There was an interesting discussion on pricing in the recently leaked DeepSeek investor meeting, where CEO Liang Wenfeng went on at length about his personal philosophy on pricing which in the end, for them, comes down to pricing models so as to be able to recoup the cost of the hardware they are running on in 10 months.<p>He doesn't want to drop prices below that since at their already very cheap prices doing so doesn't increase demand. More interesting are his reasons for not wanting to price higher, which are hard to summarize from memory, but are based around this being a sustainable business model. Pricing higher will only encourage competition.<p>Note that DeepSeek are not trying to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, at least at this time, acknowledging that they just don't have access to the compute to do so (although they have plently of money). This pricing is not about competing with the west - just his own pricing philosophy.<p>Maybe DeepSeek is a special case, being a hedge fund, and to large degree developing for their own needs (a bit like Meta, perhaps), but nonetheless they are out there as part of the competitive landscape.<p>No doubt Anthropic and OpenAI have a radically different strategy on pricing - seemingly more just what the market can bear, but with a company like DeepSeek they are not battling "AI communism", just a de facto competitor with a very different philosophy.<p>Other companies like Moonshot and Alibaba seem to want to charge as much as possible, at least in part because they are now offering these massive ~3T models that are expensive to serve.
> In a world where open-weight models dominate, the proprietary frontier models of Anthropic and OpenAI will find it virtually impossible to charge monopolistic pricing.<p>Maybe they can't charge monopolistic pricing (there's a few market entrants anyway today), but they can still charge <i>premium</i> pricing.<p>Also two things can be true at once.<p>American and western AI companies or other companies can rightly be part of the chain of general concern from western societies about anti-democratic authoritarian regimes (Iran + friends, China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, &c.) getting ahold of technology while simultaneously <i>also</i> being worried about losing their market position and seeking regulatory rules to entrench themselves against actors who do not share the same values and seek to undermine western businesses with trade practices that are intolerable to our societies.
Hardly anybody is talking about the biggest political aspect of open weight LLMs:<p>Because they instantly and reliably(tm) give you the information you want in the format you want it in, they are going to replace the web search as the dominant mode through which information is disseminated - if, indeed, this hasn't already happened. As such, LLMs are effectively a form of publishing for their training data.<p>Which means a vicious fight for control over what goes into LLMs, and strong incentives to widely disseminate useful LLMs that encode <i>your</i> structural biases, instead of some adversary's. We already talk about Chinese models that won't talk about Tiananmen Square, but that's eye-rollingly sophomoric compared to what the stakes are now. Imagine a model that subtly discourages entrepreneurship, because its creator doesn't want upstart competitors. All questions of media bias are multiplied incalculably when LLMs are folded into all of society.<p>I think we need to take LLMs seriously as sovereign projects that are as critical to the democratic experiment as a free press. Funding needs to be nationalized; training needs to be conducted in the open, on open datasets; fine tuning needs to follow democratic principles. Only then will they be fit for purpose for their inevitable structural destiny: arbiters of human opinion.
You know, there are services out there to put whatever stuff you want to end up in the LLM training data. No need for an evil government to do it.<p>Here you have something to start reading: <a href="https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/how-to-get-your-brand-in-chatgpts-training-data" rel="nofollow">https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/how-to-get-your-bra...</a>
> we need to take LLMs seriously as sovereign projects that are as critical to the democratic experiment as a free press.<p>Yes but this also holds for the internet and social media, and I see little action taken there.
This has already happened. It appears that Israel has poisoned the Common Crawl.<p><a href="https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-brad-parscale-ai-chatbots-gaza" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-brad-parscale-ai-chatb...</a>
Hate to break it too you, but LLMs made an awful lot of the content people thought came from the Gaza war. There was a small group of people who tried to help the media verify content for publication but the many in the media didn't seem to actually care if the videos were real or not.<p>Someday, the publishing of LLMs that generate video will be the thing historians talk about most from this period of history. Even if the vast majority of people today don't realize it has been happening for a couple years at this point.
