dictatorship are simply two sides of a coin.
> They’ve been moving up the food chain for 30 years.
Organically, sure. If a company has an opportunity to build higher value components profitably it would likely take it. But that is slow.
What I mean is state pouring massive amounts of money, every year for many years, into as-is unprofitable areas to build not just the products but education, infrastructure and support needed for the local companies to become competitive.
WSJ had a good article in the last few days on China's containership building which AFACR said the government poured over 10 billion at the time to become the world's shipbuilder. This is the time of effort I am talking about and, as far as I know, it is fairly new.
$10B is a drop in the ocean. If all it took was a bit of money the US could have stayed ahead. For perspective, they’ve earmarked $800B for clean energy subsidies, that AI fund is $500B.
You can’t buy back entire supply chains and a workforce, it takes generations.
It was 10B 20 years ago when China was significantly poorer. And it is not just money. It is planning, oversight and various care and feeding activities (china-style, including executing officials for corruption) for almost 10 years before that part of the system became mature and economically self-supporting.
The USA hasn't been number one in anything for decades.
So really nothing will change, Americans will keep thinking they're number one and life will go on as usual.
USA is number one in believing they are number one.
The US is still number one I making software and space. Though I doubt we have much longer to hold onto this.
A lot of consumer tech with very competitive UX is coming out of China. They are also getting very strongly into e.g. web frontend tech. I see no reason why the west would have any special advantage in this.
They are ahead of Europe (at least in car UX) but quite behind of the US. This is the last stronghold that the US has but given the recent layoffs and transition toward "AI everything", I am not sure if the US tech industry will survive this too.
Time to start learning Chinese.
I would rate Europe over US by far for car UX. My north American vehicles universally have the worst interfaces. My European Cars typically the best and Japanese/others in between.
I assume you have Tesla center screen and CarPlay/Android Auto in mind, but those aren't that highly regarded outside the US...
What US car UX is ahead of Europe?
Chinese hardware docs are very scarce if you don't know mandarin and don't have Chinese connections.
So to compete on software West might encounter unexpected difficulties. You need good platform docs to develop good software.
Probably not a problem for big companies.
That feels like something AI could solve.
Last time I did this, someone who knew the language described the attemped Chinese in dispagaging terms:
在中文和任何拉丁-德语语言之间进行转换是机器翻译仍然难以完成的任务；我不知道为什么，但它比英语-西班牙语或英语-C 等语言的转换要困难得多。
What are C languages?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language) etc
In the above Chinese this doesn't really make sense.
Thus demonstrating the point I was making with (and demonstrated by) the "attemped Chinese": machine translation isn't good enough yet. (This Chinese is from Google Translate).
It's shorthand for something or it's a typo. It doesn't make sense otherwise.
Software is more trivial than hardware. That’s why you see bootcamps for software but not for hardware. China can easily eclipse the US on the software front. And they have.
> We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene
Is economy a zero sum game now? Isn't economic development supposed to be a good thing? Can the West only exist in a world of poverty and underdevelopment?
The current western lifestyle of dirt cheap foreign goods exists only in a world of relative poverty and underdevelopment.
That doesn't make sense. Consumer goods have become cheaper and more accessible because the third world has become more productive and richer. If they become richer still it will be because they become more productive still, which will mean their exports will be more competitive (cheaper).
How interesting a question is OpenAI's corporate fate in the context of future of AI now that it's just another for-profit?
Let's just hope they contribute back as much as the west has contributed to spreading knowledge and knowledge-tools to the world instead of just free-riding on it and then pretending it wasn't foundational. Linux, Wikipedia, RISC-V, ...
It's not just the Chinese who are lacking the acknowledgment of these contributions.
My man literally the best open source model (that happens to be excellently documented) is Chinese.
That is because they want to undercut the US and prevent them from making money. It remains to be seen if they'll be as benevolent in making tech open-source if they are the clear winners. Frankly, I don't see why they will.
