Side note, but I hate that we're moving to a world where coding costs a subscription. I fell in love with coding because I could take my dad's old Thinkpad, install Linux for free - fire up Emacs and start hacking without an internet connection.
It doesn't though. You can still code the old fashioned way, and you are even likely to become a better programmer for it.
Personally, I tried copilot when I got it for free as a student and it didnt make a difference. The reason I know is that I was coding on two devices, one which had copilot installed the other didnt, and I didnt care enough to install it on the latter through an entire semester.
Its just slightly better autocomplete, by a questionable standard of "better".
> There’s literally nothing an llm can write or tell you that you can’t write yourself or find in a manual somewhere.
That's like saying, there's literally nothing a service business can do for you that you can't do yourself. It's only true in a theoretical sense, if neither time nor resources are a constraint.
In such hypothetical universe, you don't need a dentist - you only need to spend 5+ years in medical school + whatever extra it takes to become proficient with tools dentists use + whatever money it takes to buy that equipment. You also don't need accountants, lawyers, hairdressers, or construction companies. You can always learn this stuff and do it yourself better!
Truth is, time and attention is finite. Meanwhile, SOTA LLMs are cheap as dirt, they can do pretty much anything that involves text, and do it at the level of a mediocre specialist - i.e. they're literally better than you at anything except the few things you happen to be experienced in. Not perfect, by no means error-free - just better than you. I feel this still hasn't sunk in for most people.
Even if you absolutely have to use an LLM for some reason, there are already perfectly good LLMs for code generation that you can comfortably run on commodity hardware.
For now. It’s not clear what the monetisation strategy is, but probably it will be paid in future (alongside whatever other strategies they may have, like selling data, etc)
I think you are approaching this with the wrong mindset. I see it as I'm paying somebody to type and document for me. If you treat LLMs like a power tool, it is very easy to do a cost benefit analysis.
That is what happens when developers want to be paid for their work, but refuse to pay for the tools they use, regardless of little they may cost.
So we're going back to the last century, but given we are in a different computing context, only the stuff that can be gated via digital stores, or Web Services, gets to have a way to force people to pay.
You are not alone. The only future for these sorts of AI coding helpers is for them to use 100% free software AIs. On the bright side good progress is being made in that area and the main sticking point seems to be the expensive hardware to run them on (and integration). Costs on that hardware will hopefully drop over time so they won't still be mostly limited to 1st world (like the subscriptions).
But I am glad we now have more paid options available. Tooling is important and people that do good work should be able to charge for high quality tools.
I would be much happier in a world full of tools licensed like Sublime Text, where I can purchase a license and just run it without the need to constantly phone home though.
Use an aggregator like nano-gpt.com. You get access to all the top models (including o1 pro which usually requires a $200/month subscription) on a pay per use rate. Short on cash ? Use deepseek models for .1cents.
"install Linux for free - fire up Emacs and start hacking without an internet connection." that still works you know. Nobody is forcing you down this subscription path (except Microsoft)
Just get a graphics card and run a prompt-compatible llm yourself. Recent models like phi-4 show decent results (relative to your general amazement baseline) even on medium quantization. I’m running q4_k_m (8gb) with custom “just print and stfu” characters and rarely reach Claude anymore.
> I fell in love with coding because I could take my dad's old Thinkpad, install Linux for free - fire up Emacs and start hacking without an internet connection.
I'm not understanding what it is about a private company launching a product that changes that?
>but I hate that we're moving to a world where coding costs a subscription
I mean you don't need to if you don't want to. I am gainfully employed as a software developer and what I do everyday is literally just fire up Emacs on my Linux machine and write code. To this day I haven't figured out what llms are supposed to do that a bunch of yasnippets don't.
Just like five years ago most of my day is reading and debugging code, I'm not limited by how fast I can type.
If you pay out of pocket it means it's not an approved tool by your company, which means you can be fired and sued for leaking their intellectual property.
