China wants to dominate in AI — and some of its models are already beating their U.S. rivals
China wants to dominate in AI — and some of its models are already beating their U.S. rivals
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/49967612
"On Hugging Face, a repository of LLMs, Chinese LLMs are the most downloaded, according to Tiezhen Wang, a machine learning engineer at the company. Qwen, a family of AI models created by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is the most popular on Hugging Face, he said."
Which LLM was this written by?
Doesn't matter, they're all just 3 ELIZAs in a trenchcoat.
What an impressive waste of resources. It's portrayed as THE most important race and yet what has been delivered so far?
Slightly better TTS or OCR, photography manipulation that is commercially unusable because sources can't be traced, summarization that can introduce hallucinations, ... sure all of that is interesting in terms of academic research, with potentially some use cases... but it's not as if it didn't exist before at nearly the same quality for a fraction of the resources.
It's a competitions where "winners" actually don't win much, quite a ridiculous situation to be in.
Image gen did not exist in any way shape or form before. Now we're getting video gen like a few years later.
Let's not forget we started by playing the game of Go better. My prediction as a hobby Go programmer (the game, not language) in 2015 would be that better than human AIs would be there by 2020 and they got there by 2016.
Before the AlphaGo match with Lee Sedol people predicted the AI would just put up a decent fight since a previous version played questionably against a weaker player. It blew one of the best players ever out of the water, losing only one game of the series.
Future matches even against the world #1 with the better models showed it to be invincible against humans
You're making the same mistake. You're looking at the current capabilities and predicting a human speed of improvement. AI is improving faster.
Image gen did not exist in any way shape or form before.
Typical trope while promoting a "new" technology. A classic example is 1972's AARON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARON which, despite not being based on LLM (so not CLIP) nor even ML is still creating novel images. So... image generation has been existing since at least the 70s, more than half a century ago. I'm not saying it's equivalent to the implementation since DALLE (it is not) but to somehow ignore the history of a research field is not doing it justice. I have also been modding https://old.reddit.com/r/computationalcrea/ since 9 years, so that's before OpenAI was even founded, just to give some historical context. Also 2015 means 6 years before CLIP. Again, not to say this is the equivalent, solely that generative AI has a long history and thus setting back dates to grand moments like AlphaGo or DeepBlue (and on this topic I can recommend Rematch from Arte) ... are very much arbitrary and in no way help to predict what's yet to come, both in terms of what's achievable but even the pace.
Anyway, I don't know what you actually tried but here is a short list of the 58 (as of today) models I tried https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence and that's excluding the popular ones, e.g. ChatGPT, Mistal LeChat, DALLE, etc which I also tried.
I might be making "the same mistake" but, as I hope you can see, I do keep on trying what I believe is the state of the art of a pretty much weekly basis.
This sort of stuff has been said about pretty much every technological breakthrough in history. Language models on their own do indeed have lots of limitations, however there is a lot of potential in coupling them with other types of expert systems. We simply don't know what all the potential applications are for this tech. However, the iron rule throughout history has been that people dismissing new technological developments have typically been proven wrong.
Language models on their own do indeed have lots of limitations, however there is a lot of potential in coupling them with other types of expert systems.
Absolutely, I even have a dedicated section "Trying to insure combinatoriality/compositionality" in my notes on the topic https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence
Still, while keeping this in mind we also must remain mindful of what each system can actually do, not conflate with what we WANT it do yet it can not do yet, and might never will.
LLM's are great at generating boilerplate code or sending you in the right direction.
Isn't AI a capitalist bubble profiting from stealing other people's work? Why would a communist country engage in that?
What we are constantly bombarded with in the capitalist hype train bubble is fucked. Just watching so many corps tripping over themselves to force shit into things that really and truly don't need (or in shit like health insurance to auto-deny life saving care) is maddening. It is being used without concern over if it is even more than alpha stage. Just like how we see stuff like the games industry just launching games broken as hell as if they are completed and for full price. The stealing of work is very much in-line with capitalism, just as it always has been with regards to physical resources.
But it can have benefits beyond the above stated bubble cashing in and out. It could be very useful in socialist/communist nations. That is because under those systems, the ownership would be collective and benefits shared right back to everyone. But should be carefully applied and not for profits over lives. So really such advancements would make more sense in socialist/communist settings.
Also places like China actually do apply the death penalty to greedy leaders of companies. Which helps compared to the US and other capitalist nations that place those same greedy leaders on pedestals beyond true punishments.
Why not? It doesn't really matter who steals from who in the AI race, it's about who gets to the top first to dominate the market. So of course China would want that, as do every AI company around the world.
FYI, China although communist in name, actually functions mostly on capitalist economy, but party authority always comes first.
FYI, China although communist in name, actually functions mostly on capitalist economy, but party authority always comes first.
In a capitalist economy the market comes first, the market dominates politics. In China it is the exact opposite, and that's why China can build entire cities in the time it takes a capitalist country to build a single bridge or highway. They don't wait for private investors to provide funding or wait for private contractors to bid for the project. They just decide they're building a city and then they do it.
In other words, politics are in command.
Because AI can screen far more private personal conversations between potential dissidents than real people can?
And they're likely to do so given how much of it depends on how much capital and energy you dump into it.
Wake me up when AI isn't garbage.
AI in its current form is a joke.
A nothing story.
A bigger deal is that they are open source.
China does have a "delete America" program, and I saw an announcement, not repeated in west, that they banned Intel, AMD, Nvidia for certain Chinese customers about 2 weeks ago. Nvidia still has a big interconnect, CUDA, and driver stability advantage in GPUs, but China is catching up on price/performance, and national security makes this an area of high investment. A Chinese Nvidia solution is to just host AI training in Thailand. Hosted costs for AI in China are 1/7th the cost of cheapest US option (Llama).
Extreme US climate terrorist energy corruption is going to limit US datacenter and affordable electricity for all. Mexico has an opportunity for electricity exports and datacenter hosting with access to Chinese energy.
expand on this please
Incoming Administration promises to protect oil and gas oligarchs by limiting renewables/batteries/EVs, including potentially destroying big 3 automakers with Canadian/Mexico tariffs. Harming Tesla competitors with loses on their NA investments in batteries and EVs, that includes tariffs on JPN ROK batteries. Coercion of EU colonies is likely to force their dependence on extortionist US oil and LNG imports if they want to keep US in NATO, for the privilege of buying extortionist US weapons. NATO CIA stooge leader is telling EU that they need to give up pensions, social security, and healthcare, and institute drafts, to get to 3% of GDP military spending targets. EU blaming immigrants from US sponsored destroyed lands, instead of their own US subjugation, is certain to be the political climate for abandoning sustainability and prosperity.
Coercing US consumers on NG electricity expansions, with increased LNG exports, together with datacenter expansions, is attempt at boosting NG prices, even when $2/mmbtu is not competitive with solar for new electricity. Utility oligarchs are certain to feed better at the trough if they support NG extortion agenda instead of renewables.
The main point is that in addition to cheaper energy, outside of US extortionist energy pricing, foreign datacenters also allow for global customers.