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The AI Race Just Got Awkward

412 points · 463 comments · allisdust

  1. nater5000 · · focus · HN ↗
    >The new game in town is adopting Chinese labs’ advances. Note how I call this adoption instead of the more vitriol-infused “stealing” that Anthropic tends to use.

    I mean, there's a pretty big difference between labs publishing their research openly and a competitor utilizing it versus a lab breaking TOS to... hmmm, what's the word? steal data from a competitor?

    >That’s because, unlike the Western companies, the Chinese are pretty much giving away their recipes.

    Yeah, Western AI companies have never published their research. It&#x27;s crazy how the Chinese had to independently develop the foundational technology that powers LLMs because Western companies simply never publish their research (I mean, as long as you ignore stuff like this &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1706.03762" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1706.03762&gt;).

    &gt;The latest one shamelessly copied without acknowledgement is the breakthrough in KV cache optimizations that DeepSeek has generously shared with the world.

    Thank you, generous corporation. I&#x27;m sorry that other corporations don&#x27;t provide you free publicity for your selfless contributions to the world.

    &gt;Now I don’t know why they would freely give away such a breakthrough, but they just did

    Well I&#x27;m glad the author finally got to their point. A very insightful analysis.

    &gt;They do seem to be a little embarrassed by the copying. Hence the silent releases without much pre-announcement for both Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol.

    You have to be in pretty deep to infer this kind of emotion to these kinds of corporate activities.

    &gt;So the Chinese labs have thrown a lifeline to the Western loss-making labs, and I just have no clue as to why.

    Then why write this article? Why point out these things just to have no conclusion?

    This article sucks. Even if you hate US AI labs and are all aboard Chinese labs producing open models, there&#x27;s nothing of substance here. This is the loose draft that you hand to your LLM to finish for you, but it seems the author just forgot to do so.

    Even if you&#x27;re willing to characterize US AI labs as evil and selfish and Chinese AI labs as righteous and generous (which is already completely trivializing these dynamics to the extent that anybody over the age of 14 can likely identify is lacking nuance), you can at least put some effort into producing some hypotheses about why these dynamics are occurring. Of course, odds are if the author did try to articulate some hypothesis, they&#x27;d likely quickly realize that the narrative they&#x27;re painting just doesn&#x27;t hold up.

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