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Comment by juiceland | Hacker News Reader

> The reason they release the AI models is economic warfare against US

The story is so much more complicated than that, to the point that this economic warfare theory is basically a meme.

Chinese models are open because they don’t have a choice. “When you trail the frontier, openness maximizes reputation per unit of capability. The moment you lead, you close.” [0]

[0] https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-ex...

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They do have a choice, as evidenced by all the times when the other option gets picked. The article you link tries to acknowledge ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen Max as exceptions, but forgets about Baidu's Ernie and iFlytek's Spark, which are also closed-weight. There's simply no consensus yet on which strategy is better, so different companies end up making different bets.

That’s because Baidu sells model access and iFlytek sells integrated products. Also both have released open models, just older ones. They just close their latest ones because they got the reputation they needed out of them and have transitioned to a product. Notice that both of these explain the motivation without resorting to unfalsifiable claims about "economic warfare".

Huh, when XHToken released a model named Spark, I assumed it was just a name collision, since iFlytek appears nowhere in the documentation. But on iFlytek's model marketplace, it's listed as their self-developed model: https://maas.xfyun.cn/modelSquare So they actually released an open model quite recently! Thanks for letting me know.

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