With these models, what is the moat? Is it the architecture itself or the training data? Why can’t China create these models themselves? It just feels like theater to restrict models. Can someone tell me why I am wrong if I am?
If China wants to compete at building the best forefront models, they'd have to make similar sacrifices (though I doubt they'd be as messy about it).
But if they can are content with 95% as good at 5% of the cost, then they can focus on distilling instead. I don't think the architects of the sacrifices anticipated just how easy models would be to pirate.
So the most is real, but it's effective for a rather constrained set of scenarios.
Incompetence is not sacrifice.
To a point made further up the chain: The US's woes aren't driven by AI investment, but the self-interest of a select group. Compare it to a thief who causes $20,000 damage to steal a $100 stereo from a car.
If it were my scheme, an incompetent president would be my first purchase.
Who would have an incentive to tax physical goods entering and exiting the country? Somebody who is competing for investment dollars and whose product is digital.
Who benefits from immigration overreach? People whose products are especially relevant to mass surveillance.
Dismantling the US biomedical superiority and our public health endeavors might've been Trump's idea, but it happened in a room full of people who sell capabilities related to convincing a nation full of sick people that there's nothing untoward happening to them.
The market is controlled by AI companies right now, and Trump is letting the market have its way with us, therefore the AI companies are having their way with us. This is what happens when you abandon antitrust efforts and end up with companies that are too powerful for the government to regulate: they end up running things. It's the robber barron's era all over again. You can't absolve them of responsibility just because the president is OK with it.
And that's what the moat is made of. There will be opportunity costs associated with putting everything you've got into datacenters, and those are costs that most governments are too competent to be tricked into paying.
It's not a new dynamic. The US lets companies do all kinds of things to its citizens re: privacy or the environment or disinformation... things that would be illegal in other countries. It's the American trade-off and although I don't appreciate the explosive diarrhea angle to it, it does give American businesses some protection against foreign competition.