Comment by WarmWash
5 hours ago
If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models.
The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers. Which will also be defended because "I would never trust an American Lab".
It's funny how you can look at obscenely overvalued Western AI companies, with capex's that are unsustainable, and along comes a system which pokes a gaping hole in this model, and the response is "Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"
Perhaps the question should instead be "Why are these Western AI companies getting insane valuations on dubious ROI, and how can these Chinese models run on a fraction of the infrastructure?"
Not saying you're doing this specifically, but I'd be careful with thinking that "company" in China means the same as "company" in America (or in the West more generally).
True, "Industrial Policy" [0] is much bigger over in China, and has been for a long time.
Although that might become "was" given the recent shift in US politics, where the Republican party of big-government has been heavily taxing Americans with tariffs [1], nationalizing US companies [2][3], and commanding the manufacture of specific goods [4].
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_policy
[1] https://thinkinthemorning.com/trumps-great-leap-backward/
[2] https://www.cato.org/commentary/yes-trump-just-nationalized-...
[3] https://time.com/7313446/trump-seizing-private-companies/
[4] https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/17/politics/trump-weapons-iran-d...
>It's funny how you can look at obscenely overvalued Western AI companies, with capex's that are unsustainable, and along comes a system which pokes a gaping hole in this model, and the response is "Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"
The only way this is funny is if you are completely oblivious to how China usually operates.
The main cost is training the first version of model. It is very easy to just train the copy cat model based on the output of another model.
this is a justification for why one frontier lab would have extremely high spend rates. There is >1 frontier lab though.
More explicitly: if the Chinese can get near-leading performance models at a fraction of the cost by stealing from Anthropic, why doesn't OpenAI? Lord knows they could use the extra cash.
That doesn't make any sense. If the cost is training, the cost is compute, not data. Distilling another model means paying for that model, which isn't obviously less expensive than crawling the web and curating a dataset. Regardless of where your data comes from, the training process costs the same.
Because the revenue of Chinese AI companies is small. Anthropic's annual run rate is $50bn, z.ai's is $500m.
>"Ya, but what do those sneaky Chinese have up their sleeve here?!"
I feel like that is way over simplified. I do not trust the American government. I do not trust the Chinese government. As an American, I believe the Chinese government has a longer and broader history of stealing intellectual property and far less checks and balances than the American government. The current American administration will be gone soon and maybe we can get some sanity back at some point. Overall, I trust my data in America more than China and I think that's reasonable. I am not naive. I'm aware of all the problems with my country and am quite vocal about it. In fact, I think it would be naive to think that the Chinese government won't have complete access to everything that goes through a Chinese server.
We are in full agreement on your second point.
> If Chinese LLMs are successfully making people in the west defend China, then I think we have all the evidence we need to explain why they are giving away their models.
Right, and if "The West" wants people to defend them, they better get in on the free action too.
In fact, they have no choice - tokens are soon going to be a commodity, if they aren't already. Most everyone is going to be happy paying 1/20th of the cost for 80% of the value.
Oh, yeah, before I forget, hear the worlds smallest violin, playing for those token suppliers in "The West" whose repeatedly stated goal is to replace human knowledge workers...
I think the next step is for China to start selling Huawei (and other) GPUs around the world, because everyone appreciates the risk of giving either of the two superpowers their data. The US is no longer in a position to pressure other countries to bad imports from Chinese companies.
This is the beginning end of the hyperscaler era, not a shift from US hyperscalers to Chinese hyperscalers. Taking Nvidia's extremely lucrative market is the goal.
Software ecosystem aside, their hardware is inferior to NVDA/TSMC's and will remain so. And even if it wasn't, China just doesn't have the fab capacity to both meet domestic demand and export enough to hurt demand for NVDA.
It’s not like this is a new tactic, china has been very successful at wiping out competition by undercutting them using state subsidies in many sectors of the economy.
> wiping out competition by undercutting them using state subsidies
The same tactic is in the USA. Like every new AI datacenter has ~10 tax waiver + explicit subsidies + favorable loans, etc, etc.
Not even mentioning the many instances where US corporate interests were defended and advanced by US military force abroad.
As always, the US has a government removing red tape to foster innovation, while China has a regime, unfairly picking winners, to hurt and subvert the West.
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The smallest violin in the world for Sam Altman, and Musk
> get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers.
These open weights models are also hosted outside of the US and China. That's a very important difference.
The next step of course will be to get people using that ungodly cheap AI on Chinese servers.