Classic. If doing good makes someone feel good, then they must be selfish! And their doing good is in fact not good! /s
I'm sorry but your comment comes off as racist. You've given no reason as to why they wouldn't do the same and your opinion seems entirely coming from assumption of ill-will. Why would you think the West have shared their knowledge while China won't? I suggest you reevaluate your biases.
FWIW I am not American or even from the west. At a nation-state level, the west (US) shared knowledge with the intention of offshoring production for cheaper goods, not out of the kindness of their hearts. They still protect key technologies like the jet engine and bleeding edge fab tech. It is the same when it comes to Chinese companies that are at the top of their game - DJI or Bambu labs don't open source their designs last I checked, and their track record when it comes to software is also not great. Simply put, companies only open source when it makes business sense.
I am simply assuming that China follows the same principle - try to wring maximum advantage out of their industrial might and commoditize their complement wherever possible. Because of China's unique single party system, their strategies are very top-down coming straight from the CCP in key areas like AI and robotics. It is not racism, simply realpolitik.
The CCP strictly controls knowledge and information access within China through rigorous censorship. It would be surprising if Chinese companies were allowed to just make their advancements open source without review, if those advancements would have a meaningful impact on the state of technology.
It is strange and inappropriate to call that observation racist.
I don't think it's intentional racism, but a lot of what many western folks think of China come from propaganda. China has visa-free policy for many countries now. Go check it out in person.
Things are done for reasons.
We can discuss the reasons why they might or might not open source things, or we can agree not to because someone might call us racist for discussing corporate and wcenomic motivations.
The West mostly has not shared their knowledge. Most software is not open source.
There is already evidence that they do in fact contribute to open source. Maybe replace “hope” with “continue to”
What's happening to DRAM and NAND?
Chinese complete supply chain is ramping up. Previously they could achieve the Frontier but hampered by tools sanctions. Now Chinese indigenous tools are catching up.
> Huawei may release its own Open Source PC OS soon. We are slowly but surely witnessing the collapse of Western Tech scene.
The US has been so used to being number one that not being number one equates to “collapse”.
No the US Will NOT collapse. They just won’t be number one in economic/military/technological might. Similar to how many countries like the UK, Japan, and more have not existed as the number one economic super power.
It will be (arguably already is) societally rough though. The west has been riding the asian cheap labor for decades (and the cheap colonial labor before that). People are not gonna be happy falling down the "value chain".
Probably explains Trump's moves: Force out all the illegal immigrants doing low value work, kill off as much fluff in the government as you can to cut the debt load, those unemployed people are forced to fill in the low value labor. You've solved all the problems and everyone except the capital owners are worse off..but at least the capital owners live to see another day.
Or (speaking as an American) we could just criminalize the use of Chinese LLMs.
/s ... but... maybe not?
Wherever you sit on the political spectrum the fact that this idea will almost certainly be seriously discussed in the coming months should be concerning to you.
They effectively are banned for a lot of the commercial world already. I cannot imagine most businesses American or European would be willing to use Chinese services.
They might be officially banned by the employers, but I guarantee you they'll get lots of usage anyway
Then you should bet on it if you are so confident.
Even if casual usage happens with employees which is questionable already, the real money would be from corporate adoption which is highly unlikely even from a European country, the risks are too high for data leaks.
Does China make cheap and fast DRAM?
I have two SO-DIMM sticks of a domestically produced Chinese brand named FASPEED, with chips bearing logos and markings that I don't recognize from anywhere else. These sticks' mfg. datestamp is "44-24" and from what I've learned they cost little in China but come with a salted price tag when sold through channels aimed at Western customers. I'm not sure if they come in fast-enough variants to compete, and not sure about the quality or longevity otherwise. FASPEED makes SSDs, too, but I have no data on those. I also have an M.2 SSD from another Chinese brand called XINCUU which I previously had never heard about. The label of that SSD is in parity with expectations of Chinese business morals - it claims to be PCIe NVMe with "1000 MB/s speed" but is in reality a SATA device, and it does not perform even close to the ~550 MB/s limit of SATA 3.0. Both of these run unusually warm for DDR4 memory and M.2 flash storage, leading me to believe they are wholly designed and produced in China.
