China is winning the hearts of developers in this race so far. At least, they won mine already.
I actually claim something even stronger, which is it’s what’s in your heart that really determines if you’re American :)
That pretty much translates to blank checks from the party without much oversight or expected ROI. The approach is basically brute forcing something into existence rather than organically letting it grow. China is notorious for this approach, ghost cities, high speed rail to nowhere, solar panel production in the face of a huge glut.
Ultimately though, there is an expectation that AI will serve the goals of the party, after all it is their trillions that will be funding it. I guess the core difference is that in the US AI is expected to generate profit, in China it is expected to generate controlled social cohesion.
Some of the reasons could be:
- mitigation of US AI supremacy
- Commodify AI use to push forward innovation and sell platforms to run them, e.g. if iPhone wins local intelligence, it benefits China, because China is manufacturing those phones
- talent war inside China
- soften the sentiment against China in the US
- they're just awesome people
- and many more
Thank you for including that option in your list! F#ck cynicism.
If all of that stuff becomes free, the money will just move a few layers up to all of the companies whose cost structure has suddenly been cut dramatically.
There is no commoditization of expensive technology that results in a net loss of market value. It just moves around.
And some uses of LLMs are intensely political; think of a student using an LLM to learn about the causes of the civil war. I can understand a country wanting their own LLMs for the same reason they write their own history textbooks.
By releasing the weights they they can get free volunteer help, win hearts and minds with their open approach, weaken foreign corporations, give their citizens robust performance in their native language, and exercise narrative control - all at the same time.
Watching the US stock market implode from the bubble generated from investors over here not realizing this is happening will be a nice bonus for them, I guess, and constantly shipping open SOTA models will speed that along.