Sounds great to me; live by the sword, die by the sword.

So from my perspective, it's doubtful that this is the moat. Besides, for example, Claude Code in particular is so buggy (and always has been).

I'm amazed that no one is talking about proposals that are surely being discussed in Washington and pushed by SV lobbyists to restrict Chinese models on national security grounds, or other some other basis.

The belief that Bytedance could engineer a finger on the algorithmic scales to serve the interests of the Chinese Communist Party led to a lot of debate in Washington, and ultimately resulted in TikTok being divested from its Chinese owners. Huawei is shut out from the U.S. market, which limits its business even in markets where it's not banned because it's effectively stamped with a scarlet letter.

IMHO, Chinese models are headed for a similar fate or at least a showdown in Washington or the courts because they are supported and/or controlled by entities which ultimately serve the CCP.

Personally, I think models will increasingly become specialized in different areas, some good at X, others good at Y, and we might see workflows that mix multiple models.

https://xcancel.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412#m

how is running servers supposed to be 0 cost, while running ai inferrence isn't?

My experience has been quite the opposite. I was using Claude Code almost exclusively this winter/spring and swapped to Codex earlier this summer. It took no time whatsoever to switch. And before Claude Code, I was using Cursor. Same story.

[edit: Oh and there was also a brief interlude with Conductor, though I think they're more or less just serving the underlying Claude/Codex harness]

This has an element of stochastic improvement so it's hard to predict but the chance of the U.S. "winning" this "race" is pretty bleak.

You see this all the time in communities that have internalized hierarchy as a "good", little kings of shit mountain vying for less and less at a higher and higher cost.

China has a billion+ people that their AI can "study". Plus due to China's political structure, their AI has access to everyone's chats, comments and sites, scraping everyting.

Here in the US, with 1/3 the population, the AI race was lost before it even began. Plus in the US, all companies and people are doing all they can to restrict AI from scraping sites and peoples chats.

So I believe, China will end up owing AI.

There are also half a dozen other companies from China continuously hammering our clients’ websites.

I was wondering, what's in that cold dessert? Low and behold satellite imaging shows massive datacenter build outs, very cheap solar energy.

Few months ago something happened and the Geo location on data on those IP now shows "Shanghai" or "Shenzhen". A way to cover tracks? But mapping latency still points to fact that nodes behind these IPs are still operating around Xinjaing region

credit:

'You Can't Cheat Time: Finding foes and yourself with latency trilateration' https://youtu.be/_iAffzWxexA HN user: lopoc

Shenzhen vs Xinxiang is hard to do using this technique but Shanghai vs Xinxiang does show difference.

Assuming that China only distills is a huge mistake.

It’s no longer some backward place that does low value copying. Look at companies like ByteDance and Xiaomi.

Chinese companies aren’t just distilling, they’re acquiring data in the same way American companies did by paying people and crawling the internet.

The way I understand it, China has a few large companies that crawl the web at a rapid rate and build corpora. The government essentially wants select few companies to do this and then make the data available to other strategic companies operating within China.

Then there are data aggregators that buy data from apps, websites, and services, as well as systems like OpenRouter or Cursor, where companies can learn from the “traces” of coding agents, chats, and so on.

This massively reduces costs, as smaller companies like DeepSeek don’t have to do their own crawling or acquire data from 100s of websites and coding agents etc....

There are also companies in China that buy American LLM APIs and proxy them to companies within China. So, there could be 10,000+ companies using American AI products, while China logs all of this, understands how they’re being used, and trains on their traces.

I think we see this with Meta being paranoid about internal Claude usage, to avoid inadvertently distilling[1].

If distillation is a driver, then smaller American labs could be distilling, but are not for legal reasons.

But that's a big if we just don't know for sure.

1 - https://cryptobriefing.com/meta-restricts-claude-code-codex-...

This from OpenAi's Head of Strategic Futures "Some observations on Kimi: It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that"

https://x.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412

China's strategy of spending billions on training these models and open sourcing these models away is strategic - they want to kill the US LLM industry at any cost.

To win on the AI front by any means necessary.