Step one of this was perhaps DeepSeek's incredibly low cache hit pricing ($0.0036/M) which no-one else seems to be able to match.
If they had encrypted LLM compute then in theory wouldn't matter who/what is running it
I'm sorry but USA no longer has any moral superiority over China.
I understand it's supposed to be obvious to all of us, but maybe just for fun, can you follow through? What is the next step in the nefarious plan?
Not OP, but IMO the Chinese are waging economic warfare by "commodifying the competition". US VC's and equity are massively invested in AI being very very profitable and as soon as it's not that becomes garbage debt on a balance sheet, and a lot of it. When money is invested it's expected to make a return. When a few people make bad investments they lose their bag, when many many people all make the same bad investment, you get a nasty recession. When the US goes into recession China is more emboldened to pursue their agenda because policy makers are distracted by shoring up support at home and not as interested in expanding their power abroad.
I'm confused. China has been in a fairly bad recession the last ~2 years (their housing bubble popping). Why are we assuming that recessions can only happen in the US?
I'm also confused how China managed to convince so many US VC's to spend an insane amount on a technology with "no moat". China exporting cheap AI hurts American hyperscalars. But it doesn't induce the behavior in American hyperscalars that causes them to be vulnerable to cheap AI. It seems kind of patronizing to point the finger at China, rather than acknowledge the American (potential) misallocation of resources.
That sounds like a problem for the idiots invested in this garbage and who cut foolish sweetheart debt deals with the hyper-scalers. That's mostly rich people, because they haven't yet found a way to offload their bags onto retail (though they're certainly trying).
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They can do that without open sourcing their weights. In fact, that would be the best way to do it. So why are they open sourcing their weights?
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The present US administration and its backers don't want diversity, democracy and non-whites. Where does that leave non-Chinese and non-US citizens ?
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> They would be looking to do large scale espionage, whether it be corporate secrets or personal secrets.
The US token providers started the ball rolling on large-scale copyright infringement in order to make their models work.
They built their business on IP laundering, so it's very difficult for me to feel sorry for them now.
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So people in countries adversarial to the US, or even demographics at risk domestically like illegal migrants have nothing to worry about dumping their info OpenAI or Anthropic servers? But the Chinese are going to spy on people using open weight models running on private or third party servers? Do you hear yourself? Do you have any grasp of theory of mind at all? Is your vision of Chinese "ethnonationalism" white people picking cotton? Is that what you are afraid of?
In your take, why are they producing and giving away such good local models? Mindshare? Promotion?
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The untold capital and effort, the disciplined, complex long game operation, all to get 10 million people a second asking "are there timezones in space?" or "excel bar chart colors?" or "do you think I'm beautiful?"
It's hard to truly grasp the enormity of the evil, really.
Jesus Christ you are FULLY brainwashed.
I feel like it's less "defend china" but more "don't wanna have US have monopoly on it"
Found the late-stage OAI/Anthropic bagholder lmao
Yes, they have been coming out of the woodwork like borer beetles. Not exactly subtle.
As a European, I trust Chinese AI providers more than American. Cloud act did it for me.
Canadian, and I also agree. It’s hard to avoid but I try not to use any American service or data storage.
And that's fine of course, but it's worth noting that you're making a decision driven by emotion rather than data.
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Both China and the US can compel businesses to hand over data. There is no reason to trust any service that doesn't have strong built in privacy.
Compel? I am confused, all data in China is held in datacentres which the state has full access to, that is the terms of their operation and why some big tech US companies didn't want to operate in China. They don't need to "compel" anyone, the CCP has people at every large company supervising employees, and they already have full access to your data.
I am always completely baffled by these comments that not only get basic facts wrong but appear unable to conceive of a situation where the everything is subordinate to the state.
There is no negotiation, there is no due process, you give access to everything before you start or you can't operate.
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It’s not China that is threatening to annex Greenland though.
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Yes, but China can't arrest me if they don't like what they see in my data.
USA and its vassals can.
I trust them as a cloud less than US but don't completely trust US.
As an American, I trust Chinese AI providers more than American.
Same
The chinese providers are just the CCP. They don't even need a cloud act...
I think too many people are conflating Chinese providers with Chinese models - you can easily have Chinese models safely (well, relatively safely, I guess) hosted on US or EU infrastructure.
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Interested in the reply to this.
Funny that Europe starts to become China, just without the manufacturing and growth. I can see why people like them.
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