Also 20$ per month is way less than what it costs them to run it. Eventually they will need to charge way more to cover their costs, and the people who can't code without an AI assistant will need to pony up :)
I see many comments about not using this because China/ByteDance stealing data, etc. I get it for for enterprise, you don't want your code leaking to the outside world, even if in my experience, the code is mostly garbage and not worth that much.
But if it's for some personal project that you're putting on Github, does it matter? If my code is going on Github anyway, it's going to get slurped up regardless. I don't particularly care if it gets processed by Cursor or ByteDance before it gets scraped.
> But if it's for some personal project that you're putting on Github, does it matter?
I don't think the fear is that they'll steal code you'll end putting publicly on GitHub, but everything else. I guess there is some fear that it won't just analyze and process what you currently have open, but might scrape your computer for more data and so on.
I personally don't believe ByteDance would be stupid enough to even attempt exfiltrating files from developers machines, which typically are better protected than the average user computer, just trying to see the perspective of others with a more charitable reading :)
Trust em or not … had that happen to someone else using Cursor a few weeks back. I ran a prompt for refactoring a function and all of a sudden it started dumping someone else’s directory structure and file contents into my text file. Like hundreds of files. Not exactly sure what happened but I immediately uninstalled Cursor.
I'm glad people care about their personal data, I just wished they cared as much when talking about ChatGPT, because in reality if you're not a Chinese dissident living abroad, then OpenAI is much more dangerous to you than the CCP.
OpenAI does not have a history of disappearing people and when they return, their attitude has completely changed (see Jack Ma). OpenAI does not have a history of aggression against other nations shipping vessels. OpenAI does not have a history of corporate espionage and IP theft. OpenAI does not have a history of setting up police stations in other nations. OpenAI does not have a history of operating an illegal bio-lab in foreign nations. That's pretty defamatory to compare OpenAI to the CCP. OpenAI does not have a history of spreading a virus that killed millions and pointing fingers at other nations.
> […] in reality if you're not a Chinese dissident living abroad, then OpenAI is much more dangerous to you than the CCP.
Correct.
I laugh a little every time I hear some folks immediately push the “Big Bad China is just trying to steal our data” narrative. My immediate reaction is, “Grab some tea and let’s sit down real quick, so I can tell you what some of our companies right here in America and our government do with our data.”
Who cares what political stunts the US is currently going through? Except for the ~4% of the world who happens to live there, the rest of us tend to choose tools based on either what others around us use, or what we've found to work best for us.
If that happens to be an editor from China instead of US, I don't know what difference that would make? Both governments in those countries are crazy about spying on both their own citizens and everyone else, and have their corporations under surveillance.
As long as the editor doesn't send opened files/files from my drive to some remote backend, I couldn't care less about the nationality of the developers.
> As long as the editor doesn't send opened files/files from my drive to some remote backend, I couldn't care less about the nationality of the developers.
Is this sarcasm? Isn’t that exactly what the editor has to do to do its job? How else would the AI stuff work? It’s not running on-device, right?
Its not shut down, your president made it available again without a single change. And it was only a geoblock to begin with. By that logic it can't be that bad?
Not quite. At least in iOs, you can't redownload it, so if you uninstall it or change phones, no more TikTok. Also, Apple will be blocking any updates to the app for US folk.
TikTok was shut down because of clueless bureaucrats and political games, not because of any specific threat. If there was a real risk posed by China why are they idly allowing millions of people to migrate to Xiaohongshu, which is even more strongly controlled by China?
TikTok ban plan may actually snowball, because now China thinking about their soft power and opening their internet to the world.
The 16th Shanghai Municipal People's Congress actually talked about this.
They have a lot of companies with very large consumer, and their market is saturated already. Time to expand to the rest of the world.
There's no way I am using a Chinese IDE with VSCode (w/ Coppilot) and Cursor existing after reading the privacy issues in the court documents with TikTok. Bytedance had some extremely overreaching expectations of data it wanted.
That being said, I am using (Chinese) Deepseek r1 because there isn't currently a free LLM on par with it. I am careful with what I share though, a little more so than with any others that are not locally fun.
I'm thinking about this the same way, if a bit more selfishly: as a non-US citizen, I might want to move to the US in the future.