I see massive risks in belief the inferences drawn from strategic information cannot be seen. So if you depend on some position remaining inside a secure facility but you drove to it from data outside that secure facilty, The likelihood that an inference model can derive the same idea is very high. Collation over public data is not inherently secret because you used a secret model or secret weights.

A more simplistic take might be that the fear is not actually driven in the secrets, the fear is "the emperor has no clothes"

Is this an assertion that is backed by evidence?

From the Elon/OpenAI trial:

> On the stand in a California federal court on Thursday, Elon Musk was asked if xAI has used distillation techniques on OpenAI models to train Grok, and he asserted it was a general practice among AI companies. Asked if that meant “yes,” he said, “Partly.”

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/30/elon-musk-testifies-that-x...

The lessons from steel, solar and EV needs to be learned by all lawmakers. You have to respect and learn from how China Government puts the system in place for complete industry takeover and they have been very good at it. The problem with AI is that democracies will be inherently slow in adopting AI, unless something changes in the system.

At minimum, every democratic Government (US, Europe, India) need to build long-term AI vision and execute that no matter which party comes to power. Additionally, be ruthless about protecting domestic labs. It can only be possible if the intelligence pricing by domestic labs per productive task is in the similar range as open-weights models. Right now, it is not the case, even if the article gives the example of Sol vs K3.

Protecting domestic labs means not bailout, but fast track to cheapest energy, fast track approval for data centers, enforce some guardrails so customers get to use the open weights models only hosted in the country by US (or Europe) businesses. Without these protections, it might be a slow death.

That's a big claim that his whole thesis rests on but is largely not backed up. Where are the apples-to-apples tokens-to-answer benchmarks that he's using - doesn't look like there are any, just a handwavy implication that US models are more token efficient, which they may be. But how is there so little effort in establishing this point in the article? And US labs may be in much different situations from one another: it's known that some labs like OpenAI bought big, early on compute and may have secured better pricing.

His article also does not mention the average price of electricity in China vs the US, which it seems like China leads on, and probably has the political power to more heavily subsidize. While I agree the COGS is often overlooked by top line benchmarks on coding tasks, etc, it seems that he's running on a big assumption while claiming "labs on the frontier will be fine".

I think it is the right move to protect American interests

This was my assumption as well. It's also generally true of 'traditional' deep learning models that inference cost is expensive compared to training.

But the cost per token for inference has been very quickly dropping. I don't recall where, but I recall about ~50x down from GPT3, even as model complexity has increased. Even with agentic systems, there are lots of optimization opportunities. I'm less assured about claims like this.

I have been working on a project with about a dozen generation tasks, each of which comes with a fixed token budget. The nature of this system requires that most tasks be completed by distinct model families.

As a result, I tested ~50 models across as many model families as I could gather, frontier and open weight, API (gateway and direct) and self-hosted. Evaluation was based on a set of cosine similarity validations that was repeated across ~50 different embedding models.

Interestingly, frontier models did worse on the tasks than open weight models. However, when it came to costs, the picture was reversed: frontier models were much, much more token-efficient. In fact, almost no open-weight model was able to meet the initial token budget, while almost all frontier models did. Moreover, open weight models struggled massively with reasoning, in terms of latency and token consumption.

I also found that the latest models did not perform better than older models. And any a priori benchmarking data was utterly useless.

So, I ended up using a set of open weight models without reasoning, as it turned out reasoning as well as frontier negatively correlated with the tasks. However, before I knew this, I had spent a lot of time running each available reasoning level for each model.

Lastly, as an aside, when it came to embedding models, size (dims as well as model size) did not correlate with quality, once a hurdle figure (~2k dims) was met. In fact, sweet spot was 3-5K, and for my (text-based) set of tasks, dense models tended to outperform MoE ones.

Is he casually assuming a singularity has already happened? A regular first-mover advantage I can understand, but those have been squandered or lost many times before.

Sure, any model that is not at the frontier can use the frontier model to generate synthetic high quality training data, so this can reduce significantly the training costs.

