A former ByteDance engineer says China's AI industry is 'far behind' the US

"I don't even agree with the assumption that Chinese models are catching up — I believe we're still far behind," a former ByteDance engineer said.

TL;DR

A former ByteDance engineer believes China's AI industry is significantly behind the US.
Chinese AI models may perform well on benchmarks but struggle in real-world applications.
Companies are criticized for 'benchmaxxing' rather than focusing on practical performance.
US companies can iterate on AI models much faster than Chinese counterparts.
China faces structural disadvantages, including access to advanced chips, infrastructure, and data quality.
Reliance on distilling outputs from US models limits long-term progress for Chinese AI.
US models benefit from stronger user feedback loops, leading to continuous improvement.
Contrary views from figures like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Elon Musk suggest China is catching up or could overtake.
The assessment from within China's AI ecosystem suggests the gap with the US may be widening.

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Yann LeCun

The salvation is Project Tapestry

https://t.co/5MOgouVplV

Yann LeCun reposted

Daniel Jeffries

Open weight models running on open source harnesses solve this problem.

One of these days, American companies will wake up to the same solution we pioneered decades ago that Chinese teams are now running against the closed source new wave East India companies of American AI.

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

Yann LeCun reposted

Daniel Jeffries

This ugly reality is staring us right in the face:

Americans will have walled AI gardens where we beg for access from a few East India companies, open source will get banned on national security grounds, and 6 billion people who aren't American, aka the rest of the world, will standardized on a Chinese AI stack.

Bloated. Broken. Slow. Ugly.

There's still time to change it but it's slipping through our fingers like fast running sand.

Read this passage below from Bill Gurley because it's about to become our hideous reality if we don't change course quickly.

"If a credible Western open frontier player does not emerge, the consequences cascade quickly.

This is the inverse of the early Internet wave. In the 2000s and 2010s, Western companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — dominated globally while China carved out its own walled garden. The AI version flips that dynamic on its head. Without a credible Western open frontier player, the only open models capable of running entire economies are made in China. If U.S. policy further restricts Chinese open-weight access on national-security grounds, the U.S. ends up with two or three closed Cathedrals serving the U.S. market — and the rest of the world picks the AI stack that is free, capable, self-hostable, and not embargoed. Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, India, the Middle East. Roughly six billion people. Chinese open models become the global default by 2030, and the United States ends up technologically isolated from the majority of the world’s AI users. We would have done it to ourselves."

Fully essay in replies.

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.

clem 🤗 reposted

Xiaoyin Qu

if US bans open source because China is leading, then

1. impossible to enforce(you just need to download a zip for weights)

2. Increases the cost of using AI for US companies and consumers, while China leads in enterprise and consumer adoption which drives GDP growth and productivity gains

3. Gives away market share to China for countries who don't follow the ban(which will be many)

Banning open-source might benefit labs, but only in the short-term, as they will lose long term regardless. It will harm independent neoclouds, enterprises and consumers. Because you forcefully drive up the cost of using intelligence by 100x compared to China, and if everyone in China and ROW can afford the good-enough intelligence but only not in the US, will this benefit US in the long run?

clem 🤗 reposted

Xiaoyin Qu

You cannot ban Chinese open source to make US win. The whole point of open source is it's OPEN. You might ban in the US, sure, but how are you going to ban it outside US? Instead the real question is, why can't US build the best open source model? Where is meta, gemini, @grok and why can't openAI and anthropic do this? Sure @elonmusk is baking something..

clem 🤗 reposted

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.

David Sacks

Secretary @howardlutnick is right. The Kimi Panic needs to stop.

— American frontier models are still ahead. When you factor in what’s in the lab, the gap is even larger. As long as we keep releasing, we will stay ahead. Let our horses run.

— As Ben Thompson showed, Kimi’s apparent cost advantage largely disappears once you account for higher token usage and the real cost of running a model this size. Open weights still require expensive infrastructure.

— Anthropic and OpenAI are growing revenue at rates that Silicon Valley has never seen before at this scale. This remains the clearest test of who is winning the market.

President Trump’s light-touch regulatory approach is working. We should remain confident in American innovation. As long as we don’t sabotage ourselves with unnecessary rules, the U.S. will continue to win.