China Smart, US Dumb: Twisting the LLM Daozi
May 12, 2025
No AI, just the dinobaby expressing his opinions to Zellenials.
That hard-hitting technology information service Venture Beat published an interesting article. Its title is “Alibaba ZeroSearch Lets AI Learn to Google Itself — Slashing Training Costs by 88 Percent.” The main point of the write up, in my opinion, is that Chinese engineers have done something really “smart.” The knife at the throat of US smart software companies is cost. The money fires will flame out unless more dollars are dumped into the innovation furnaces of smart software.
The Venture Beat story makes the point that “could dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of training AI systems to search for information, eliminating the need for expensive commercial search engine APIs altogether.”
Oh, oh.
This is smart. Buring cash in pursuit of a fractional improvement is dumb, well, actually, stupid, if the write up’s inforamtion is accurate.
The Venture Beat story says:
The technique, called “ZeroSearch,” allows large language models (LLMs) to develop advanced search capabilities through a simulation approach rather than interacting with real search engines during the training process. This innovation could save companies significant API expenses while offering better control over how AI systems learn to retrieve information.
Is this a Snorkel variant hot from Stanford AI lab?
The write up does not delve into the synthetic data short cut to smart software. After some mumbo jumbo, the write up points out the meat of the “innovation”:
The cost savings are substantial. According to the researchers’ analysis, training with approximately 64,000 search queries using Google Search via SerpAPI would cost about $586.70, while using a 14B-parameter simulation LLM on four A100 GPUs costs only $70.80 — an 88% reduction.
Imagine. A dollar in cost becomes $0.12. If accurate, what should a savvy investor do? Pump money into an outfit like OpenAI or the Xai- type entity, or think harder about the China-smart solution?
Venture Beat explains the implication of the alleged cost savings:
The impact could be substantial for the AI industry.
No kidding?
The Venture Beat analysts add this observation:
The irony is clear: in teaching AI to search without search engines, Alibaba may have created a technology that makes traditional search engines less necessary for AI development. As these systems become more self-sufficient, the technology landscape could look very different in just a few years.
Yep, irony. Free transformer technology. Free Snorkle technology. Free kinetic into the core of the LLM money furnace.
If true, the implications are easy to outline. If bogus, the China Smart, US Dumb trope still captured ink and will be embedded in some smart software’s increasingly frequent hallucinatory outputs. At which point, the China Smart, US Dumb information gains traction and becomes “fact” to some.
Stephen E Arnold, May 12, 2025
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