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Comment by npodbielski | Hacker News Reader

Interesting take. One question though: is it even possible for US companies? I am not so sure. Investors put a lot of money in those companies and they expect return. Doing nothing for 6-12 months waiting for China would probably make a lot of important people very unhappy.

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I guess the central point here is that many view this as a race and one in which if you are ahead the competitor can undercut you and being in the lead doesn't matter and instead cost matters - China's model can do XYZ at X% the cost of Claude!! So doomed! But if that's true for the United States it's of course true for China too. In other words, if American companies stopped investing they would have to stop investing too otherwise they would wind up in the same situation, it's like a game of hot potato. I don't buy it because it doesn't make sense. I think the 6-12 month lead time for American companies actually matters and China doesn't have a great hand to play here. At best they can catch up, if they pull ahead then American companies can just play the same hand that China seems to be playing.

They're trying to (and other commentators are as well) look at this like a manufacturing play where you flood the market with low-cost goods but I think that's not just simplistic but wrong too.

What is wrong too? The plan to create a lot of cheap models? That it is what is happening but it is bad plan? Or the opinion that it is what is happening but it is wrong opinion because they do not plan to do that but i.e. China is just bigger with more people so just more companies are releasing more models?

Maybe both is happening a lot of choices will make more people go with Chinese models, which means less money to the US which means more problem to US companies. But at the same time they are cheaper and less of quality because this is China, this is what they does.

Personally I think this much more complicated as everything in life.

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