China is building an entirely independent semi conductor supply chain and if they are not competitive now, they will be in the near future. US sanctions forced them into turbo charging their efforts.
You’re saying this as if you’ve seen their books and know the pricing is sustainable.
Based on what Altman says and leaked reports, OpenAI is actually losing money on every new user. Unlike traditional software, maintaining a SOTA AI service doesn't scale. The conundrum he faces is he can either quantize models and slash R&D to try to turn a profit now but lose the SOTA race, or keep pumping money and hope the rest bleed out. He's opted for the second, having raised 10B in 2023, 6.6B in 2024 and reports of another raise in 2025. He's probably trying desperately for the middle ground where an explosion of high price subscriptions replacing workers massively boost his revenue. So he's also reportedly projecting revenue 4x to 13B this year.
This is an accurate summary of OpenAI, and makes it more likely that Baidu's model is being priced well below cost
I wouldn't necessarily think so. There's still enormous room for quantization and hardware optimization, which China has proven to be world class at. And a lot of spend is really on R&D. For the same reason I believe if OpenAI waned to they could break even in a year
AI is not only price.
I bet the Chinese AI will tell you the "chinese point of view" just like the one from USA tells the US one.
Also who knows what was censored or added there.
That vast majority of conversations with AI is irrelevant to censorship. Well, I can only speak for myself, but surely you can see questions like "phone A vs phone B", and "how do I use feature X on product Y" or almost any programming question isn't concerned with censorship.
Is censorship a thing for models? Of course. Does it matter? Probably not, unless you either specifically have chats on those specific topics, or if you are trying to create a meme.
The concern of censorship is way overblown by some people. Most users only care about "does it work?", then some "is the answer correct?", and at the bottom is "is the answer censored, and according to what ideology?". Seriously, think about these models/products like a normal person.
This is also true of OpenAI and Anthropic. There is a disturbing level of censorship there.
The funny thing is that you'll hit the wall sooner or later with reasoning if you don't give up bias, which applies on both/any ends.
You can't "give up bias". You can choose what you prefer, but an "unbiased" model doesn't exist. If you put in information, you're adding bias.
what people mean by an "unbiased" model is a model that just reflects the underlying distribution in the data.
So biased by both the choice of the sources and the information contained in the sources.
But crucially not biased by RLHF being applied afterwards to stop the models from making basic biological observations, telling jokes about left wing politics, or saying anything nonnegative about European historical impact on the world, and so on.
at the moment it's definitely price though
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Please don’t do this to HN.
I come here because I value what people here think and want to read their thoughts and share mine.
Pasting AI output like this devalues the conversation and is uninteresting.
but is it west ai or east ai?
What's interesting about Baidu's AI model Ernie is that Baidu and its founder, Robin Li, have been working on AI for a long time. Robin Li has a strong background in AI research going back many years. Also notable is that some of the key early research on scaling laws—important for understanding how AI models improve as they get bigger—was done by Baidu's AI lab. This shows Baidu's significant role in the ongoing development of AI.
https://research.baidu.com/Blog/index-view?id=89
I am excited to see Baidu catchup. It feels like they have earned it. Being very early.
Here’s a true story I find funny about scaling laws at Baidu.
From 2016-17 I did a projection using our scaling law equation with my coauthors about how many GPUs it would take to train an LLM with a step function in capability. Joel Hestness in particular did excellent experimental work to enable this.
I came out with a projection of about a $1 Billion GPU budget.
Baidu was in the middle of downsizing the US research center (SVAIL) in favor of AI in China and I was participating in the layoff of many of my colleagues while trying to keep the lights on long enough to finish our scaling law experiments, which I personally thought would change the world.
I actually wrote a report to Robin explaining the implications of scaling laws and asking for a $1 billion budget to train a Baidu LLM in 2016 and sat on it through 2017.
But I never sent it because I thought it would never have been supported in that environment. I sometimes wonder what Robin would have thought about it and how the world may have been different if Baidu had released ChatGPT.
We may be about to find out because the AI moat filled with simple algorithms and scale seems to be much more shallow than the processor and systems moat.
