That strategy happens to have beneficial side effects to the global Hoi Polloi, but to attach any kind of benevolence to it would be naive.
It also enables further R&D using the open models as a starting point. That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off. In that sense it provides a long term hedge by minimizing the damage in the worst case scenario where china ends up suffering a crushing defeat in the AI race for whatever reason.
That is not necessarily true, as "tightly regulated industries with security concerns" are also afraid of deepseek models generating vulnerable code. Even a possibility of that prevents those industries from deployments.
> That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off.
So, basically, competition is bad for US models? That argument doesn't address open-weights. And it doesn't work the other way around, because in that case China should be releasing close-weights instead.
Having less of a lead is bad for US frontier labs.
> That argument doesn't address open-weights.
Open weights does far more to further that goal than closed weights ever could. The bit right before the sentence you quoted was about enabling further R&D using open models as a starting point. In the same way that open weights serves as a force multiplier when it comes to flooding the market with cheap inference it also serves as a force multiplier if your goal is the raise the R&D floor. In this scenario a reasonable move for a capable opponent that's lagging behind is to attempt to raise the floor of the whole market so as to erode the position of whoever is in the lead.
Also consider that (as I previously mentioned) raising the capabilities of the global market as a whole serves to minimize damage in a worst case scenario. If you find yourself needing to depend on a foreign supplier for a key technology then it's better to have as many choices as possible from as many different jurisdictions as possible.
If you see a given technology as fundamental[tm], you want to ensure that you will retain access to it AND its ongoing development. China may well foresee a possible future where US imposes export controls and global sanctions to block PRC from having access to the necessary equipment to either train or use the most advanced models - let alone its alternate parallel universe where US might go as far as prevent anyone else than US themselves having the most advanced forms of the technology at all.[ß]
To ward off such a scenario, China doesn't need to become the sole leading supplier. They only need to guarantee that nobody else can even try to block them off, and that the technology itself can never be yanked.
ß: What could possibly give them such ideas?