The current balance of power in open models

Posted by gmays 4 hours ago

Comments

Comment by silverFork 3 hours ago

Impressive you know. They are a few months behind but still the world uses their models. Bet you because the users suspect that Americans will pull the rug from under them. Few months behind versus being left behind forever. Would have been nice to know the differences in spending between the models but I suspect the data is impossible to collect.

Comment by matheusmoreira 10 minutes ago

It's not a suspicion, it has actually happened. US government briefly banned Fable for non-americans, and the american corporations pick and choose who has access to their unrestricted models which in practice excludes even american citizens, to say nothing of foreigners like myself.

They are literally segmenting the world into haves and have-nots, just like nuclear power. Thank god China is out there and constantly undermining them with their non-stop open weights model releases.

The best situation for us mere mortals is one where they struggle against each other endlessly without any hope of victory. The second either the US or China wins, it's pretty much over for us and unimaginable oppression will quickly follow.

Comment by lowbloodsugar 2 hours ago

They are good enough and vastly cheaper. It’s not fear of the future. It’s economic reality of the present.

Comment by amirmc 2 hours ago

That’s certainly part of it. I think people underestimate the value of getting to ‘good enough’. Once that’s reached, the economics start to be more of a factor in decision making.

However, I think geopolitics has also become a factor as the very existence of this article indicates.

Comment by esseph 2 hours ago

> However, I think geopolitics has also become a factor

The world powers have only said things like "bigger and more important than the Manhattan project”.

So what gives you that idea?

Comment by tamaker 1 hour ago

Really important work here. Really glad it's being shared a) with US Leadership and b) with the community.

Comment by verdverm 3 hours ago

This is a prepared statement for congress by Nathan Lambert, author of https://rlhfbook.com/ and AllenAi employee (one of the few who have shared their models as open source)

Comment by spindump8930 1 hour ago

Unfortunately Nathan recently left AI2, along with some of the leadership most involved in their truly open models. https://www.geekwire.com/2026/allen-institute-for-ai-ceo-ali...

Comment by Transformanshen 2 hours ago

DeepSeek and Qwen set a floor American open-weight models can't match without subsidy or a different cost structure, and that price/performance ratio drives adoption more than benchmarks.

Comment by mapontosevenths 33 minutes ago

Anthropic is profitable now. They have massive debt looming over them, but they're at least making more than they spend each quarter.

Comment by aesthesia 1 hour ago

It's worth noting that Chinese AI labs aren't profitable, so in some sense they're not doing it without subsidy either.

Comment by avazhi 52 minutes ago

As an aside, it’s always funny to me that anybody outside of Europe listens to anything the Europeans say about AI. The Europeans literally have zero skin in the game. Their entire raison d’être is just to pass regulations that they then attempt to extraterritorially enforce, but they contribute almost nothing to the area of interest. It’s legit insane to me.

The contributions they make vs the amount of inconvenience they are vis-a-vis compliance with their own esoteric rules probably fit some Pareto maximum of 20% of users requiring 80% of the work for compliance. The rest of us (ie, the non-European world) should honestly just point and laugh and then move on when these people try to influence things.

Comment by enugu 5 minutes ago

Not a fan of overregulation killing business, but Europe is definitely an important check against the surveillance powers of big tech companies in US. European regulations become a reference point for the rest of the world, especially poorer countries who dont have power to regulate US tech companies by themselves.