Comment by yogthos

Linux gets a lot of funding and corporate development done actually. And training models is also getting cheaper every year. There are also projects like Petals which allow you to train models in a distributed fashion https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals

And yeah, I do think China's government is going to continue subsidizing this tech because this tech is being used all over the place in China now. Meanwhile, the models aren't developed by the government, they're developed by individual countries that get subsidies. As I've explained above, converging on common infrastructure is going to save resources for all these companies. And continuing to work in the open with the rest of the world means getting the benefit of having a global community of researchers helping advance this tech forward.

It's not just altruism or clout. American companies working on closed models have to foot the bill for all the research, and they're limited to the brainpower within the company. And they're competing with Chinese which have much bigger research community contributing to developing their models.

If the model itself is not the product, then American companies find themselves in a situation where they're spending a ton of resources on something that's not their core business.