I have a huge amount of respect for Dario and Ilya for carrying on scaling laws at OpenAI or it may have never seen the light of day.
If there is one problem for the AI community to solve by 2030 I think it is the moat problem.
Dario, founder of Anthropic is an ex-Baidu AI employee, it was at Baidu that he learned the bitter lesson.
Do most people feel the way you do? This is one factor out of multitudes of factors representing Chinas rise as a super power that will eclipse the US in technological, economical and military might.
I’m excited but most people are patriotic and I feel things like this or even the whole situation with BYD producing better cars then Tesla is something people take as an attack to their identity. If not an attack it’s definitely represents an eroding of their patriotic identity.
Unfortunately Trump can’t slap a tariff on this. Maybe he can ban it like he was going to do with TikTok? The US really needs to get off its high horse and not associate its identity with being the sole economic super power in the world.
It's not about patriotism. Many people outside the US, myself included, see a problem with authoritarian superpowers per se. Although now that the US is rapidly drifting towards authoritarianism, that just seems like an inevitable future to prepare for.
Agreed. Within the US though a lot of it is definitely patriotism. But even for Europe a new super power on the block is not necessarily a good thing.
Would you prepare for such a future by banning TikTok and placing tariffs on all goods like BYD cars? I would say no. Those acts are done out of patriotism.
I think (hope) most folks care less about the “attack on patriotic identity” and are more concerned that what is essentially a dictatorship is rising in power significantly. History has shown dictatorships rarely end well for the general populace and the rest of the world.
Democracy has its flaws, but one of the features that most people prefer is that it can significantly change how it looks and operates to reflect the will of its people without violence.
I don't think this is really true. History mostly just shows that hegemonic powers rarely end well for other countries, and ultimately even for the people under said hegemony. The same will obviously be written of the US in the history books. We've invaded, overthrown, or tried to overthrow so many countries that you'd have a far easier time counting the countries we haven't tried to dominate in one way or the other.
And historically many of the greatest eras under Ancient Greece and Rome were under autocratic systems that advanced humanity by essentially every single metric. For that matter China has been among the most powerful countries in the world countless times - yet I think relatively few would ever know this because it's always been a quite insular nation, and never pursued hegemony in the same way as Western empires. Of course that could change but it seems extremely unlikely. Pursuing the perpetuation of global hegemony has been anything but fruitful for the US, and it should be a great lesson for the rest of the world. Those times, not just of the US - but of any global hegemon, are probably behind us.
We can agree to disagree on hegemonic power being a bigger deal than dictators. But regardless, saying China is insular is ridiculous. They have a very public plan to expand their hegemony by taking over the infrastructure of other nations by way of “developmental loans”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
The BRI is just the Temu version of the IMF with Chinese industry upsell.
It is not. The IMF does not demand collateral for the loans that they then hand over to foreign governments. China does.
https://theconversation.com/mombasa-port-how-kenyas-auditor-...
IMF forces countries to adopt austerity politics[1], causing lower economic activity and often leading to economy shrinkage[2], and forces countries to open their markets to foreign capital, which leads to surplus extraction abroad. Both of those measures lead to impoverishing the country that is taking the loan.
[1] https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2021/04/05/imf-austerity-is-alive-and... and https://academic.oup.com/book/11959?login=false
[2] https://accountinginsights.org/austerity-principles-economic...
That article says the exact opposite of what you are claiming. This is the lede paragraph:
"In December 2018, a leaked letter from the Kenyan auditor-general’s office sparked a rumour that Kenya had staked its bustling Mombasa Port as collateral for the Chinese-financed Standard Gauge Railway. Our new research shows why the collateral rumour is wrong."
LLM much?
> more concerned that what is essentially a dictatorship is rising in power significantly
Which one?
Ironically, as we go down that path we're going to push Europe and LatAm into China's arms.
Honestly I'm more worried about the US backsliding to full authoritarianism with the usually "spicier" foreign policy. The more politically insular China from the current regime seems stable enough. Xi could have even 15 years left in the tank before succession shenanigans start. Obviously this from a LATAM perspective, I'm not in Taiwan or South Korea, I would be considerably more spooked then.
