Can someone explain to me why I, as an American, should be angry that China is making something better than us that it is also releasing for free to the world? I mean, we still get to use it if we want, and so does everyone else.
I don’t see why putting more money into the pockets of a few AI billionaires is considered a national priority.
You absolutely shouldn’t be angry!
The existence of powerful open-weight models is the single thing that’s going to prevent us from descending into the full corporate dystopia everyone’s afraid of.
It’s going to hit the stock market hard once everyone figures out what’s going on though.
There is absolutely no reason to be angry. If China develops better AI and releases it freely, Americans benefit just like everyone else. The only people with a reason to panic are billionaires.
Silicon Valley spent billions building AI tollbooths while Chinese labs made models people can actually download and run. Then Washington restricted chips, and China got better at doing more with less. It’s almost poetic: America tried to corner the future of AI and accidentally made efficiency China’s competitive advantage.
Open-weight is not the point in the AI race so this comparison doesn‘t tell us anything about who‘s leading in whatever metrics they‘re testing right now.
I wish models had to disclose their training sets so IP holders can sue for damages. Those would get into the trillions no doubt. Hell I wish LLMs never got this much out of hand. But I don‘t understand what they‘re getting at with this or why make it a „China VS the West“ thing.
Open weight AI absolutely matters if the question is who gets to shape the AI ecosystem. A slightly better closed model wins a benchmark: a good open model can be adapted, audited and run without paying a Silicon Valley landlord. And yes, training data transparency should apply to both Chinese and Western labs. That’s not a contradiction: it’s the point. Still: FOSAI » OWAI » ClosedAI
Because then Western AI companies can go to the governments, point to China and say: “see how advanced they are? See how they can apply that to the economy and military? You’d better give us money and not try to regulate us.”
That is the whole story.
You’d better give us money and not try to regulate us.
Actually, right now, the western AI companies desperately want regulation.
An unregulated environment is one where they’re forced to compete on price against the Chinese companies and startups running open-weight models. All signs point to them losing that battle.
OpenAI/Anthropic’s wish list right now is a bunch of regulation to prevent the use of foreign models, and to require expensive to implement “safety” requirements that make it hard for startups to compete.
Yes, that’s a different kind of regulation than the one I was thinking about. They do want market/economic regulation (i.e. ban Chinese model use) but not law/justice regulation (our AI made an oopsie, sorry, not our fault).