Which is why I would like the US govt to have as little data as possible about me (who knows what the mainstream politics will look like, things that are very innocent today might be punishable by death in 10 years).
Chinese govt, on the other hand, can have my data freely, since I don't think I'll ever move to the Mainland China.
Then you know nothing of how China operates its military or its intelligence gathering apparatus. Ask any of the parts of the world that disagree with China about their sovereignty…
That something else is even more toxic doesn't make poison not poison. It's not a choice between what poison you pick, but between accepting or rejecting poison.
And, logically - if we're worried about spying - it actually makes the most sense for average Chinese people to use US software and vice versa. The biggest threat to a person is always the police & military of their own country.
For example, China killed a lot of people. They were all Chinese.
I think you're unaware of just how aggressive China is. Look at their neighbours and their policies - they don't have a single friend because everyone is afraid of their bullying behaviour backed up by their military.
Look at conquered regions like Tibet and Xinjiang.
Look at how they set up police forces in foreign countries to keep an eye on Chinese citizens living abroad. Even having kidnapped and illegally held Chinese citizens in England because they posted anti-CCP messages on WeChat.
Look at countries like the Phillipines (not even a direct neighbour) who are trying to hold on to small fishing islands just off their coast because the CCP claimed those islands in the 1970s.
Remember a few years ago when they ran a week long military exercise around Taiwan... because a US representative spoke to the Taiwanese president. Sure I agree with you that the US also overstepped a line here, but for your response to be shelling the waters around the island is excessive to say the least.
Look at the aggressive nationalist and imperialist news they feed their own population, and the propaganda spread to make the Japanese seem like demons. Did you know there are several theme parks in China where children are encouraged to Bayonette a mannequin of Japanese Imperialist soldiers?
Call the US as bad as you like, but I've never seen a theme park where children are actively taught how to kill and demonise the Taliban or Nazis.
This is probably true, but at least in principle one of those foreign nations stands for free speech and democracy and the other stands for censorship and authoritarianism.
[Edit: hey Europeans commenting and downvoting below, note the words "in principle" in the above comment and evaluate which of the two countries do or do not purport to stand for these things despite whatever your hot take may be on the current moment.]
I would rather let Chinese companies take my data than US/EU ones where I have bank accounts. Unless you are a super important, influential person, you shouldn't worry about China.
As far as I can tell this is operated out of Singapore, which is not some communist backwater, according to the law there and on top of US big tech infrastructure. The models this editor work with are by Anthropic and OpenAI both US companies.
Singapore or not, these TOS grant you nada in terms of privacy. You'd be a fool to use this: We may use Your Content to provide the Services to you and to other users, including without limitation troubleshooting, diagnostics, security and safety reviews, and customer support requests. You hereby grant to us, our affiliates and our third party partners (“SPRING Parties”) an unconditional, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable, perpetual and worldwide license, to reproduce, use, and modify Your Content in connection with the provision and improvement of the Services and its underlying technologies, as well as for the SPRING Parties' respective business operations, in each case, to the extent permitted by applicable laws.
One nuance to consider regarding Bytedance: TikTok’s CEO is also based in Singapore, but is a former Xiaomi executive who worked in Beijing for years. The firm’s employees in places like Singapore could be coerced by the government of China because of their friends, family, assets there.
Employees of Bytedance (and other Chinese companies) have to deal with draconian employee rules and agreements that tie them back to the rules of their Chinese mainland parent corporation and the Chinese government itself. For example look at the details that came out in this lawsuit against TikTok, where employees have to agree to uphold Chinese national interests, uphold socialism, etc.
I think you are contradicting yourself! Also, why add "China" to a product when you don't attach "America" to the other. If you are thinking politics, fine, else we are in for tech advancement!
Early TikTok was basically a standard Chinese startup in terms of how they collected data to optimize the app... It's not because they cared about what "you" are doing.
The Chinese tech ecosystem is just more competitive than the US one.
Most social media companies have been careless with data until they got public backlash though... TikTok's systems are probably more secure today than anyone else's... Because of the backlash.
