China is increasingly keeping its best AI talent to itself

tech

China is increasingly keeping its best AI talent to itself

China's AI boom is producing world-class talent, and Beijing is increasingly reluctant to let them go elsewhere.

TL;DR

Top Chinese AI researchers and startup founders are reportedly subject to travel restrictions, requiring government approval to go abroad.
These restrictions reflect Beijing's strategy to manage talent drain in the AI sector, viewing AI as a national security priority.
Recent intensified restrictions follow the Manus-Meta deal investigation, with Manus co-founders reportedly barred from leaving China.
The performance gap between top U.S. and Chinese AI models has significantly narrowed, with China catching up or outpacing in publications, citations, and patent volume.
China is also reportedly planning to scrutinize U.S. capital investment in its AI firms and has previously implemented export controls on rare earth materials and barred state data centers from using foreign AI chips.

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clem 🤗 reposted

Tommy

As Chinese AI models go closed source, and all U.S. frontier models are closed, there is a massive opportunity for a western open source AI Lab

A future lack of competitive open source AI models is a net negative for humanity, low cost intelligence and sovereignty

clem 🤗 reposted

Eric Newcomer

Soaring Costs Prompt Fresh Interest in Open Source AI. Chinese Firms Are Way Ahead. https://t.co/EufHdg5xN2

clem 🤗 reposted

Harry Stebbings

“We have a crisis of open source models in the Western world.

Outside of China, there are no good open source models. We don't even have any in the US now.

The talent, the capital and the focus to be best-in-class at pre-training, mid-training, post-training is an extremely scarce skillset.

The answer for a lot of countries may just be to take an open weights model from China, post-train or fine-tune their own version, and have that be what they start from." @EverettRandle

Why does the West have such poor open source models and is it a national security threat to rely on open-source Chinese models @demishassabis @ylecun @aidangomez @lilianweng @janleike

clem 🤗 reposted

zerohedge

API prices of key AI models: US vs China https://t.co/ZOWMxcvhK0

Yann LeCun reposted

clem 🤗

- 2016-2024: 🇺🇸leads in open-source AI

- 2024-2027: 🇺🇸 leads in general AI & massively benefits

- 2024-2026: 🇨🇳 leads in open-source AI

- 2026-2030: ??

It's not open-source AI leadership OR general AI leadership, it's open-source AI leadership BEFORE general AI leadership!

Open-source AI is the foundation of all AI. It does not only creates more innovation, competition, jobs, and prosperity now, it's also the best (only?) way for a national tech ecosystem to accelerate and ultimately reach the frontier of AI in general.

Because open-source AI reduces siloes, shares learning and innovation, intensify emulation which all lead to an acceleration of the local ecosystem progress that no others can match if they're less open and collaborative.

Same seems to be true for companies btw, OpenAI/Google started with open science and open-source AI which led to their (and Anthropic who spun off from OAI) domination. Meta could have done the same but decided to change course for some reason.

clem 🤗 reposted

Ben Pouladian

America is about to lose the AI race, and it will not happen at the frontier. It will happen at the floor.

Everyone is watching who ships the smartest model. The actual war is over the 80% of tokens nobody posts about: the routine inference that quietly runs the world. On current trajectory, that fight is already lost.

Watch what people do, not what they say. Coinbase just defaulted its own engineers off frontier models onto open weights and cut AI spend nearly in half while usage kept climbing. Even NVIDIA runs a closed frontier model as an orchestrator and pushes the volume to its own open weights. The frontier is becoming a router. The volume goes open. That part is settled.

Here is the part that should terrify Washington: the only credible open tier today is Chinese. GLM. Kimi. And the US answer is to tighten export controls and freeze its own labs in place, as if you can embargo a file that is already downloaded, or price-match free.

So China hands the Global South Huawei hardware and free open models, and a generation in Africa and Southeast Asia learns to reason through a model that will not tell them what happened at Tiananmen Square. That is not a cost story. That is influence through inference. You do not have to win hearts and minds when you supply the mind.

Open source is not a nice-to-have for America. It is the whole ballgame for the 80%, and right now the US is barely on the field.

We need American open weights. Not eventually. Now.

Aravind Srinivas reposted

roon

the era of the chinese labs being far behind is over, Kimi is at least on par with the modern public frontier models. people have to think differently now without any competitive margin built in

David Sacks

This is concerning. For the first time, a Chinese model Kimi K3 has taken #1 on the Frontend Code Arena and is scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks.

Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models.

This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI -- while addressing risks in a targeted way -- or we’ll watch our lead evaporate.

clem 🤗 reposted

Amir Efrati

Moonshot mudslinging CHART

In battle over Chinese AI restrictions, it’s Anthropic & OpenAI versus pretty much everyone else in Silicon Valley https://t.co/Z5o2a9cWuR