That has been falsely taught to you but the real fight has never been about the type of rule. But rather on the type of economy US and the west hate China not because of how its dictatorship but rather because its economy is not private capital economy that is showing it can succeed without private citizens completely taking over the country.
As in the last 40-50 years is has been the US and western countries that have been involved in bringing down democracies that had slightest socialist tendencies and propped up dictatorships that allowed the companies to exploit the countries resources. So it is not about the type of government rather the type of economy.
>its economy is not private capital economy that is showing it can succeed without private citizens completely taking over the country.
Its economy absolutely is private capital. What it has shown is the dictator is still stronger than the private capital and will react to any threats to the dictator with violence (see: Jack Ma)
> As in the last 40-50 years is has been the US and western countries that have been involved in bringing down democracies that had slightest socialist tendencies and propped up dictatorships that allowed the companies to exploit the countries resources. So it is not about the type of government rather the type of economy.
Ahhh, yes, the Great War of 2021 when the US invaded Sweden, Finland, and Norway for having governments in power that have far more than “even the slightest socialist tendencies”.
> Ahhh, yes, the Great War of 2021 when the US invaded Sweden, Finland, and Norway for having governments in power that have far more than “even the slightest socialist tendencies”.
No, the Great Stupidity of 2025, when the US started officially endorsing the extreme right-wing in the EU and calling for its dismantlement.
How is Sweden, Finland or Norway in any way socialist? I haven't heard anything about seizing the means of production or overthrowing of the capitalist class from them. Unless you treat governments doings stuff as socialism, then I guess they may be.
China started rising when it allowed capitalism in its special economic zones. Private capital had a big part in it. Shenzhen was given that status in the early 80s.
That's like 10% of the story. There are dozens of countries that moved to a more capital oriented economy yet there is only one China. The philipines, Indonesia, Malasia, the whole continent of Africa or South America. All capitalist economies, even neoliberal. Yet none of those countries that "allowed capitalism" come close to 1% of China's GDP. What's the difference? The difference is that in China the Communist Party governs. Society rules over Capital, not the other way around. That made the whole difference.
Another aspect is that China has more people than the US and Europe combined.
Massive labor force unrivaled by any in the world, all working to elevate 1 country.
Allowing capitalism, a competent government, and sheer volume of people - all critical to making their rise possible.
>Democracy has its flaws, but one of the features that most people prefer is that it can significantly change how it looks and operates to reflect the will of its people without violence.
Internally, maybe. But China becoming a de facto supowerpower doesn't mean everyone else becomes Chinese any more than America being a superpower means everyone else becomes American. The salient point for most people is how that superpower balances the carrot of trade and the stick of violence to maintain its hegemony. To that end the US has far worse of a track record than does China.
Unless the implication is that China intends to directly colonize Western countries, which is something only the US is currently threatening to do.
I’m more concerned about the silence from congress and other similar government entities., to be honest. Are they complicit?
Like 95% of the planet, I'm not American. Like 82% of the planet, I'm not Chinese.
BYD being better than Tesla isn't a matter of patriotism in most of the world. DeepSeek and Baidu can spend as long as they want playing musical chairs/rap battles with Anthropic and OpenAI, it makes no odds to me which wins.
America and China both have politics that have no reason to care for people like me, nor people like my friends, that they are for different reasons and differ in penalties for being an out-group doesn't matter when I'm a foreigner to both, when my antecedent are who the 13 Colonies rebelled against and more recent antecedent forced unwanted opium sales on China.
As a European I can say that I like this development because prices go down and models get better and OpenAI has no monopol anymore.
It has nothing to do with just giving up and going 'Wellp, I guess China wins.'
China and the US are obviously very different culturally in just about every way possible. This difference makes for great competition. Someone in another topic mentioned something that seemed pretty insightful to me - in that where LLM companies failed in the US was in basically becoming clones of each other, whereas DeepSeek (and now perhaps Baidu) were going in a different way, and that way turned out to be better.
