One possibility. Certain countries will always be able to produce open models cheaper than others. USA and Europe probably won't be able. However, due to national security and wanting to promote their models overseas instead of letting their competitors promote theirs, the governments of USA and Europe will subsidize models which will lead their competitors to (further?) subsidies. There is a promotional aspect as well, just like Hollywood governments will use their open source models to promote their ideology.
What's your take on why certain countries will have it cheaper and subsidies being at the forefront? An energy driven race to the bottom, is perhaps what you mean? I would suppose I have been seeing that China is ahead on their Renewables plan compared to the rest of the world, and they still have the lead on coal energy, so they'd likely be the winners on that front. But did you actually mean something else?
Energy is definitely a major factor but other factors too. Cheaper infrastructure (data centers), cheaper components including GPUs (once that is cracked) and cheaper data collection (web scraping, surveillance infrastructure, etc). Any novel idea that improves the architectures of models in the future will inadvertently get leaked quickly and then all these other factors come into play. Countries that cannot make models this cheap will subsidize models for national security reasons and promoting their country's interest reasons.
The problem with china is, they will have to figure out latency. Right now DeepSeek models hosted in china are having very high latency. It could because of DDoS and not strong enough infrastructure but probably also because of Great Firewall, runtime censoring prompt and servers physical location (big ping to US and EU countries).
Surely ping time is basically irrelevant dealing with LLMs? It has to be dwarfed by inference time.
> Right now DeepSeek models hosted in china are having very high latency.
If you are talking about DeepSeek's own hosted API service. It's because they deliberately decided to run the service in heavily overloaded conditions and have very aggressive batching policy to extract more out of their (limited) H800s.
Yes, for some reason (the reason I heard is "our boss don't want to run such a business" which sounds absurd but /shrug) they refuse to scale up serving their own models.
> the reason I heard is "our boss don't want to run such a business" which sounds absurd
Liang gave up the No.1 Chinese hedge fund position to create AGI, he has very good chance to short the entire US share market and pocket some stupid amount of $ when R2 is released, he has pretty much unlimited support from local and central Chinese government. Trying to make some pennies from hosting models is not going to sustain what he enjoys now.
tbh the "short the stock market" story is pretty silly, it wasn't predictable at all. but yeah, the guy got to do whatever he want to do now.