Comment by jmyeet
6 hours ago
The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. It's why the US is seeking to block states from banning prediction markets. It's why the federal government is seeking to block states from blocking data center projects.
As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty.
I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy.
So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies.
The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).
The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts.
The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.
if you look at share of industry profits, currently most of AI profits are captured by NVIDIA and cloud providers
banning deepseek/open weight models will allow Ant/OAI jack up prices and extract more profits for themselves
keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers
> keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers
With the Chinese manufacturing capacity, how long do you think this will remain true for? You can't spin up a fab in a year, that's true, but you can in five years, at which point all the protectionism in the world isn't going to help.
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> The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).
It sounds right, but I see zero evidence of this. I think you underestimate how many people in the current administration are True Believers. This does not, to me, seem like anything to do with Big Capital, but rather "America over China".
and it would be great to have an independent auditor have access to all the training material and good search tools, so that take down requests can be made by copyright owners
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Do you really think the truth has anything to do with the power of a narrative?
Seems like interests of US government and US capital (monopolize and corner markets, jack up prices, extract economic rent in perpetuity) run strictly against interests of the broader US consumers and overall global population
> It's why a Tiktok sale was forced.
I think that has more to do with controlling narratives that the USG doesn't like.
Ever see a tiktok about may 35?
I don't use TikTok, but a cursory search shows that there's a #tiananmensquare tag that has a few thousand videos, including many about the protests and Tank Man. So while I haven't seen a TikTok about it, someone has.
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Why should that mean that Americans should prefer that TikTok restrict narratives unfavoraroble to American oligarchs?
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Those data centers that "states" want to block: the CCP was directly tied to funding the protests and movements to weaken the U.S. technologically. Kevin O'Leary exposed it, in collaboration with the White House.
I'm happy that China is doing that. US cannot be trusted anymore.
Not saying that China can be trusted either, but I think having more actors is better for all of us.
Chinese have a wider outlook on it.
Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.
But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.
So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.
They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.
It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.
> It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.
I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.
Moving towards China because of concerns of autocracy is a hilarious concept.
Yeah, for me it's the latter. Until recent years, it was at least possible to defend the US as having some good principles, despite how imperfectly defended or promoted they may have been. That in turn could make it worth defending. Now, it's just blatantly turned into everything it always stood against.
> But also a financial one
china's advantage is manufacturing capacity. giving away the model is a loss leader for the hardware business. they have a big gap on chip manufacturing. the only way to close that is by developing more efficient software. an open ecosystem is the best way to accelerate innovation of software development. since they are behind the US on model capabilities they aren't really losing anything by making the models open weights and being open about the performance enhancements techniques. but the open weights models are not necessarily what are running on the platforms or what they have internally. deepseek released v4 on their platform about a month before the open weights release, which I would guess was done to expose it to adversarial testing, so they could fine tune the removal of capabilities from the open weights model. (but i may very well be wrong)
Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.
Well yeah humanity in the sense of everyone except maybe Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols, ... I mean open models are really cool, but I have a hard time believing China is doing it purely for the greater good. The commoditizing your complement story sounds much more plausible.
>> Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity
It’s really BS. Comunist China Party is mostly interested in control above all. Forget humanity, human rights, what is good or what is bad or even financials. The most important thing to them is to keep the people on a short leash. Of course once they feel they have that under control they think about the “humanity” stuff as well but that’s just extra.
Which part of releasing ai research in the open or open weight models reflect that exactly?
An excellent example of Poe’s law. I can’t imagine what kind of Western person would hold such a cognitively dissonant view of globalism, for example.
What do you mean?
I think you’re assigning magnanimity to a competitor that is lagging behind and has every, state backed incentive to capture the market the only way they can. By making the models dirt cheap to access. If the roles were reversed you wouldn’t see open source versions of Chinese models. Much like you don’t see them open sourcing their blade battery design.
realisticaly, the united states has no right or moral authority when it comes to human rights or rule of law given the last few years. given that, the admonishment of china's human rights violations against uighurs run hollow and hypocritical.
just happy to have more models that I could eventually play with if hardware ever becomes cheaper.
The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.
Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment.
The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
> there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.
Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.
Not quite -- those were loans that were largely repaid, quite different from the subsidies CCP uses for its industrial base.
ProPublica has a nice tracker that shows the loans: https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/
You can also see how subsidies compare between China and OECD in this recent doc. In autos, China subsidizes to the tune of 2-3% of revenue vs. <0.5% for North America. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/magic-database-indus...
