That's how it supposed to work.
I hope it does, though I'm doubtful because distribution is important. You can't beat "ChatGPT" as a brand in laypeople's minds (unless perhaps you give them a massive "Temu: Shop Like A Billionaire" commercial campaign).
Closed source AI is almost by design morphing into an industrial, infrastructure-heavy rocket science that commoners can't keep up with. The companies pushing it are building an industry we can't participate or share in. They're cordoning off areas of tech and staking ground for themselves. It's placing a steep fence around tech.
I hope every such closed source AI effort is met with equivalent open source and that the investments made into closed AI go to zero.
The most likely outcome is that Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic win and every other "lab"-shaped company dies an expensive death. RunwayML spent hundreds of millions and they're barely noticeable now.
These open source models hasten the deaths of the second tier also-ran companies. As much as I hope for dents in the big three, I'm doubtful.
Even when the technical people understood that, it would be too much of a political quagmire within their company when it became known to the higher ups. It just isn’t worth the political capital.
They would feel the same way about using xAI or maybe even Facebook models.
https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/airbnb-picks-alibabas-qwen...
The fact that it's customer service means it's dealing with text entered by customers, which has privacy and other consequences.
So no, it's not "pretty inconsequential". Many more companies fit a profile like that than whatever arbitrary criteria you might have in mind for "consequential".
2020 - I was a mid level (L5) cloud consultant at AWS with only two years of total AWS experience and that was only at a small startup before then. Yet every customer took my (what in hindsight might not have been the best) advice all of the time without questioning it as long as it met their business goals. Just because I had @amazon.com as my email address.
Late 2023 - I was the subject matter expert in a niche of a niche in AWS that the customer focused on and it was still almost impossible to get someone to listen to a consultant from a shitty third rate consulting company.
2025 - I left the shitty consulting company last year after only a year and now work for one with a much better reputation and I have a better title “staff consultant”. I also play the game and be sure to mention that I’m former “AWS ProServe” when I’m doing introductions. Now people listen to me again.
And most startups are just doing prompt engineering that will never go anywhere. The big companies will just throw a couple of developers at the feature and add it to their existing business.
Of course you’ll always have exceptions (government, military and etc.), but for private, winner will take it all.
Companies just need to get to the “if” part first. That or they wash their hand by using a reseller that can use whatever it wants under the hood.
Although I did just check what regions AWS bedrock support Deepseek and their govcloud regions do not, so that's a good reason not to use it. Still, on prem on a segmented network, following CMMC, probably permissable
Well for non-American companies, you have the choice between Chinese models that don't send data home, and American ones that do, with both countries being more or less equally threatening.
I think if Mistral can just stay close enough to the race it will win many customers by not doing anything.
I'm not sure if technical people who don't understand this deserve the moniker technical in this context.
American companies chose to manufacturer in China and got all surprised Pikachu when China manufactured copies for themselves.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
American intelligence has penetrated most information systems and at least as of 10 years ago, was leading all other nations in the level of sophistication and capability. Read Edward Snowden.
Now on the HN frontpage: "Google Antigravity just wiped my hard drive"
Sure going to be hard to distinguish these Chinese models' "intentionally malicious actions"!
And the cherry on top:
- Written from my iPhone 16 Pro Max (Made in China)
Even if China did manage to embed software on the iPhone in Taiwan, it would soon hopefully be wiped since you usually end up updating the OS anyway as soon as you activate it.
put another way, how do you propose to tell this subtle nefarious chinese sabotage you baselessly imply to be commonplace from the very real limitations of this technology in the first place?
There has never been a shred of evidence for security researchers, model analysis, benchmarks, etc that supports this.
It's a complete delusion in every sense.