Cost and Efficiency: The Engineering Behind China's Open-Weight AI Models

Yeah, well, let me just sort of like pause on that open weight and what it means, because I think usually people throw around the phrase open source models for a lot of the Chinese models.

And in fact, there's a difference between an open source model and an open weight model.

And you can be one and not the other.

You can be an open weight model and not be an open source model.

Although if you're truly an open source model, you're going to be also an open weight model.

So the difference... is that in an open weight model, which is the, that's what the primary Chinese high capability models are that have been released in the United States, they release the weights of the model, the parameters.

And remember that the parameters are the relationships between the data inside the neural network.

And so you've got all of this data that's sort of being ingested into the neural network, and it's getting related to one another, to different pieces of data, and the relationships are changing as more data comes in.

And the weights of the parameters are, they tell you a lot about how, a huge amount, about how the model is can reason and the way in which it has sort of considered the data, and I'm putting that sort of like in just English language versus engineering language, versus open source.

What Open Weight does not tell you is it doesn't tell you exactly what the training method was.

It doesn't tell you, for instance, how many layers the neural network has.

It doesn't tell you about the guardrails that the model developer might have imposed or any output filters.

It tells you about the weights.

So it gives you a lot of information, but it doesn't give you all of the secret sauce of the model.

So there really is a true difference between an open source model where you get everything and you can really look at it and study it from soup to nuts versus an open weight where you're just getting sort of one piece of it.

Yeah, absolutely.

But also the open weight piece and having access to the weights within the models, what can also make it so useful for folks because then they're able to adjust and fine tune the models when they're hosting it in their own environment to make it more useful for their specific use case.

Yeah, so the reason we really want to talk about these Chinese models is because they are becoming models that a lot of U.S. and ex-U.S. developers have been writing on.

They have been used more and more as the base for tool development and additional fine-tuned model development.

And recently we saw an uptick in adoption of open weight, Chinese open weight models.