Absolutely and verifiably false. WeChat became so important to the CCPs surveillance interests that it was essentially nationalized; and other apps that grow to its scale basically suffer the same fate. The only reason that hasn’t happened overtly to TikTok is because it’s an international product, so instead the nationalization happens discretely.
China is taking every venture-funded AI startup and shitting on them. Almost all of them.
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.
Slightly relevant but they are also in the game of commercial mathematical optimization solvers and this year they reached parity with the sota American ones (ibm cplex, gurobi, Fico Xpress).
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.
Yes, I checked the recent solvers in the MIP space and it seems they're blowing out the existing American solvers. Huawei has invested a lot of money in this area.
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.
Any blogs or other writing about this topic you can recommend? I worked with gurobi in the past but haven't been keeping up with the trends and performance gains.
If these AI efforts are funded by the Chinese government, it makes perfect sense as a strategy. The more successful they are, the more risky it becomes to invest in US AI companies, leading to fewer investments (and less know-how in the long term), and China getting even more ahead.
(I am not in AI, so please correct me if this is inaccurate.)
Good news is the system in China frequently get in the way - people with connections wins the government or state owned businesses contract, making it tougher for many innovators to strive with a shrinking private-owned/consumer-demand environment
(Source: frustrated friends who lose the government contract to someone with inferior technology)
Trae doesn't look opensource, from their site looks like you download the binary (osx only for now) and install it. You can't configure it to use your own AI or another provider. You need to use their own API, all your prompts and code are go to bytedance.
Computer vision and deep learning conferences have been overwhelmed with Chinese authors since many years ago. No surprises. However the quality of the work skyrocketed recently
Interesting theory -- maybe trying to diluting/confusing the technology market with alternatives that phone home [to the LLM] with your content.
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 could more competition be bad? Sure some startups' business plans no longer work and have to pivot but many more startups now have access to better products at lower cost.
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
Well, this is apparent if you follow the releases, but Silicon Valley doesn't want you to know that. The strategy of making this open source has a clear goal: to make it easier for other Chinese startups to use it.
Maybe they think it's in their national interest that a generation of Americans stops practicing their reading skills because of the tl;dr machine and stops building job skills that aren't reliant on the job-doing machine.
I'm okay with the software being made open to the public. I think ultimately it's good for society as a whole. The US is welcome to do the same (I.E. actually opening OpenAI) but I don't think the drawbacks of AI are mitigated by making it more profitable to the American establishment.
I feel like this would've been better as a VSCode extension. Copilot, Q, Gemini, all were able to take this approach. Also, VSCode isn't considered a full IDE and adding some AI features isn't enough to change that. It seems like they forked VS Code just for the ability to say they "created an IDE" in the same way other projects fork Chromium to "build a browser".
Nah the extension API is pretty limited. Copilot uses proprietary API’s not available to extensions.
If you really want an integrated experience, and not just a sidebar UI, you need to go the same route as Cursor and fork Code-OSS (the MIT-licensed part of VS Code, analogous to Chromium for Chrome)
What about Continue? It's an open source, bring your own api AI integration for vscode. It does everything that copilot does, including the editing-your-code-in-front-of-you diff style editor.
Reminds me of JetBrains AI, I think I'll stick to JetBrains solution for the time being. I'm not super crazy on AI coding solutions, but the JetBrains flavor hits a sweet spot for me, built-in and does what I usually need it to do.
It is definitely quirky, but I am able to use it mainly to scaffold things, and to ask it to refactor things. I only use it for personal projects so far where its no biggie if it doesn't work out, or to ask it about stack traces.
I've also blankly asked it if there's any issues with the current code, and found errors before I try to build / run a project.
Same here, I need to try it again but Copilot+Aider cover my needs right now. I would like LLM completion in my commit messages which Copilot doesn't have but JetBrains AI does IIRC. I really want JetBrains AI to get better, I think they are supposed to be adding Claude support this month? Or already did?
Readit News
We're truly building walls everywhere.
