Kimi K2 Thinking has continued the remarkable trend of Chinese Open-Source AI besting or equalling the Western closed source models investors are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into.
OpenAI floated the idea of a government guarantee for its debt, but then backtracked when the idea was badly received. It’s inked deals to build $1.4 trillion in infrastructure. Where’s the money going to come from? It’s revenue is expected to be $20 billion in 2025; that’s just 1.43% of that debt.
OpenAI says they have the potential to earn hundreds of billions a year, but where are the consumers who want to give them that amount of money? At every turn Chinese Open-Source models can do what they do, for a tiny fraction of the cost.
We are paying for our own prison.
And then people will complain “how did it get like this?”
The classic pattern of “commoditize your complement”, where an industry that depends on some other product acts to ensure that the market for that product is impossible to monopolize.
Or, less charitably, the classic pattern of destroying rivals by giving away what they’re trying to sell.
Either way, it’s a weird timeline where China has become the bastion for openness and intellectual progress in this field, but I guess I’ll take it over OpenAI maintaining an iron stranglehold on the technology.
Distillation goes brrrr.
And that’s not really a burn on them. The only people here who were dumb were the Western leaders who neglected to consider weights are easy to copy.
Did anyone hear a “pop?”
unfortunately, not yet.
Markets are closed
And didn’t “OpenAI” try to justify this horseshit by complaining about Chinese open source models somehow stealing the tech of their closed source models?
Well yes, and I think it’s probably true, you can use one model to train another, effectively cloning it. It seems like it’s much more expensive to make the first round of good models. Part of the argument could be that openai/anthropic are actually still driving the frontier, developing the researchers and expertise to do that, and continuing to innovate the tech