But at the scale of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, it is quite likely that the (raw) training cost is very high anymore. Here's a few heuristics:

1. All the hyperscalers see a huge demand for inference. They can't deploy datacenters quickly enough to satiate all the demand they see. But, it's is impossible for the inference demand to be constant throughout a day or a week. If you use the times when the demand is lower than the peak demand (which is almost all the time) to dedicate the spare compute capacity to training, then your the cost of training compute is zero.

2. It is likely that increasingly a higher cost of the "training" is actually setting the guardrails, which is essentially post-training. As we've seen, without proper guardrails, the US Government won't allow you to serve inference. Anthropic was hit directly, but OpenAI delayed their 5.6 release as well to make sure the US Government is ok. This part of the training cost can't be reduced easily by using synthetic data generated by other models.

3. The frontier labs are also investing more and more in building an ecosystem around their models.

I am not a frontier lab insider, but take a look at the jobs posted on the Anthropic career page [1]. There are 74 jobs in "AI Research and Engineering" and by my count at most 15-20 are related to pure model training (of pre-training or RL type), and the rest are post-training, safety and security, alignment, interpretability, productivity and lots and lots of other things.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/careers/jobs

The actual difference is how much scrutiny and time was put into the Mythos / Fable and GPT 5.6 release. Making it feel like “these are a big deal”. Spring and summer THAT was the AI story

Then Chinese labs release models that approach Fable performance. We’re shocked they just seemed to appear out of nowhere.

It’s less about the gap closing. It’s more about the weight we put into Fable-capable models.

This is of course a baseless assumption. Let's say China created GPT 3.5. Then I can guarantee you that Ben would say "Western frontier labs are at a disadvantage when gathering data, because they have to follow the terms of service of Western media, and Western copyright law". Which we now know wasn't true.

And sure, some will say "but Anthropic can more easily block this as it's a single point of failure". But it's doable to overcome this. Without being "state backed".

> To that end, here’s an even more interesting question around distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here?

> In fact, this paradox is the solution. I believe that open weight models are good for innovation (and, per the above, I think that labs on the frontier will be fine), but it’s a problem to be dependent on China. The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U.S. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else.

Also, the Hidden-Agent problem exists in every model, and is a persistent tangible risk independent of whatever team people cheer for at the games. Let us remember, every LLM nuked all of humanity 92% of the time in simulated war games. =3

It gets particularly hairy because models themselves can tune their "token verbosity" to manufacture demand for compute. If compute was such a precious resource, you'd think we'd be complaining that the output was too terse.

The ability for a vendor to determine ex post facto how much a query costs is a similarly new economic phenomenon to zero marginal cost.

1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.

2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via model providers in the US ( either frontier or model hosts like fireworks.ai ) then please let me know your bank details so I can poke around.

Here is a quick example of how Chinese deepseeks agent works kn its underlying model) when asked a tough question

https://x.com/jinen83/status/2079406993979383902?s=46&t=D7hQ...

Frontier labs that thought they could Rupoor[0] the entire creative class, transferring the coercion premium of copyright ownership from Hollywood to themselves. In their eyes, copyright should not apply to them, but also their models should have exactly the same value as a copyrighted work.

Stratechery also argues the US should explicitly make training fair use and forbid terms of service that prohibit distillation. I'm in support of the latter, but NOT the former, even though I normally hate copyright. My reasoning is primarily that copyright is one of the few legal paths available for a rando to go and put the work of an AI frontier lab in legal jeopardy. In the EU and Japan, such legal action has already been foreclosed by similar law. And while free distillation would obviously be preferable, it's also much more of a legal long-shot. Getting America to do anything that even smells like taking property away from the powerful is impossible[1] - it's our zeroth amendment. But we can at least hack the property laws that currently exist to cause problems for the frontier labs.

And, to be clear, if distillation is OK but training is not fair use, distillation is still OK. The output of an AI model is never copyrightable, because copyright only protects the human element. Essentially, this would say "don't train on humans, but absolutely rip off and steal the shit out of other AI labs and give it to the rest of us."

[0] In the Legend of Zelda series, Rupoor is anti-money - collecting it decreases the amount of money you own. I am using it to mean "turn someone's asset into a liability".

