(I am not in AI, so please correct me if this is inaccurate.)
(Source: frustrated friends who lose the government contract to someone with inferior technology)
It is that bad that all the American companies withrew from the public benchmark library. You can only see there Chinese commercial solvers and open source ones.
But in my opinion this was completely expected, most research in this area is now done in China, American universities have in comparison stopped in time.
Love this field of CS!
I just had to talk someone I know out of using RedNote as the TikTok shutdown loomed last week -- they had ZERO IDEA about its provenance. Unless you're paying attention, it's actually not clear what's what.
How many products keep sending all kind of unknown telemetry, have a ton of trackers, etc?
Can't really blame them doing the same.
1) They try similar like Zuck with LLama make sure GPT or Claude or Gemini is not the real winner in the West world like Android/iOS was for smartphone, Facebook/Whatsapp for social media/IM, Google Search for search, Windows for desktop OS. Majority people get used to to single product and they don't switch often.
2) Trying to kickstart community similar like LLama kickstarted big community around it that helped with tooling, testing, etc.
3) Slowing down development of ai companies in the west - giving them less data for training (after all midjourney, elevenlabs, llama kickstarted training on copyrighted content, it's pretty sure they using user data at least from e.g. free version of GPTo-mini) and bleeding their budget kind of war of attrition.
4) Familiarise the west audience with their ai models - after all still not many people using models like DeepkSeek since not many providers host them and majority of people don't have fast enough computer to run full models fast enough - Trae helps with that
Or are you being sarcastic? You must be being sarcastic.
Tencent's Hunyuan 3D - Tripo, etc.
Tencent's Hunyuan Video - Sora, Runway, Pika, etc.
ByteDance's Trae - Cursor, etc.
DeepSeek R1 - GPT, etc.
Unitree - Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, etc.
And a ton of this stuff is completely open source. All of the Tencent stuff is. This destroys the moat of so many companies that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars training and building their tech. It's just out there for free for anyone to build with.
And has anyone been checking the volume of Chinese AI research papers? Almost every impactful paper I've read in the last month has mostly Chinese names. And a lot of those papers come with code. Usually permissively licensed.
China is absolutely killing at the AI game. They've fast followed (or in many cases led) into a position of strength.
I wouldn't want to be RunwayML, Pika, Luma, or Tripo right now. Any "foundation model" company with a single use case is getting cloned and commoditized.
edit: Please don't downvote me because you don't like the message. I'm actually fine with you shooting the messenger, but this is absolutely worth talking about. It's pretty surreal to watch this all start to unfold over the last quarter or so. I want to read what others think about it.