To push back on naivety I'm sensing here I think it's a little silly to see Chinese Communist Party backed enterprise as somehow magnanimous and without ulterior, very harmful motive.
Yet, we (developers, users, human civilization), benefit from that.
So yes, I cherish when Chinese companies release open source LLMs. Be it as it fits their business model (the same way as US companies) or from grants (the same way as a lot of EU-backed projects, e.g. Python, DuckDB, scikit-learn).
It's a very transparent, consistent strategy.
AI is a little different because it has geopolitical implications.
This is using open source in a bit of different spirit than the hacker ethos, and I am not sure how I feel about it.
It is a kind of cheat on the fair market but at the same time it is also costly to China and its capital costs may become unsustainable before the last players fold.
Absurd to say Deepseek is CCP controlled while ignoring the govt connection here
It's a bit early to have any sort of feelings about it, isn't it? You're speaking in absolutes, but none of this is necessarily 100% true as we don't know their intentions. And judging a group of individuals intention based on what their country seems to want, from the lens of a foreign country, usually doesn't land you with the right interpretation.
What I appreciate about the Chinese efforts is that they are being forced to get more intelligence from less hardware, and they are not only releasing their work products but documenting the R&D behind them at least as well as our own closed-source companies do.
A good reason to stir up dumping accusations and anti-China bias would be if they stopped publishing not just the open-source models, but the technical papers that go with them. Until that happens, I think it's better to prefer more charitable explanations for their posture.
I am very curious on your definition and usage of 'fair' there, and whether you would call the LLM etc sector as it stands now, but hypothetically absent deepseek say, a 'fair market'. (If not, why not?)
It's also a bit funny that providing free models is probably the most communist thing China has done in a long time.
ESH
We should all be happy about the price of AI coming down.
Seriously though, our leaders are actively throwing everything and the kitchen sink into AI companies - in some vain attempt to become immortal or own even more of the nations wealth beyond what they already do, chasing some kind of neo-tech feudalism. Both are unachievable because they rely on a complex system that they clearly don't understand.
Can you really view this as a cheat this when the US is throwing a trillion dollars in support of a supposedly "fair market"?
Where do you think they learnt this trick? Years lurking on HN and this post's comment section wins #1 on the American Hypocrisy chart. Unbelievable that even in the current US people can't recognize when they're looking in the mirror. But I guess you're disincentivized to do so when most of your net worth stems from exactly those companies and those practices.
Do you believe the lack of competition is purely because the products are superior?
US tech is now sort of like the dollar. People/countries outside the US need and want alternatives to hedge against in the event of political uncertainity but cannot do it completely for various reasons including arm twisting by the US govt.
One example is some govts and universities in the EU are trying to get rid of MS products for decades but they are unable to.
If that's true, why doesn't America compete on this front against China?
> they're more often than not held at a disadvantage by domestic governments
So when the US had the policy advantage over the EU it was just the market working, but when China has the policy advantage over the US it suddenly becomes unfair?
I think you misunderstood this. When domestic competitor arise against American tech, the domestic government tends to explicitly favour those competitor against American tech, placing the latter at an disadvantage.
You can see India or China or Korea or SEA where they have their own favored food delivery apps and internet services. Even in the EU the local LLM companies like Mistral are favored by local businesses for integration over OpenAI. Clearly American tech hasn't actually displaced serious domestic competitors, so the rare earths comparison fails when the USA in contrast is far more willing to let local businesses fail.
Things can be bad in a spectrum and I believe it is much easier for society/state to break up a capitalistic monopoly than a state backed monopoly. To illustrate, the state has sued some of those companies and they were seriously threatened, because of competition ills. That is not the case with a state company.
Banks created their oligopolies and then who saved them when they fucked up?
Isn't Tesla a state backed monopoly in the USA because of grants and tariffs on external competitors? Isn't SpaceX? Yet nobody treats then as state backed.
I don't understand this necessity to put companies in a pedestal and hate on states. Capitalist propaganda I guess?
Market forces are manipulated all the time. This distinction is nonsense. Companies influence states and vice-versa.
The way I see this, some tech teams in China have figured out that training and tuning LLMs is not that expensive after all and they can do it at a fraction of the cost. So they are doing it to enter a market previously dominated by US only players.
Meanwhile, America has been causing death and destruction around the world. It's easy to make lists: Vietnam, Iraq, Gaza, Cuba, South and Central America etc etc.