Luna is about suppressing inexpensive Chinese model competition.
It's super simple.
Gigantic hyper margin ad network = artificial subsidization of cost for various tiers = put the boot on the neck of Chinese competitors. There's no scenario where they can compete with what advertising margins make possible in terms of artificially lowering prices charged.
> Luna is about suppressing inexpensive Chinese model competition.
I think so too. To me the so-called Chinese local models are a clear move to prevent US companies to establish a foothold and build a moat around their business. US companies are clearly invested in a strategy to make themselves relevant with claims of major impressive achievements with the so called frontier models, and how these and only these are unblocking whole ranges of applications. At the same time, they are heavily invested in pushing AI on all absurd types of mundane tasks, such as transcribing meetings and... talking to your own kids?
In the meantime it's rather obvious that, in spite of all the propaganda, frontier models are required only in ultra niche applications, whereas the ability to run any model at all already provides most of the value. In fact, US companies have been renownee by dumbing down older generation models in what seems to be a desperate attempt to make newer models look better and influence their uptake rate.
So there is no better way to take the wind out of the US AI companies' sail than pulling a two-punch attack consisting of not inly releasing capable models that refute the "only US frontier will do the job" thesis but also releasing them for free to commodities them and eliminate the business impact of dumbing down models.
> i don't doubt they're pushing for using AI for that, but i'm curious of examples of where they're doing this. commercials, ads, etc.
You just be living under a rock. Not do long ago Sam Altman was floating this fantastic usecases for AI was to have it explain to you your kids interests, and have it create a podcast for you to be able to keep in touch.
Chinese buy their tokens at home. West as a market is an afterthought for their companies them. Western AI is banned, so only used via resellers by small fish, not companies. US has zero presence at that huge market, and absolutely not a moat.
They are buying Huawei accelerators in bulk to serve their local customers. The whole system is currently optimized to deliver a lot of cheap LLMs and hardware for them to run on.
Everyone keeps saying this, but I don't believe it's true. I think Luna is just an MLA or sparse architecture like all the flash variants and it's just cheap to run.
In any case, over the past few years, the only thing that has gotten more expensive is the hardware to run local models while API and Subs have gotten more affordable or feature rich while remaining same price.
They can compete because they have the compute to run the volume and if it's good on agentic work, people will be less incentivised to use other models for "Tasky-y" work.
It's literally increasing their market opportunity
They're closing in a billion users. That's Google search territory.
OpenAI is sitting on a $100+ billion ad network, incoming.
They're not going to need a government bailout, they're going to be a spigot of cash production.
Every single thread on HN keeps saying the same ridiculous thing, going on a year now. It's like they've never heard of advertising, which SV specializes in. It's like they're oblivious to the fact that every mega platform with so many users becomes an ad goldmine, and GPT's context positioning is even richer than search.
> OpenAI is sitting on a $100+ billion ad network, incoming.
How can you make this sort of claim with a straight face, knowing that a chinese model downloaded for free from ollama works as well if not better than OpenAI's models, without costing you a cent.
GPT is still 20 a month for most people, 50-100 or 200 for pros.
Meanwhile, for local LLM's - everyone is chasing hardware that is crazy expensiv eand to get around it they're leasing it or putting it on credit card. DGX Sparks are insane, and you need 2 for most people talking in this thread. Mac Ultra 5 is amazing but 6k minimum 12k for the build most want so many people lease it for 240 a month which doesn't even include electricity or time in setup so instead of talking about facts, we get into weird arguments like console wars where people give APple a 5 trillion dollar company 250 a month for 36 months and don't even own their hardware money "because they can run local models" vs just paying for output from their choice of frontier.
I say this fully loving local llms and embracing them, but the reality is, local llms have gotten so expensive and continue to get expensive while we keep talking about this "Threat" of apis - where there are a lot more than openai and anthropic available much cheaper and competitive priced.
Oh, and they don't work better than OpenAI or else we wouldn't even have these discussions.
Snark aside, Luna 5.6 was (is) an incredible game-changer.