[1] Given that America was literally created to protect a wealthy land/slave owner class from disenfranchisement, either from above or below, and the last time we did this we literally had to fight a civil war against that same owner class that installed a new owner class that has largely remained today

1. training new base models are expensive for sure, but fine-tuning them are relatively inexpensive enough the labs can continue to do so forever. the main reason why frontier models are so good is because the massive input they generated from user usage. they are using that information to strategically build better training data. and this is why no other models can catch up, til now that is. but if chinese models are good enough, and free to host, and cheaper to use, then the consequence is the frontier labs will lost valuable user inputs and the chinese labs will gain more. as time goes by this will be a domino effect.

2. nvidia is not only the player in the hardware scene. amd mi350p is getting popular, and huawei is pumping SuperPoDs. what does this mean for us? chinese models will surely use chinese hardware, and optimize for them. the other people will pick amd because compare to nvidia they are cheaper. with open weight models and open source inference stacks, they are freely to experiment and improve the stack, thus further lower the inference cost and nvidia dependency. and they even plan to build their own inference hardware, too. and nvidia loses market share meaning all the fund it gives to openai or anthropic will be cut, too.

and you say there is nothing to afraid?

This might be a simplistic take, but my biggest worry with depending on Chinese models (and, by proxy, open-weights model development) is that the US can deem them a national security risk at basically any time, and Ant/OAI have minimal interest in making frontier-level models open-weights.

Regulated companies prohibit Chinese models in anticipation of the ban-hammer from the feds, so for data-sensitive work, they're stuck with LLaMa, gpt-oss and Gemma models (which are good and serve as a good-enough base for sft, but seemingly not as good or as expensive as Chinese models)

I suppose the USG can do the same thing that China is doing and bankroll/subsidize that effort; whether they will is for fate to decide.

Nonetheless, this article made it clear that nVIDIA is the real winner in all of this. Shovel selling to the extreme.

The United States' real advantage over China is freedom. Chinese LLMs simply can't compete with American ones when it comes to the humanities, creativity, entertainment, or financial transparency. As long as the U.S. continues monetizing these strengths, the compounding effect will make it virtually impossible for China to surpass the U.S. at the product level.

What if there's a way to extract the commodity of intelligence from smaller models?

I've seen for many use cases it's well enough. :)

Ben Thompson is wrong: US frontier labs are right to be panicking

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48982061

Following this argument the key for each player will be the underlying cost structure and serving capacity to offset the upfront R&D cost.

The cost infrastructure will be driven by access to cheap electricity and cheap chips. The capacity will be driven primarily by depth of pockets now to buy all available supply in chips/mem/data center building capacity. While China is certainly in the lead on cheap energy, I am wondering if they can/want to beat the > 1tn USD being spent on data centers right now. Following the example in the article:

If company C from China sells 10 units for 20 USD produced for 10 USD they pocket 100 USD.

If company A from America can sell 100 units for 20 USD produced for 15 units, they pocket 500 USD or 5/6th of the market's profits.

Source: https://martinalderson.com/posts/the-upcoming-ai-margin-coll...

Love this.

I don't know if I agreed totally with the assessment of the risk Chinese labs pose to US labs though, in particular I think the main part I wasn't sure about was this:

> I highly doubt that Chinese models are cheaper to serve on a marginal cost basis, they just seem cheaper because Anthropic and OpenAI are so supply constrained that they are charging far more than they would if there were sufficient supply to meet the demand for intelligence.

How true is this? My understanding from Deepseek's original paper was that they focused heavily on optimising training and inference costs, in particular so that they can operate on cheaper (and more accessible to China) hardware.

It's possible I'm just not in the loop, but nobody seems to talk about US models innovating in this way (I'm just talking about cost-to-serve/train, not saying US AI companies don't innovate in other ways).

It seems to me at least, like there's a fair bit of evidence that AI shifting to a price based commodity market (vs a "best-model takes all" type market) would put China at a significant advantage? And even more significantly, require a pretty hefty correction of company valuations in the US?

Today chineese deliver that promise and usa people freak out like they have any skin in this game. Enjoy the ride leader of the free world....

>Right now defenders are effectively banned from using Fable or Sol for cybersecurity because of Trump administration directives; that means the best alternative is using models from a country which has been trying to weaken our cyber defenses for years. This is insane!

