HN user
It'd be interesting to know how much of that is truly organic support versus what the CCP pushes out across the internet as agitation/propaganda.
Are they cheaper? They are open-weight, so in theory, they are cheaper to run and do with them as you wish.
The problem is that they come from a place with a long and storied history of attacking digital assets in the US and the West in general.
They're exactly as rational as any other group of humans.
They've repeatedly stated that they'll use force to take Taiwan if necessary.
They are building the military power to make the full frontal assault.
I don't get why there's so much "oh, China's different" talk on here or on other online forums. I often wonder how much of that is organic versus something their propaganda/agitation ministries puts on.
It can be made liquid. And in Zuck's case, it really, really should. It's not good to have publicly-traded companies where one person has total voting control over shares.
The problem with hosting these right now is that it's not a known quantity like lots of traditional business software is.
You can more-or-less approximate what your build out spend for a data center hosting database software is going to be. Your book of business will require a given amount of revenue to pay it off, but once that's known, it's off to the races.
With AI, things are moving so fast and new business models are being tried all the time. You would be competing with some of the wealthiest companies in the world for data center hardware capable of hosting these models in a usable state.
We've gone with Claude somehow hosted through GCP Vertex AI where I'm at.
There’s been a relatively big reaction to Kimi K3 and Chinese open weights models, but only for financial reasons.
Let's be honest: it's financial and national security reasons.
China has a long and storied history of hacking attacks on American and western targets.
There are other parts of the world that make open weight models; Mistral is a European option. You don't see the worry about that because most people in the US are used to existing in a world order where European powers are considered ambivalent to the US at worst and holders of a special political relationship at best.
If Mistral had the same backing that Chinese AI companies did, there probably wouldn't be as much hemming and hawing. Sure, American companies would take a haircut, but that haircut wouldn't be seen as a move towards software hegemony built on top of manufacturing hegemony. It'd just be you calling into Paris or Frankfurt to talk to your vendor in the future.
When the people running it have a net worth of over $150 billion.
Do their lawyers love the idea? Hard to say. My guess is, Zuck really likes the idea, so he keeps directing them and their chief counsel to try stuff like this.
It's almost as if having a CEO of a company placed beyond the control of the corporate board is a bad thing.
Well, let's see here:
Voting: "When you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election" - Trump [0]
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which Trump has been throwing fits about Congress not passing [1]
Memes: Admittedly, this one's far looser, as it's local law enforcement doing the arrest, not the federal government, but "Tennessee man jailed over anti-Trump meme suing sheriff, county" [2] It would be interesting to see if the sheriff was contacted by federal law enforcement over the post.
This one's not as loose, as the federal government is trying to uncover the identity of a Reddit poster who has criticized ICE [3]
Jokes: Suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! after host's monologue [4]
Public meetings: National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 [5], though that links to a much larger collection of information on Trump's actions directed at civil society.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/01/15/trump-s...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_American_Voter_Eligi...
[2] https://augustafreepress.com/news/tennessee-man-jailed-over-...
[3] https://www.engadget.com/social-media/the-us-government-want...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_Jimmy_Kimmel_Liv...!
Most Americans feel like there are still other routes to vent frustration. Memes, jokes, voting, public meetings, etc.
The administration seems to be focused on removing these junctures.
I don't think this will have the effect that the administration thinks it will.
People aren't ignoring all of the things they have been up to. They're keeping track, regardless of the data that the government puts out.
Still, the administration thinks people will just forget. In their minds, it will all simmer down, and since they now control the government, they can avoid consequences from voters and from the courts.
The problem is, history shows that there are worse things for those who abuse human rights than losing elections or facing trial. It would be better for them - and the country - if they kept the data open, disciplined the officers who can't abide by basic professional standards, and re-evaluated their approach.
It'd be interesting to know how much the Intelligence as a Service angle serves as a value-add in the minds of Google's executives.
You can get decent open-weight models now. That's not difficult. The difficulty is 1) running them and 2) compliance.
My company runs Claude on GCP's Vertex AI solution. We're in the US healthcare IT space, so the models need to be from somewhere that American healthcare agencies and companies have traditionally been okay with sourcing code from - which means the US, Canada, and maybe Europe. The stuff that handles PHI/PII must be in the US. The expense of hosting is more of a PITA than most customers want to go through this early in the technology's lifecycle, and intelligence gains are simply a matter of degree for most business tasks.
In theory, we could find some open-weight model (likely from China) for our development agentic work and host it anywhere you can host AI models. We don't, though, and I think Google, OpenAI/Microsoft, and Anthropic see that as the core of their business.
We're almost five years into the whole GenAI thing and we're still relying on these guys to spoonfeed us incremental updates.