Great story. A couple of billion dollars 18 years ago is not an industrial policy.
The US is primarily powered by oil and natural gas, has massive domestic capacity, and locked in supply all over the Americas. China has a completely different energy mix and they move from a position of competitive disadvantage on ICE cars to competitive advantage on electric. Rapid electrification for China is all win, but for the US and our partners in the oil business, it would mean stranding trillions in capital investments that still have decades to run, so it just isn't going to happen.
Why do people say this? You can get a Shanghai-made Tesla Model 3 with CATL batteries in the US yet somehow, if a Chinese car, made with Chinese components in Chinese factories were to enter the market, the would spell doom for the entire US auto industry.
You just explained it. You can get a Chinese made car in China.
That's kind of the point. They are smart enough to protect and support their domestic industries. We also have to do that, it's necessary for sovereignty.
Perhaps the U.S should change its industrial policy as well so that it can be competitive on the global market? To me it’s been clear that the car manufacturers both in the US and Europe were just milking their customers every year with a facelift as a reason to sell the same old car. I am glad that a 3rd player is in the market to challenge the “heritage” tax.
Don’t worry about the free market. China will definitely agree to free market terms after it captures the market like the U.S did and Britain before it. Then enforce strict free market rules and strict IP rules.
> The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.
Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.
A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.
It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.
It's not like I don't understand the argument on the other side of this. I've heard it my entire life. It's been dominant since the late 1970s and 1980s.
It's just that it's wrong.
We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.
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automotive platforms are a key military asset it's not like the pokemon dildo industry, if you stop building jeeps your abolity to bully third parties is diminished
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This is absolutely true. Remember that automakers greatly contributed to war efforts in the past. It is an indispensable domestic industry, just as much as energy.
Then there is the issue that BYD cars are presumably connected to servers in China and most probably backdoored. They are too much of a security risk. I would absolutely not drive such a car, without permanently disabling the onboard cellular modem.
You can just copy the chinese playbook and allow entry if you are willing to hand over ip.
US note remotely capable of doing a China playbook which is: _OLD_ IP. In exchange for allocating cheap land, building cheap factories/infra, staffing with cheap technical labour etc etc... the IP sharer just sits back and collect checks. The Chinese playbook actually offers value US (and west in general) not capable of providing.
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it would destroy it, but then new more competent US automakers would pop up, similar to tesla.
US Big Three are simply full of incompetent boomers who want to maintain monopoly using tariffs, chicken tax, and banning of competitors that actively harm consumers.
Suddenly US government thinks that capitalism and free market is not desirable... huh
> then new more competent US automakers would pop up, similar to Tesla.
A company that literally is collapsing as we speak because it's more profitable to be in the business of stock inflation and financialization.
A coherent industrial policy would be addressing that as well. But if we don't do something to limit imports there won't be anything to save.
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> The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.
I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.
That's not the chief advantage, insofar as there is a difference between China, India, and Indonesia, which there is.
Their chief advantage has been a coherent, long-running national industrial policy and trade policy that encourages industry while keeping the financial sector from taking over the economy and ripping everybody off.
We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.
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We're in late-stage capitalism here. The pitchforks are already out and spreading across the globe. Unless the big companies get broken up, this nation will split into either a police state or socialist state.
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China does not think llms are a matter of national security, they aren't as brain broken as the west.
That's 100% untrue lmao.
I'm sure they think of them as a matter of national security, because they think of everything as a matter of national security, but a few analysts I respect say that the mood there is not nearly as AGI-pilled, and I have no trouble believing that.
China is far more focused on robotics. Deepseek is largely bootstrapped by the hedge fund that developed it. They received a grant from the government of China, and recently an investment. Imagine thinking text autocomplete is a matter of national security.
China will flood the west with affordable robotics and watch the West eat itself alive. They know Western capital owners are so greedy they'll screw over their entire society to chase a buck and replace labor..
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> As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI.
Yea m8, I think you might've been a bit late to that realization.
are you sure it has nothing to do with the fact that those cars are very heavy, potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels that can be rooted (or are already) at any time by their manufacturers in China?
Is the idea that we're just one OTA update from them turning into bombs? Considering the quality of software in the auto industry, I would be about as worried about any domestically assembled EV.
> potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels
Is Tesla any different?
if you are adversary of the US and the possibility of a hot conflict with it exists, it is not.
What makes BYD different from, say, Volvo, which sells EVs freely in the US?
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> It's why a Tiktok sale was forced
Well that and the overwhelming pro-palestine content on that platform. We certainly couldn't have that.