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Comment by JLO64 | Hacker News Reader

A worst case scenario I feel is that the government could restrict inference providers within the US to run only approved/American LLMs, which would be a huge deal since the only recent American OSS model is Gemma. I could see OpenAI/Anthropic/Google lobbying for that though…

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My thought as well. They will approve every new American trained LLM but they can't control the release of free Chinese LLMs. Therefore, the only card they can play is to simply make Chinese LLMs illegal to use for American companies and Americans.

Ultimately, this will grant more power to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google due to regulatory capture but it hurts the AI industry overall.

Only the us AI industry. It will put the US in a ditch with it's only asset being the ability to surveill its citizens for negative money and negative innovation. The rest of the world will keep spinning just fine

Let’s hope. It would be great for Europe and the rest of the world.

Unless we (Europe) start to do the same…

Nah there's literally no reason geopolitically or economically to do that for Europe. The US has more or less entirely botched everything except it's military applications for AI. It's endangering the whole economy in the process too.

Not for the same reasons (such as the direct propaganda I expect from the Trump government), but if there is a precedent I can definitely see propositions to have some sort of regulator vet models before release to protect young people or similar

uhm. Europe is ID gating their entire internet - they're not bothered about foreign powers, just control.

Chat control also failed. There's a lot of hope still.

The thing goes both ways. They have to secure their people from Russian and American propaganda that will be coming by the petabyte once a few more us data centers go online. The US is trying to elect fascists in Europe.

At the same time it's a terrible practice for privacy and human rights. Especially in the wrong hands.

They know very well that China is going to keep releasing world class models at 1/20th the price and 5-300x smaller in size. They also know they screwed up by going full technofacism and there's no way back because of the trillions invested in oligarchs and it endangers the entire economy.

China can’t keep doing that. This is essentially a capture the market ploy that is government back from them at this point at current DeepSeek prices they would have to make a massive loss.

I think you misunderstood what China has been doing to make the progress they have. They've invested far less and have actual applications because they are the world's largest manufacturer.

In the us we have products we sell to china to automate their factories. China soon wont need those. The US goal of laying off anyone who thinks for money is really different than chinas goals of automating product manufacturing.

Deepseek costs less because it actually costs less. Chinas electrical infrastructure is so much better than the uses. Meanwhile the us has ai data centers running on effing gas. On literal gas generators. The only budget discussions for infrastructure in the us are basically for the DHS too. It's not sustainable.

China can’t keep doing that.

Who or what will stop them?

Probably economics eventually.

I also don't think we're going to have top tier free models forever. It's going to end within a few years.

They aren't spending money like we are. They've been able to do what they have with an embargo on Nvidia cards even.

I think we will see model size shrink more and more and become more efficient. Ideally to the point where they run on high end computers and not data centers. That's the future in my opinion.

At that point you could run them on your phone or chrome book for free or with ads like Google search. Or pay for privacy

Aurareturn. I don't think they care. Geopolitically China stands to gain a lot by commoditizing it's complement. They don't need a booming insanely profitable ai industry. They are not trillions of dollars leveraged in. I think for them the applications matter more. And they can do just fine with the us scrambling for a few decades. They don't think short term the way the us does. Neither do most countries. They also don't do the individualistic burn everything down for one trillionaire thing.

China !== Chinese LLM labs.

Sure but those are still profitable enough without trying to take over the world. Even with free models. Not every new idea is worth 20 trillion dollars. I think most small companies are happy to take home a few billion.

None of them are profitable. The industry will consolidate and the consolidated company will need to make money.

Alibaba was almost measuring profit in the trillions of dollars profit last year. They make the qwen models. Sure their profit is driven by another vertical, but I don't think they are in any danger of having cash flow issues. Supposedly they have already broken even because they had serious business needs for LLMs. And again that vertical is complimented by their investment. It draws in ad revenue, customer support, etc.

I'd love to be wrong but I don't see how Chinese frontier models will keep getting released for free. I'm pretty sure Qwen no longer releases their flagship models to the public.

They may not see the economic value of releasing models for free and then hoping that you'd use their API. Once they catch up more to US models, they will inevitably go closed source. That's my prediction.

I could see a much more restrictive licensing agreement before going full closed source. It could be a scenario where hyper scalers such as AWS or Azure will gain far more value from free Chinese models than Chinese labs such as when AWS often gained more than for-profit open source software than the creators.

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