Personally, I tried copilot when I got it for free as a student and it didnt make a difference. The reason I know is that I was coding on two devices, one which had copilot installed the other didnt, and I didnt care enough to install it on the latter through an entire semester.
Its just slightly better autocomplete, by a questionable standard of "better".
There’s literally nothing an llm can write or tell you that you can’t write yourself or find in a manual somewhere.
That's like saying, there's literally nothing a service business can do for you that you can't do yourself. It's only true in a theoretical sense, if neither time nor resources are a constraint.
In such hypothetical universe, you don't need a dentist - you only need to spend 5+ years in medical school + whatever extra it takes to become proficient with tools dentists use + whatever money it takes to buy that equipment. You also don't need accountants, lawyers, hairdressers, or construction companies. You can always learn this stuff and do it yourself better!
Truth is, time and attention is finite. Meanwhile, SOTA LLMs are cheap as dirt, they can do pretty much anything that involves text, and do it at the level of a mediocre specialist - i.e. they're literally better than you at anything except the few things you happen to be experienced in. Not perfect, by no means error-free - just better than you. I feel this still hasn't sunk in for most people.
Also, local llms with an agentic tool can be a lot of fun to quickly prototype things. Quality can be hit or miss.
Hopefully the work trickles down to local models long-term.
I think you are approaching this with the wrong mindset. I see it as I'm paying somebody to type and document for me. If you treat LLMs like a power tool, it is very easy to do a cost benefit analysis.
So we're going back to the last century, but given we are in a different computing context, only the stuff that can be gated via digital stores, or Web Services, gets to have a way to force people to pay.
But I am glad we now have more paid options available. Tooling is important and people that do good work should be able to charge for high quality tools.
I would be much happier in a world full of tools licensed like Sublime Text, where I can purchase a license and just run it without the need to constantly phone home though.
Nothing stopping you to build the world you want really.
There's no moat, all the clever prompting tricks Cursor et al. are just that - there is no secret sauce besides the model at the other end.
Complexity isn't an issue either, have the model write the interface to itself.
I'm not understanding what it is about a private company launching a product that changes that?
You can do it without IDEs, nothing is stopping you. I don't think this is a new phenomenon though.
You are free to coding without spend a dime, these AI dev tool cost money because these LLM cost money to run
You can get the same experience with open source tools that you can run your own model on your pc
I mean you don't need to if you don't want to. I am gainfully employed as a software developer and what I do everyday is literally just fire up Emacs on my Linux machine and write code. To this day I haven't figured out what llms are supposed to do that a bunch of yasnippets don't.
Just like five years ago most of my day is reading and debugging code, I'm not limited by how fast I can type.
It is kind of terrifying that I probably would stop coding for the day if those subscriptions end. (I get far too much convenience out of them)
I have tried to rationalize it by the fact that I do pay for internet, and version control, and my peripherals etc
The problem is that coding was a passion, but turned out to be very lucrative profession so loads of people who can't do it want to do it.
This is why we have languages like Go, and AI tools: allow people who don't want to learn how to be developers, to get a job as developers.
Also 20$ per month is way less than what it costs them to run it. Eventually they will need to charge way more to cover their costs, and the people who can't code without an AI assistant will need to pony up :)
https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode
https://github.com/getcursor/cursor
https://github.com/Trae-AI/Trae
Not even a commit: https://github.com/timdorr/-/commit/9e5a571abd3fc4f8714e8c40...
This is what a commit-less repo looks like on GH: https://github.com/verdverm/_
Unfortunately they don't show the description "starting repository for any language and project" (a play on the _ (any) token in CUE)
But if it's for some personal project that you're putting on Github, does it matter? If my code is going on Github anyway, it's going to get slurped up regardless. I don't particularly care if it gets processed by Cursor or ByteDance before it gets scraped.
I don't think the fear is that they'll steal code you'll end putting publicly on GitHub, but everything else. I guess there is some fear that it won't just analyze and process what you currently have open, but might scrape your computer for more data and so on.
I personally don't believe ByteDance would be stupid enough to even attempt exfiltrating files from developers machines, which typically are better protected than the average user computer, just trying to see the perspective of others with a more charitable reading :)
Correct.