US companies will inevitably copy these strategies, one way or the other, as will Chinese companies copy what ends up working well from the US (see their latest rockets looking more than a little inspired by Starship). And the true competitiveness ensures in the end that the main people who will win will not be whichever guy ended up founding an AI company first, but you and I. It's how capitalism is supposed to work - companies beat themselves down into a race to the bottom, and society reaps the rewards. It only gets really messed up when there's no "real" competition, which is an increasingly frequent state of affairs. But that definitely will not be the case here.
Expect the same thing from India in the future as well. Their economy is advancing rapidly, and soon enough we're going to have another 1.4 billion people able to fully utilize the outliers such a population entails to similarly drive things forward in their own unique way. It's a great future for the world as a whole.
Given the framing of "most people" and "patriotic": China's got 1bn+ people.
don't know why you're getting down voted because it's true. we should work together with the new world superpower instead of fight it.
and don't start on some dictator BS. the US does/has done as many, if not more, bad things as china.
And open weights promised for June. China is really taking over in the ML game.
https://x.com/Baidu_Inc/status/1890292032318652719
What's AI 3 months in real world time? could be old or obsolete by then
Is the title claim correct? It is not mentioned as such in the tweet.
I feel like Deepseek had such good media reception, and SOTA models are so close that "GPT4x performance at y% the price" is an easy tagline that companies will be using in the coming 6 months. It's an easy goal to achieve because of diminishing returns in compute and game-able benchmarking, cherry-picking, distilling etc.
Not to say there can't be actual interesting improvements in performance/cost, but in many cases it will be more of a marketing angle.
Yeah I was wondering about that too, the benchmarks look good but this seems to be more like a competitor to GPT 4o, not GPT-4.5
ERNIE 4.5: Input and output prices start as low as $0.55 per 1M tokens and $2.2 per 1M tokens, respectively.
Comparison models: https://x.com/Baidu_Inc/status/1901094083508220035/photo/1
Anyone managed to try this yet? https://yiyan.baidu.com/ appears to require a Chinese phone number.
Just tried it. Not sure exactly what model is behind the scenes but it was cringe. I provided specs for a coding task, it told me that the specs are possible but too complex so it just gave me an alternative naive way of doing it. I use LLMs as a tool so I'm trying to be very exact with my requirements and wording, this felt like it was basically negotiating the requirements with me...kinda annoyed me, lol. My suspicion is that it was trained too much on chinese forums and the data was not refined enough.
You get one free question answered without a login. You can dismiss the login prompt which appears after submitting your question and use copy/paste with keyboard shortcuts or browser debug tools to retrieve the full answer (including the part hidden with CSS rules). Either use XPath of '//div[@id="answer_text_id"]//text()' or copy the text/eventstream response for the API call to https://yiyan.baidu.com/eb/chat/conversation/v2 once the SSE session has closed.[1] Clear cookies and site data and you'll get a new session and can keep going.
It can take about 20 seconds to return all tokens so it appears likely the login prompt is there to minimise resource consumption.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent...
America, is this the future you want?
Surely, this is as inevitable as not being able to use Wechat as an American.
The models aren't what worry me anyway. China is going to kick our ass when it comes to AI integration into society and the economy.
Imagine the difficulties faced by America vs China in integrating AI into healthcare.
We are just too worried about winning this AI model sporting event even though the entire concept is flawed and doomed to failure. We actually have to figure out how to use these models for more than how many Rs are in strawberry. That appears to be the actual hard part.
Of course, none of this is helped by having wasted an entire generation of some of America's best minds on javascript programming for obscene profit.
An entire generation is not wasted. The bigger issue is that China has no concern wiping out whole classes of jobs to be replaced by the next iteration and America struggles with keeping those voters happy. Think about things like our lack of dock work automation in favor of keeping some labor unions happy.
I'm trying to figure out the same thing. They make claums about it being totally free, but everything is in Chinese and you appear to need a Chinese mobile number to register.
"Free" does not mean "available to everyone."
The tweet is in English, which strongly suggests that the product is accessible in English, but then doesn’t appear to be.
That begs the question what the point is of an announcement in English?
