American AI May Not Survive Chinese Open-Source

letter.palladiummag.com

2 points·ForHackernews··5 comments

I don't think the public is going to swallow subsidies for the richest companies on Earth so that they can avoid competition.

"...A proprietary model that the U.S. government is treating like something just shy of a nuclear weapon..."

This is more than a little hyperbolic. Maybe "just shy of Valium"?

What stops them to release their models as well? Not asking if greed has limits, it doesn't, I'm talking about a sensible business model that all things being equal consumers can decide for themselves if they want to use a domestic product or not which at that point, why not.

Right now frontier agents and open source agents are apples to oranges to the user, investor, manager et al. If you flatten that and say "hey, we provide this tool as well!" then it just comes down to pricing/speed. Just because America's scale is bigger today doesn't mean they'll stay #1.

Same thing that happens when a FOSS tool is released of something that is a private SaaS. The company will make it insanely hard to migrate. We already see this happening with OAI and Anthropic. E.g. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367350

> Just because America's scale is bigger today doesn't mean they'll stay #1.

There many #1's, in many different areas, cramming truck-loads of capital into two corps while starving everything else, and doing for meager advantages over the cheap stuff, is economic suicide by opportunity cost.

This looks to me like Anthropic and OpenAI preparing the ground to get a taxpayer bailout when they are unable to meet their financial commitments.

"It wasn't our insane trillion-dollar promises, it was those dastardly Chinese communists offering the same products cheaper!"

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