I laugh a little every time I hear some folks immediately push the “Big Bad China is just trying to steal our data” narrative. My immediate reaction is, “Grab some tea and let’s sit down real quick, so I can tell you what some of our companies right here in America and our government do with our data.”
If that happens to be an editor from China instead of US, I don't know what difference that would make? Both governments in those countries are crazy about spying on both their own citizens and everyone else, and have their corporations under surveillance.
As long as the editor doesn't send opened files/files from my drive to some remote backend, I couldn't care less about the nationality of the developers.
I see your point but in this particular case, I think it needs to send the opened files to a backend for processing
Is this sarcasm? Isn’t that exactly what the editor has to do to do its job? How else would the AI stuff work? It’s not running on-device, right?
(I am guessing that there will be a deal floated for Elon to buy TikTok in a few weeks)
Although, if TikTok's earnings can cover the payments on the loan, it could be possible.
Apparently, the executive order was illegal
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It was banned because of a law passed by Congress. Representatives aren't bureaucrats.
They have a lot of companies with very large consumer, and their market is saturated already. Time to expand to the rest of the world.
That being said, I am using (Chinese) Deepseek r1 because there isn't currently a free LLM on par with it. I am careful with what I share though, a little more so than with any others that are not locally fun.
So as a non USA citizen, I'm way more afraid of USA than I am of China.
Which is why I would like the US govt to have as little data as possible about me (who knows what the mainstream politics will look like, things that are very innocent today might be punishable by death in 10 years).
Chinese govt, on the other hand, can have my data freely, since I don't think I'll ever move to the Mainland China.
For example, China killed a lot of people. They were all Chinese.
Look at conquered regions like Tibet and Xinjiang.
Look at how they set up police forces in foreign countries to keep an eye on Chinese citizens living abroad. Even having kidnapped and illegally held Chinese citizens in England because they posted anti-CCP messages on WeChat.
Look at countries like the Phillipines (not even a direct neighbour) who are trying to hold on to small fishing islands just off their coast because the CCP claimed those islands in the 1970s.
Remember a few years ago when they ran a week long military exercise around Taiwan... because a US representative spoke to the Taiwanese president. Sure I agree with you that the US also overstepped a line here, but for your response to be shelling the waters around the island is excessive to say the least.
Look at the aggressive nationalist and imperialist news they feed their own population, and the propaganda spread to make the Japanese seem like demons. Did you know there are several theme parks in China where children are encouraged to Bayonette a mannequin of Japanese Imperialist soldiers?
Call the US as bad as you like, but I've never seen a theme park where children are actively taught how to kill and demonise the Taliban or Nazis.
[Edit: hey Europeans commenting and downvoting below, note the words "in principle" in the above comment and evaluate which of the two countries do or do not purport to stand for these things despite whatever your hot take may be on the current moment.]
Have you tried the 7b?
Employees of Bytedance (and other Chinese companies) have to deal with draconian employee rules and agreements that tie them back to the rules of their Chinese mainland parent corporation and the Chinese government itself. For example look at the details that came out in this lawsuit against TikTok, where employees have to agree to uphold Chinese national interests, uphold socialism, etc.
https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
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Early TikTok was basically a standard Chinese startup in terms of how they collected data to optimize the app... It's not because they cared about what "you" are doing.
The Chinese tech ecosystem is just more competitive than the US one.
Most social media companies have been careless with data until they got public backlash though... TikTok's systems are probably more secure today than anyone else's... Because of the backlash.
Does that sound like a business or an intelligence front?
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.
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.
https://plato.asu.edu/bench.html
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 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)
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.
If you really want an integrated experience, and not just a sidebar UI, you need to go the same route as Cursor and fork Code-OSS (the MIT-licensed part of VS Code, analogous to Chromium for Chrome)
I don't think it has any special api access?
Wondering if it is a fork of vscode though because right now it will be competing against cursor.
I've also blankly asked it if there's any issues with the current code, and found errors before I try to build / run a project.