Great PR in a national pride kind of way. I can only imagine DeepSeeks PR earlier this year was a huge win for them internally in the country.
GTP 4.5 is not a reasoning model. Reasoning models outperform it clearly. Even OpenAIs o3-mini is smarter while being magnitudes cheaper. Those 2 should be compared in my opinion. GPT 4.5 feels like a failed experiment to see how far you can push non-thinking models.
Outperform in what way? Reasoning models may be able to solve problems correctly a bigger percentage of time, but they burn many tokens to get there. So they’re much less efficient, both in latency and ultimately environmental cost.
>GPT 4.5 feels like a failed experiment to see how far you can push non-thinking models
It's not a failed experiment, it's a very good experiment, because it produced a very useful piece of information for the world (that there's limited return to further size scaling).
Good point. But pushing it as a product with that knowledge still puts it in a weird spot for me.
Baidu have a long history in the scalable distributed deep learning space. PaddlePaddle (so good they named it twice) predates Ray and supports both data parallel and model-parallel training. It is still being developed.
https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Paddle
They have pedigry.
US: Could I interest you in my lunch?
China: Thanks, already on it.
Cheap means small, small means low Q&A scores. I know that this isn't that important for the majority of applications, but I feel that over-reliance on RAG whenever Q&A performance is discussed is quite misleading.
Being able to clearly and correctly discuss science topics, to write about art, to understand nuances in (previously unseen) literature, etc. is impossible simply through powerful-reasoning + RAG, and so many advanced use cases would be enabled by this. Sonnet 3.5+ and GPT 4.5 are still unparalleled here, and it's not even close.
https://nitter.space/Baidu_Inc/status/1901089355890036897
Lmarena.ai is a very accurate eval (with stylecontrol). Other benchmarks like AIME and whatever can be trained on/optimized for and therefore should not be trusted. Most ai companies do something fishy to boost their benchmark scores.
There is a interesting dynamic of supply and demand here. 1% is basically free for all existing use cases today.
BUT new use cases are now realistic. The question is how long until demand for the new use cases shows up
What use cases? We are still in the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" phase, which might end before anything of value is found (if previous fads serve as a lesson here).
Vision related tasks like Waymo self driving cars and then also productivity enhancement like coding assistance and writing.
I doubt diffusion algorithms are a good fit for the kind of real time computer vision processing that self driving cars depend upon, do you have good sources for that?
About writing assistance, based on our office/copilot recent rollout, I don't see that getting past the novelty effect and turning into something most people will want to pay for (besides for programming and niche use cases).
Good.
OpenAI, Anthropic, et al, are getting sucked into a vortex of competition with China that is ultimately going to zero.
AI is the ultimate race to zero.
There is no moat. AI and intelligence is becoming a commodity with nobody (except Nvidia) is making money. This is known for a while now.
The acceleration and adoption would only make those in the middle who aren't aware of the change happening without a job and unable to get a job.
The US-China competition in addition to Jevons Paradox will be so viciously fierce that jobs will be removed as soon as they are created.
Intelligence can not be a commodity, because complexity is infinite. By definition the top 1% in understanding complexity are the top 1% in intelligence.
NICE. This is the capitalism I signed up for…not OpenAI and Anthropic charging $200/mo for an LLM while trying to do regulatory capture.
Actually $20,000.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/openai-reportedly-plans-to...
>AI company to other companies: For $20k, we can replace your workers
>Open access LLMs to companies: That's nice, for $2k, we can destroy your business model
I can’t tell if this is an ironic comment lol
Man the AI race is just launching at all fronts.
The title is editorialized in a misleading manner.
Quite impressive if true because historically Baidu's models have tended to under-perform.
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"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378123.
Europe 2.0
What does Trump have to do with Sam Altman's management of OpenAI? If Harris was president, what race to the bottom do you imagine she would engage in so Sam Altman could undercut China?
That's not the argument they were making. What they're stating is that the Trump administration is directly facilitating the slow death of American intellectualism, and that this will have downstream consequences for what advances come out of the US in the future.
It’s been 1.5 months, how on earth are you measuring these claims..?
