Comment by gabriel666smith

I don't think this is necessarily going to prove to be true.

I often see the sentiment: "the Chinese strategy only makes sense in the context of undercutting American labs' profit margins".

If, for example, you are a company with a near-monopoly on "serving video content", and you feel reasonably confident about retaining a decent slice of the serving-video-content market (Google in the west is an example, Tencent in the east), then training video models on your dataset - and releasing them freely - makes an awful lot of sense.

Free tools to create with mean more video content. In this hypothetical, you're reasonably certain that any video content which does get created will also be watched on your platform.

That is a net positive. The question becomes: How many watch-hours earns back the cost of training a model? It's probably not really that many, especially when you have a near-monopoly on a billion sets of eyes.

It's also a net-positive if people build better video models from research you release, because - again - you are reasonably certain that the even-more-innovative content those models produce will be watched on your platform.

It really begins to make strategic sense if your company is in a GPU-poor environment. Your costs cease at the point you upload a model if your users are running it themselves. You don't have to serve the model. The content is still created.

You are also less likely, I think, to alienate human creators whose work the model was trained on if the model is not sold back to them as a subscription, or by the token, but given for free as a tool.

This frames the conversation very differently. It creates, I think, less of an "us vs them" dynamic, and more of a rising tide.

It's true that it is also beneficial that these models undercut (especially in language models) American companies. But, generally, Americans are not the customers of Chinese companies releasing models. They are already serving a huge volume of customers in a complex, existing marketplace.

The full picture is much more nuanced than simply a geopolitical desire to undercut US labs, and there are several other reasons the strategy can make logical sense.