I understand some guardrails are needed, but it is becoming increasing problematic manage them without a strong public discussion.

And I'm saying this as someone working for American companies.

You techbros need to get off your ass and go to work.

We have got very far from Cicero's coining of the word 'intelligentia' (from inter legere, a 'reading between' and hence discernment) when people talk about 'intelligence' as a commodity

People have been decrying the 'cheapening' of the word intelligence for over a century now, going back to Psychology's adoption of the word and coining of nonsenses like "Intelligence Quotient". "Artificial Intelligence" is just the latest degradation of the original humanistic meaning, and now people aren't ever bothering to prepend 'artificial' to their idiotic use of the word

* Me, as an individual, because I might not be able to pay price hikes, because my revenue (salary) is much lower than what they want and I can't support my expenses via huge bank loans.

* Again, me as a new entrant to the industry, LLMs are basically pay-to-play games, again related to price hikes, new entrants might not be able to afford paying those prices 24/7 - which you need when learning new things.

* Any non-US company, US can block the models which can disrupt the whole business.

* Even some US companies, for example if you operate in EU and EU somewhat changes their mind and follow the ICC and require you to stop working with Netanyahu (war criminal as per ICC), then following laws in EU, might create trouble to your whole business.

This is extremely lopsided I'll have to resort to GLM 5.2/K3 to ensure that those security issues (hopefully) are resolved properly.

For OSS, this is one of the most counterintuitive experiences I have ever had. More than ever I'm convinced that open weight and open pipelines models are 100% critical for progress on the AI and societal fronts.

I like Anthropic, I don't think all their talk of safety is bluff and bluster, or at least, I want to believe that the people who left OpenAI because it had lost its focus of helping humanity still want that to be their main goal. However, yes, it seems that business fears are once again causing those in charge to turn "we want to help humanity" into "we are the only ones who can help humanity, and therefore we need to be the most profitable, and the only survivors".

If you want the former ideal to survive, at Anthropic and outside of it, you need to be willing to collaborate beyond profit incentives and recouping capex. Show other labs a commitment to research and community and they will follow. Better to bring teams together rather than implicitly say you distrust them, pushing them that way instead.

Look at Kling, Hailou, and places they are sticking LLMs.

The model itself is nothing. Do you guys know that HuggingFace exists??

Hermes is a better coding tool IMO. I can't put my finger on why but it just feels better. Maybe being true yolo helps.

I also heavily disagree with this no-marginal cost in software distribution view whenever I see it, bit rot is real, and someone is paying a marginal cost whenever they do an update. You have to re-distribute with changes whenever anything changes. These costs are just hidden because things are ad-supported or bundled in some way. These costs are also kept low because of standards and open source, but could become high anytime. Additional licensing also has costs.

That said, I couldn't agree more with the last paragraph, charging a high price for models would be better than denying access for any model that wants to stay relevant.

Distillation is a technical term with real meaning, and historically requires logits which Anthropic does not provide.

"Generated training data" is the correct term. It's not an "attack". And Anthropic undoubtedly also generates training data for each new generation of models, yet you never see them claim Fable is a distilled Opus.

But as inference becomes cheaper, some of the market will move to self hosted inference. I look forward to someone supplying small servers designed to run inference locally.

With or even without open models these companies are selling compute, and we've been making that rent vs buy decision for 60 years.

The concept of “commodity” as defined above is a model, a simplified abstract representation of reality, but that does not match the reality perfectly (the map != the territory).

The author claims that a token isn't literally an ideal commodity, but neither is oil or wheat, many factors influence their real value (intrinsic properties, location, available storage at production, expected delivery date, etc.) so that no two gallons of oil in different contracts have the same price.

Is treating “tokens” as a commodity a worse model than treating oil this way? It depends who you ask! I'm pretty sure that a chemist working at a refinery would be more happy to see tokens being felt with like a commodity by his company than if they started viewing crude oil like one.

(Overall, there's way too much economism in that post, and way too few facts, and as a result the argument makes very little sense, the author basically wrote that both OpenAI and Anthropic are drowning in cash right now because compute scarcity means the price must be significantly higher than the marginal cost…)