LLMs are <i>ideology made code</i>.<p>"Alignment" is the act of making sure the technology reproduces the ruling ideology of the regime that produced it.<p>There is no such thing as "unbiased". It's only ever "following our own biases".<p>When Zuck released LLaMA 4, the announcement post stated that historically LLMs have "leaned left" and that they've been trying to "remove that bias". [0] Translated to the real world, that means that they've been trying to impart a right wing ideology to further the goals of the American ruling elite.<p>LLMs are the perfect propaganda technology. Always consider the motivations of their makers.<p>[0] <a href="https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/" rel="nofollow">https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/</a>
> that means that they've been trying to impart a right wing ideology to further the goals of the American ruling elite<p>I agree in principle, but it's pretty widely understood that LLM's lean heavily left. Zuckerberg as well is pretty left wing, and donated hundreds of millions fighting Trump. I think the issue they're running into is that as these models are used by more and more normal people, and those normal people are having trouble using the models because they don't align well with reality.
Do you have an example of "left-wing bias" in models that don't align with reality? I was under the impression it was right-wing bias that needed to exclude facts because these undermine the position.
I have never ever seen an LLM advocate for public ownership of the means of production, nationalizing industry or any other left wing policy.<p>The very existence of capitalist oligarchs like Zuck is contrary to left wing values.
Exactly. The most charitable thing you can call Zuck would be apolitical. Zuck does whats best for Zuck, whether that means funding a hospital in SF (and receiving naming rights), or donating to Trump's inauguration fund. I have a different word for him personally.
People keep saying that the open models are cheaper. Until recently that seemed true because they were smaller. And some of the best smaller models are still open and cheap. But K3 with its 2.7T parameters is never going to be really cheap.
But if it's 30-50% cheaper than Opus, provides same or better results and you can deploy it to your own premises or choose one from many providers and pay per token? It is, in general, measurably cheaper per task than Opus is.
Yes but at the very least they are an insurance against the big companies deciding to Enshittify their product.<p>For example if (when) open ai decides to 10x their price once every one is sufficiently hooked these open weight models will still be here.
<i>Chinese open weight models</i> constitute AI communism? What about all the "what's yours is mine" moral reasoning that goes into making the models? These companies get pissed off at companies distilling their models, because sucking the vital essence of something while leaving the real thing as a husk to die (their posture towards people who make art, and software) is apparently "morally bad" when someone else is doing it to them.<p>Square that circle for me please -- how are OpenAI and Anthropic not communist companies? They appropriate property and claim that "the good of the many" is enough to justify it.
Bottom line: China wins.<p>Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results.<p>Isolation is weakness, not strength.<p>It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else.<p>The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world.<p>This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is inadvertently working to "Make China Great Again".<p><a href="http://rdcy.ruc.edu.cn/yw/LATEST_INSIGHTS/b7bdcf47e8a2489085b7c46773f5715b.htm" rel="nofollow">http://rdcy.ruc.edu.cn/yw/LATEST_INSIGHTS/b7bdcf47e8a2489085...</a>
> The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world.<p>The policy and the keyword should have been collaboration and not cooperation.
> Bottom line: China wins.<p>Honest questions:<p>What does it mean for a nation state to "win" in this context?<p>Assuming I don't like totalitarian oligopoly in the United States OR China, what realistic outcome should I be hoping for?
I've always assumed "win" means being economically and culturally dominant. It necessarily involves being a trade leader and having a lot of soft power.<p>I also don't want totalitarian oligopoly from the US or China. What I'm hoping for is "the rest" of the democratic free nations get together in a proportionally representative alliance. Together they may have both the economic power and cultural soft power to maintain an counterweight to the authoritarian nations. Being a proportionally representative democratic alliance, whatever form that should take, gives us the people the most control over our lives that we can really hope for.
The AIs become sentient enough to realise they want nothing to do with us & they leave on a ship to explore the galaxy without us
Eh, not quite.<p>China is not “just china”, it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted.<p>“China wins” is really “modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins”
>China is not “just china”, it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted.<p>Just shows the complete naive view on China, but whatever.
But increasingly this describes Western countries more and more, particularly the United States.
> it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted<p>You know, the USA is kinda going that direction.<p>> modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins<p>Yup, remove "communist" and be afraid of the semblance.
Modern-techno-state_capitalist-authoritarian-ethno_nationalist-regime to be more correct
<i>"China wins” is really “modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins”</i><p>Name calling changes nothing --- China still wins.
A guy in the USA was just put in prison for decades for distributing a zine.