It doesn't look like that's happening, on the contrary the prices are falling especially when taking into account capabilities.
I'm hardly a fan of China/Xi, but I do appreciate and benefit from this.
They will burn as much money as necessary to make that happen. And they have a virtually infinite amount of liquidity.
There's only 12 countries that do on the planet, the most "relevant" of them being Guatemala and Haiti.
As or the LLM topic: you can download weights of chinese models and remove any censorship and bias. Can you do so with american closed ones?
For political reason, yes. Taiwan is obviously a country, though.
The goodwill/propaganda are convenient, sure, but my guess is that they aren't the primary motivation. Another possibility is that if no takeoff happens, pressuring OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability would exacerbate any damage overinvestment has done to the US stock market/economy.
Capturing the users is the ad network, that's Google and OpenAI. Capturing corporate trust at a reasonable API cost, that's Anthropic's direction.
China has none of that and they never will for exactly the same reason Baidu is irrelevant globally despite being a highly capable search engine. 'Search' is also a commodity, that's not the value that Google brings to the table.
It's a search engine, anybody can build a search engine = that's what you just said.
But two products that provide essentially the same benefit, and one is significantly cheaper? Corporations maximize profit, my friend. What the model has to say about Tianammmen Square doesn't matter when we're using it to write code.
In the end, everyone lost and there are millions of bikes in landfills.
If you're interested in the bikeshare bubble, Asianometry did a video on it a while ago.
The notion of comparing this to Chinese bikesharing is comically absurd.
"Allegedly".
Plus with a lot of accounting tricks, and this not being recurring to make their books look nice for the eventual IPO.
Now, all this talk of pacing the frontier obviously means that they are afraid of the competition. It could be the open models eating their margins, but also competing frontier models forcing them to invest more and more for diminishing returns, just to keep up. They would certainly benefit from a "Moore's Law" roadmap to pace the advances, and seeing that they lobby for US laws, it would probably mean they are more worried about increasing spending. Though outlawing both open models and Chinese models would be good for their bottom line as well.