It's time for them to start focusing on open-weight models and efficiency. Otherwise there's just a layer of marketing hype and "will it do this?" that has to be cut through for evaluation of each and every release cycle.
Models are getting easier and easier to create. The money, if there's any here, is in the harness the user interfaces with, and the data centers running them.
Same here. I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas on a Lenovo T570 running Bazzite Linux.
It's playable. Framerates are good unless you dump a bunch of bullets at something while in VATS. No more buggy than it was on Windows when I was playing it back in university, which is saying something for a Bethesda engine game.
I paid for the game and hardware years ago. It's not streamer slop or what all of the hip young people are into, but the story's good and I like unwinding with it.
Honestly, it would have been one of the titles I would have played on a Steam Deck.
Hopefully more people look into the classics. We've hit a point of diminishing returns with things like framerate and resolution at living room/computer desk distances. VR, while cool, is expensive and often requires a dedicated area.
Something desperately needs to pop the AI bubble.
There's plenty of value to be generated with all of these other applications of computer hardware, value that could be generated much sooner than the horizon over which GenAI expects to see its first dollar of profit.
Consoles generally have older hardware. The attraction is convenience, not power.
It really is amazing that China went from the country that hacked Google out of its market to a trusted source of AI in the tech world.
Remember how OpenAI was supposed to make those open-weights AI models for the betterment of humanity?
Silicon Valley is not about having specialists or knowledge. It's about having connections and charisma.
Is this causing massive problems for us as a society? Of course, but no one seems to want to do anything about it, so here we are.
I'll need to read that, but if my anecdotal experience is any indication, there aren't that many "independent" boards of directors. Ultimately you do find some sort of connection between board members and the c-suite of many companies. In some cases (Meta) the CEO is the chairman. Marc Andreesen is also on Meta's board despite being an early investor and mentor to Zuckerberg. Seems like an explicit conflict of interest, no?
The thing is, you don't really need to have dictatorship to get those things.
You could just, I don't know, fund infrastructure and social programs without developing cults of personality around leaders or letting them torture opponents to death.
And now we've overcorrected and have people dying from a lack of government care.
It was indeed meant to sound "cool and fun". It was supposed to be a memorable slogan. That's why Reagan used it. Then people made it into a battle cry for letting the hyper-wealthy dismantle regulations that were often written in blood, or for explaining why we need to let people go into bankruptcy from medical bills.
Having some centralized/public ownership of some enterprises doesn't necessarily mean that the government is going to purge people or starve tens of millions.
More and more, "abuse of power" and "company success" seem to be intertwined.
Meta would be an excellent example of that.
Good thing there's a strong corporate governance model at SpaceX where the c-suite is fully accountable to an independent board of directors, who could use their majority voting power to remove that c-suite at will.
Could you imagine the abuse of power that could happen if one person held over 50% of the voting power at such a company?
I'm sure that their citizens who work as traders and investors on Wall Street will see this, acknowledge that there are serious problems with how data centers are being built in other parts of the country, and stop throwing mountains of money at companies that are participating in such schemes.
</sarcasm>
A lot of the "don't tread on me" is window dressing.
Peter Thiel and his ilk absolutely adore what China has done. You have an elite - in this case, the CCP - that is entitled to their position by law. It bills itself as the "best and brightest" of society and has ideological constraints that it gets to impose on its members through the cadre system. The rest of the population labors for the benefit of this elite with little-to-no input on the operation of the ruling class.
That's what Thiel wants, just with his kind in the positions of power. It'd eliminate any opposition to what they imagine as the "right" way of doing things and reduce the friction to the creation of economic value for their holdings.
Note that "friction" in this case means things like human rights, democracy, competition, workers rights, etc.
If that's their takeaway, then we should probably keep up the pressure.
At this point, spending isn't the only problem, either. We need to increase revenues.
It's thought that the IRS foregoes collecting hundreds of billions of dollars each year[0]. That's a significant chunk of the Federal government's discretionary spending each budget cycle.
People who say they want to run the government like a business seem to ignore the fact that no business has ever remained financially sound without steady revenues. It simply cannot be done.
[0]https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...
Given that DOGE was itself illegal, my guess is that the records were illegally disposed of.
This behavior will continue on behalf of people like Musk and Trump until a real consequence is introduced.
Governments would rather censor the whole internet before putting people who have credible allegations of sex crimes against children under investigation and in handcuffs when appropriate.
Let's say I have a bunch of computers (Raspberry Pi 3+, MBP from 2017, Lenovo T420) sitting around that are on my local network. All are from the last 15 years and my main driver is a M2 MBP with 32 gb of RAM.
Would this let me utilize that spare hardware to do anything meaningful with a self-hosted coding-focused LLM at a somewhat-decent token generating speed, or is this still a pipe dream?