Comment by ericmay
10 days ago
Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path. The EU as a regulatory body would pursue the same path, as will/is China.
It’s rather straightforward to think through. If China (they’re practically the only competitor) built a sufficiently advanced AI system would they allow it to propagate on the free market? Of course not. The fact of the matter is that they are behind, even if it’s just a little bit, so the best strategy they have is to try and compete with “good enough” models with lower/subsidized cost - but that is a losing strategy because AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy.
Likewise if, idk, France someone built an AI system that was valuable do you think they’d just hand it over for sworn enemy Donald J. Trump to utilized? Of course not.
The American strategy in the context of the current geopolitical landscape is the only valid one and the obvious one. If you find yourself criticizing the American strategy it’s because you aren’t in the arena where you would, inevitably, make the same decision to restrict access.
This isn't how things typically work. For instance the US is increasingly adversarial towards China yet China continues to largely power the US economy both through manufacturing and market access, which makes up an increasingly large share of all revenue for many US companies. Why? Because that position as a dependency is not only directly economically beneficial to themselves, but also provides leverage which can be utilized in extreme circumstances.
This isn't really going to achieve much besides incentivizing the growth of non-US models and minimizing market access for US-based models. I was expecting the US government to try to ban foreign models, which is also a self-own but orders of magnitude less than this. All this will do is greatly diminish the influence of the US in the future, and minimize the benefits they might reap from a global LLM explosion. It'd be like if 30 years ago, China decided that their manufacturing could only be used by white-listed individuals. Their economy and influence wouldn't be even a fraction of what it is today.
> This isn't really going to achieve much besides incentivizing the growth of non-US models and minimizing market access for US-based models.
The Catch-22 here is that the growth of non-US models is something Americans can take advantage of if they are successful while simultaneously denying access as deemed necessary by the US government to advanced American models.
If open source or models made outside the US surpass US controlled models, then the US would just switch to those and then American companies can leverage those models for their own development or for consumer sales or whatever.
If they don’t surpass US models (as I expect they won’t, though they will remain perhaps marginally useful) then the US maintains the lead in a positive feedback loop development.
If others start controlling advanced models and denying access to superior models developed outside of the United States (ex: China) then my assumption was correct.
I don’t think comparing China’s manufacturing capacity to the American manufacturing base makes a lot of sense in this context and as we know China has in fact weaponized that manufacturing capacity. If nothing else, the economic arrangement isn’t comparable partly because if Chinese factories stopped making iPhones or whatever they would simply not make anything and workers would lose jobs and such hurting the Chinese. Today if the United States government prevents Chinese users from accessing advanced American models there isn’t really a loss on the American side. Quite the opposite - these models will accelerate productivity and industrial capability for the country as a whole and make it more competitive economically.
> AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy
People claim that AGI is. AI is turning out to be a fairly competitive but “normal” product. Companies carving out niches on cost, quality, and speed.
If it was a winner take all OpenAI’s head start would have been decisive. For years ChatGPT was far ahead of everyone, then Anthropic released Opus 3, then OpenAI released 4o, then in mid 2025 it seemed like everyone had strong reasoning models including Google with Gemini 2.5, and now Claude is probably the best coding model. So taking the top spot is not a guarantee you can hold it.
Also the top model becomes a prime target for distillation, making it easier for competitors to keep up.
> and now Claude is probably the best coding model
Do people who keep saying this actually used Claude side by side with other models?
Because in my experience it turned out to be hilariously crap: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png
I don’t think they have. I used to think that Claude sucked because of the harness so I tried it on opencode and it was still trash.
I’m sure if the primary problem I was solving was multi file complex exploits it would be better but even that I am not sure of. I’ve always found the it’s too dangerous claims to be a bit underwhelming.
The point is that if AI was really a winner-takes-all technology it would have meant OpenAI’s models would have been unequivocally better, permanently.
Can a model turn crap? shouldn't it be consistent once realized? Isn't it probably Anthropic facing capacity problems and comitting fraud by silently routing you to smaller models for the price of the current Claude?
I think you view this situation from the US point of view and assume that China has the same guiding principles and values in their foreign policy, for which it doesn't. They might do what you said, of course. But they very well might also treat LLMs as another goodwill investment like the Belt and Road Initiative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative) and export the capability to partner countries, for example, in Africa, to strengthen relationships.
Belt and Road wasn’t goodwill.
A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
In many cases, much of that debt paid for Chinese companies, contractors, suppliers, and imported workers who built or operated the projects.
And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs, mostly with China’s (ie the Laos–China railway, in large part financed by Laotian debt, which may someday bring some benefits to Laos, but mostly serves China’s regional trade ambitions).
Not to say other countries do it better or have purer ambitions or whatever. It’s just the "goodwill" part that made me twitch.
Can you argue that the principle of the BRI is humanitarian and it should benefit both partners, but not equally? Imho, that policy is far better for humanity than blockading Cuba, bombing Venezuela and Iran.
> A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
I see that you blame China for Sri Lanka, while China wasn't the only creditor there.
> And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs
Easy to say in hindsight.
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Tales of an Economic Hitman was an instruction manual for the Belt and Road Initiative.
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More likely the PRC sees the open-weight models' progress as a way to prevent an existing dominant player from cementing their (finicky) lead and pulling up the ladder.
That strategy happens to have beneficial side effects to the global Hoi Polloi, but to attach any kind of benevolence to it would be naive.
How would open-weight models benefit PRC better than their own closed-weight models, but still available at lower prices? If anything, open-weights can be distilled far easier.
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They have the same values. Domination it is. People are people. Really no difference between the US and China. None at all.
Well, you are wrong. Maybe you should visit and learn more about China to understand it. For starters, China's society is high-individualistic with a strong sense of community and with high respect to their elders. On the contrary, US's society is hyper-individualistic with a strong sense of family and basic respect to their elders.
> AI is and always has been a winner-take-all strategy
AGI sure. But I don't think we're going to get there in our lifetimes, if ever. There are too many structural and physical limitations. One everyone seems to be catching onto now is that they're running out of human data and are incestuously feeing AI output to itself as input.
Current state AI is barely an improvement over where it was fifty years ago. We just have stronger hardware and more content to train on. We need a new paradigm. One that hasn't come in half a century.
> Any country that developed sufficiently advanced models will pursue the same path.
Looking at most of the available evidence, Mythos is an incremental upgrade over other models and nowhere near the implied advancement that this seems to point to. I guess you could be right in that a sufficient advancement would cause this type of withholding of it, but I think it's kind of silly to think that the US has reached that level.
I don’t think the ai market has been around long enough to prove winner take all, I see it more like a commodity which is why the winner quickly switched from OpenAI to Anthropic at least on coding.
I generally find the Chinese models to be superior. If you look at the token pricing or hosting cost it’s still about 80% margin on Chinese models. Deep cuts should still be possible.