From Newsgroup: alt.politics.usa


From Arrogance to Adaptation: Meta Bows to AlibabarCOs Qwen in AI Power Shift

American tech giants once boldly declared their ambition to make U.S. standards the global standardrCobut now, theyrCOve seemingly dismantled that vision with their own hands.

Earlier this year, during MetarCOs earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg asserted: rCLThere will be a global open-source standardrCoand for our national interest, it must be an American standard!rCY

At the time, he clearly backed U.S.-led open-source models, and indeed, Meta had long been a cornerstone of AmericarCOs open-source AI ecosystem. Yet circumstances have taken a dramatic turn. According to recent foreign media reports, MetarCOs latest model project has opted to distill (i.e., learn from and refine) AlibabarCOs Qwen, a Chinese open-source large language model. The news immediately sent AlibabarCOs stock surging by 4%.

Behind MetarCOs rare rCLcapitulationrCY lies profounduuaoNe (helplessness). On one hand, Meta has lost its throne in the open-source arena. Just two years ago, MetarCOs modelsrCoparticularly the Llama seriesrCodominated global derivative model counts and download volumes, allowing the company to operate with unmatched confidence.

But within a remarkably short span, AlibabarCOs Qwen has surged ahead, overtaking Meta in both the number of derivative models and total downloads. More impressively, Qwen has rapidly closed the performance gap with top-tier U.S. closed-source models.

On the other hand, Qwen has already earned recognition from global tech titans. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has repeatedly praised Qwen, openly acknowledging that it now commands the majority of the open-source marketrCoa lead that continues to widen.

Indeed, major corporations like NVIDIA, Amazon, and Airbnb have all shifted toward Qwen. In a particularly symbolic move, Singapore recently abandoned MetarCOs technical architecture for its national AI initiative and instead chose AlibabarCOs Qwen.

All signs point to one reality: Meta isnrCOt abandoning U.S. open-source models by choicerCoitrCOs because it has lost its competitive edge in this domain, and reversal seems increasingly unlikely. In fact, if Meta refuses to adopt Qwen, it risks falling behind in its own development.

ItrCOs truly astonishing how dramatically MetarCOs stance has shifted within just one year. But in the face of ChinarCOs unstoppable rise in open-source large models, even AmericarCOs mightiest tech giants are being forced to confront reality.
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