Chinese AI systems

[John F Sowa]

The current AI leaders are being challenged by much smaller and much cheaper Chinese systems.  This suggests that the AI behenoths that require massive amounts of electricity, land area, and water for cooling are a dead end.

There is much more to say about current R & D, but the key term is neurosymbolic.  I'll post more on that topic later, but the following article about the Chinese systems suggests that the huge Nvidia systems are not worth the billions of $$$ that they cost -- or the many more $$$ that investors have thrown at them.

John

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Cheaper, intelligent Chinese AI models make inroads in the US

AP news.  Chan Ho-him, Matt O'Brien,

San Francisco-based Raffi Krikorian, the chief technology officer at Mozilla, which runs the Firefox browser, switched to Chinese AI startup Moonshot’s Kimi K3 for many of his day-to-day activities within days of the new, powerful model’s launch more than a week ago.

“It just seems snappier,” he said of K3, comparing it to the acclaimed and more expensive Claude Fable chatbot from San Francisco company Anthropic. Earlier, he had been using another high-performing Chinese model, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, for routine tasks such as managing his calendar, documents and email.

Krikorian is one of a growing number of Americans adopting Chinese AI systems, which are gaining ground around the world because they are more affordable and increasingly efficient. U.S. companies like cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said they’re switching to Chinese AI models to help trim costs. 

   

Their popularity has frustrated some U.S. tech giants, but short of an outright ban, they’re likely to continue to appeal to independent software developers in the U.S. and elsewhere.

American-led restrictions block China from accessing some of the world’s most advanced technologies including cutting-edge AI chips and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has warned more sanctions could be coming to protect American intellectual property. 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday accused Moonshot of using “covert” but not necessarily illegal methods to build K3 off the back of Anthropic’s Fable. Some U.S. politicians and AI companies including Anthropic have accused Chinese startups of illicit “distillation” of their models to extract their technologies, a claim that Beijing rejects as “groundless.” 

https://apnews.com/article/china-ai-model-us-kimi-deepseek-a00bf637866fcd4d81f4fde28c9862ce