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Obviously the AI rollout should be slowed down and AI use regulated, like stopping any replacement of workers by AI.
But China is set to win the AI race with their open weight models on par with the current frontier models. And they are building nuclear power and solar and wind like no tomorrow. And they just started to produce sodium ion batteries to solve the grid storage problem.
Spurned by the embargo they are developing more efficient algorithms and “Extreme UV lithography” to catch up to the embargoed chips. The neoliberal model of the west is now falling behind even the high tech sectors.
In case anyone is curious it takes 8 Nvidia B300 cards to run this Kima K3 frontier model yourself (2.8 trillion parameters), costs about half a million. For a big corporation or institutions even in the global south that is relatively cheap and that is the top tier option for running a frontier model. Including complete data sovereignty. Using AMD will be cheaper, and prices will go down once China catches up in like 2030. And you could run that on solar panels and batteries and regenerative water cooling. 8x 1.4kW x24 so maybe 300 kWh LiFePo4 battery so another 50k.
To power one complete AI server you’d need about 134 m² in solar panels which are basically free these days.For solar panels you’d need about 270 / 6 * 24 = ~1000kW. With about 175€/kWp panels that is another 175 thousand plus installation. And something like 4000m². Plus chargers, and large public pool to cool those 270kW. But that is all the energy costs for 30 years up front. The bigger constraint is the land use then.
So basically less than
10%50% extra costs upfront to make AI data centers sustainable. This is a capitalism problem, both the hype / bubble / psychosis (b2b marketing induced) as well as the sustainability question.Question is, how long are they going to keep making their new models open weight? GPT2 was open too, y’know. Hell, the company that made it is called "Open"AI. Money corrupts.
And how many concurrent users do you get with 8 B300s on the Kimi K3? I’m not 100% sure on the math, but apparently about <= 4 with full context size.
They can make these models open weight because basically nobody’s gonna be able to run them and you can’t just build a brand new model out of it like you can with regular open source software. That 8 nvidia B300 card minimum isn’t enough to run it commercially, it’s good for like a small 10-20 person company of fairly heavy users, or slightly more if not using heavily.
You say it as if OpenAI started with good intentions and got corrupted by the money. But the most likely explanation is that it was a scam from the start.
I couldn’t find anything about concurrency. But I assumed it’s more like ~1000 users? B300 has something like 100,000+ tok/s, not sure about context size. I also was wrong on my math for the solar panels, see above. It’s more like +50% costs than 10%. Obviously all of this is napkin math, but even 50% isn’t too bad. My point is that with a slightly saner rollout of AI there seems to be absolutely no problem to make it sustainable. And if you buy your tokens in China you can select a data center that gets it’s power from nuclear or solar.
And yeah we don’t know how long they will release open weight models. Once hardware to run such open weight models become available they might change tactics. But right now China releasing these open models has a serious impact on the stock price of these AI companies, which is a good thing. The sooner the AI bubble pops the better.
And like 7 of the top 10 suppliers of tokens right now is from China apparently. What Xi himself said is that the world needs a multilateral approach and AI should not become a monopoly. And while that is clearly propaganda aimed at the global south, China does have a different approach. They spend peanuts on their AI models compared to the west (and the algorithmic breakthroughs done by Chinese AI researches afaik have also been published).
But you actually can use an existing model to generate training data for a new model. Which is what the US corporations are currently accusing China of doing, which is of course hilarious. Of course China has generated huge amounts of training data themselves. So basically any industrial country could in the future fund a research effort to produce a new AI model and make it open weights. A monopoly situation would be another huge issue with AI.
Basically in regulation, sustainability and democratizing access China is doing very good. And in poking the AI bubble.