Reading the news:
- https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/13/trump-c...
- https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/11/columbi...
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/08/trump-univer...
Trump can pretty much reduce Sam Altman's talent pool, his voter base seems to have an appetite for that. Also let's not pretend like private sector R&D has not been built over public sector research since forever. Seems like Trump wants to make public science more "efficient". Results still to be seen, but the perspective is not encouraging given the common wisdom on how basic science grows.
hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding has been cut across numerous sectors
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How did Trump make US LLMs complacent in two months? I had no idea Deepseek was a Trump grift.
Here's the comment I replied to:
> With anti-science sentiment in America, I think China will take over everything.
Look at what the current Trump administration has been doing to research institutions in the US. Nature published an article outright calling it "siege of science".
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00525-1
At a point in time where the US should step on the gas to prevent China to catch up, it's actually stepping hard on the breaks. I don't think this is even up for discussion.
He didn't. And if you tried to read the OPs comment it's clear he's not saying that. And comments like this only prove his point.
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Anti-intellectualism means not believing whatever the intellectuals tell you to believe, so they're entirely consistent in their opposition to it.
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Even before he took office or did anything.
Just because people see it this way now doesn’t mean that is how it all ends.
The perspective of historians implies that they look back and see that it was, indeed, the end.
Which it isn’t.
Nope, it seems more like the point where the fall accelerates
There’s a chance the Trump administration can bring the US out of its massive debt hole caused by every single recent administration before it.
So yeah, it’s definitely accelerating, but the outcome has not been decided.
I’ll happily take more downvotes to point out that society hasn’t collapsed yet in spite of your feelings. :-)
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The tech CEOs have been supporting wokeness throughout the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations.
They started pledging loyalty to Trump just 2 months ago. 2 months do not erase 12 years.
They are the modern age robbers barrons, money coming before a sense of morals, ethics or patriotism is all the signalling there is here. Oh, and it sounds like your information bubble isn't the healthiest.
(and since this is met with downvotes, I will substantiate the last part by saying that people employing "woke" effortlessly like it's a real and casual word, tend to be exposed to it a lot while not realising that it is a carefully engineered derogatory word meant to sow division and derail discussions)
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His point is that it is not...
It is not a wild take that Facebook, Twitter, Google et al. is undermining society and our social interactions on a deep philosophical level.
I hear the rumbling coming in Altmanland
I wonder what's the excuse for keeping the OpenAI models closed "for the benefit of all humanity" now that models as powerful are widely available as open weights.
We need to raise 1.63 Gazillion dollars to stay ahead of the game, to make sure that the newest models remain in the hands of an independent nonprofit acting for the benefit of all humanity, rather than some authoritarian regime... And investors willing to write a check for 1.63 Gazillion dollars require the prospect of profitability and hence a closed-source product.
Nash equilibrium.
Trying to create global enforcement against defection.
"Defect" is a dominant strategy, absent enforcement.
Not sure I buy that the payout matrix actually is the iterated prisoner's dilemma, but that's the argument.
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Lots of people want Altman to lose for reasons completely unrelated to the partisan political posturing in the United States. Wonder if some of the early LLM "leaks" from other entities happened because they wanted to keep Altman from achieving his dream of LLMs being hidden behind large thick walls under the control of a select few.
You know Elon Musk screwed up badly if this sort of news counts as good news to its camp.
I got flagged the last time I said this, but lets try again:
OpenAI is increasingly irrelevant. They no longer push the boundaries of technology.
They are still the benchmark against which all LLM progress and pricing is compared.
The general public will be using "ChatGPT" as a generic term for an AI chat interface for years.
Hijacking this thread: what's currently the cheapest way to get structured data out of a PDF?
I assume there's some reasonable tool out there to convert PDFs to Markup and than feed it to some LLM API with okay costs (Gemini? DeepSeek?). Any suggestions?
https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr , recent release. Its been a step function improvement for my pipelines
I’m feeding pdfs directly to Gemini to extract tables and so far the results are pretty good. There was a post on HN a few days ago about using Gemini for this task.