"I think the collective psychology of the Bay and perhaps the entire country has been one of arrogant self-assuredness, that the US will always have the best models and that this is simply a fact of life, partially because that is what is necessary to justify the incredible capital expenditure on these things. Kimi K3 blows all of this out of the water."
This belief is based on the US having 10x more compute than anyone else and the Bay being bitter lesson-pilled, not arrogant self-assuredness...
"Now, we have a ‘Mythos-class’ model that is not just outside of US control, but is in fact open source and available to anyone in the entire world to download and use."
Question: If corruption is really so big a deal, why is this not an issue in China? They’ve managed to make spectacular technological progress, not just in A.I. but also in batteries, EVs, solar panels, robotics, etc., and yet they’ve had corruption issues for much longer than the US. Is the corruption different?
Good question. I'm not a China expert nor a policy guy, so take it with a grain of salt.
My general sense is that China *has* historically been a much trickier place for private investment because of things like corruption or changes in state favor. I don't think those things have changed. I think the US has become a trickier place for that investment too, though, and money is money so it will move to reflect that increasing evenness. The US at one point was the gold standard for investment, and now it just isn't.
These things are high dimensional and multimodal, so I don't think you can isolate the corruption from the migration patterns and the research funding. All of these things together contribute, alongside other things like the intentional destruction of state capacity in the US by MAGA / DOGE. Isolated, each of these may be marginal; together, they compound to be worse than the sum of their individual parts.
Because talent and capital are zero sum, I think the counter factual is a world where the US is further ahead and China is further behind. But it's speculation, extremely hard to evaluate hypothetical worlds.
for China, state level corruption has been much more institutionalized and predictable lately, state capital will get exclusive investment opportunity across the private sectors via legal means, then the profits may then get distributed by power; meanwhile private companies still have to compete in market in (non democratic but at least) same rules. this has been working for short term at least for investment heavy sectors but long term would that work out well not get enshittified still yet to be seen.
US is more chaotic, top leader has to pick the winner and ask for favor in ad hoc manners, and rush to seek self-enriching opportunity within their short terms limited by constitution, which make market much less efficient.
“This is the world’s biggest open weight model, clocking in at 2.8B parameters.”
I thought it was 2.8 trillion parameters?
Good catch
"I think the collective psychology of the Bay and perhaps the entire country has been one of arrogant self-assuredness, that the US will always have the best models and that this is simply a fact of life, partially because that is what is necessary to justify the incredible capital expenditure on these things. Kimi K3 blows all of this out of the water."
This belief is based on the US having 10x more compute than anyone else and the Bay being bitter lesson-pilled, not arrogant self-assuredness...
"Now, we have a ‘Mythos-class’ model that is not just outside of US control, but is in fact open source and available to anyone in the entire world to download and use."
Kimi is not Mythos-class (https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/kimi-k3-achieves-3-in-the-artificial-analysis-intelligence-index-comparable-to-opus-4-8-and-gpt-5-5) - it's a big step up but still benchmaxxed.
It is also not yet open-weights.
"Hosted Kimi models cost a fraction of the equivalents from Anthropic and OpenAI ($3 vs $10 and $5 per million)"
They also use way more tokens. AA found it cost $0.94 per task, similar to Sol at $1.04.
Question: If corruption is really so big a deal, why is this not an issue in China? They’ve managed to make spectacular technological progress, not just in A.I. but also in batteries, EVs, solar panels, robotics, etc., and yet they’ve had corruption issues for much longer than the US. Is the corruption different?
Good question. I'm not a China expert nor a policy guy, so take it with a grain of salt.
My general sense is that China *has* historically been a much trickier place for private investment because of things like corruption or changes in state favor. I don't think those things have changed. I think the US has become a trickier place for that investment too, though, and money is money so it will move to reflect that increasing evenness. The US at one point was the gold standard for investment, and now it just isn't.
These things are high dimensional and multimodal, so I don't think you can isolate the corruption from the migration patterns and the research funding. All of these things together contribute, alongside other things like the intentional destruction of state capacity in the US by MAGA / DOGE. Isolated, each of these may be marginal; together, they compound to be worse than the sum of their individual parts.
Because talent and capital are zero sum, I think the counter factual is a world where the US is further ahead and China is further behind. But it's speculation, extremely hard to evaluate hypothetical worlds.
for China, state level corruption has been much more institutionalized and predictable lately, state capital will get exclusive investment opportunity across the private sectors via legal means, then the profits may then get distributed by power; meanwhile private companies still have to compete in market in (non democratic but at least) same rules. this has been working for short term at least for investment heavy sectors but long term would that work out well not get enshittified still yet to be seen.
US is more chaotic, top leader has to pick the winner and ask for favor in ad hoc manners, and rush to seek self-enriching opportunity within their short terms limited by constitution, which make market much less efficient.