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Comment by elictronic

1 day ago

China wants the US economy to flounder. Building our entire growth model on software that can be copied and taken by a small group of people will have no possible consequences.

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elictronic

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janalsncm  1 day ago

> China wants the US economy to flounder

It’s not that simple. If the US economy goes into a recession, it will take large sectors of the weak Chinese economy with it either directly or indirectly.

It’s probably more accurate to say they don’t want American LLMs to become dominant. The huge US data center build out doesn’t depend on Anthropic and OpenAI anyways. Those data centers can just as easily serve Qwen or GLM models.

  • matthewdgreen  1 day ago

    They can't do this at the same margins. Cloud compute traditionally has <= 30% margins, and that's the very generous profit margin that folks like AWS are able to squeeze out of it with lock-in and proprietary tooling (something that will probably go away as software becomes more commoditized.) Frontier model companies (e.g., SpaceX) have been promising profit margins in the 75%+ range.

kube-system  1 day ago

China is looking after their own interests, but they absolutely don't want their largest export market to struggle. The global economy is not a zero-sum game, and the idea that it might be is the root of many of our policy issues in the US.

  • elictronic  1 day ago

    Chinas interests today are a US with reduced power and a global economy more focused on China.

    Someone loses power for someone else to gain. It’s literally the definition of a zero sum game? China targets areas it thinks it can win and dominate in the future.

    • kube-system  21 hours ago

      Bringing "power" into the conversation is a whole different layer of complexity which I was not addressing. I was speaking about economics, which is in no way a zero sum game. Economic activity creates value.

remus  1 day ago

I don't think it is true that they necessarily want the US to struggle, I suspect it's more self interest. LLMs seem to be one of the biggest innovations of the last few decades, China probably just wants to make sure it's not being left behind and/or made hugely reliant on the US for what seems to be turning into a piece of critical infrastructure.

China has an effective strangle hold on some key sectors (solar, rare earths) and I am sure they relish this position and the leverage it gives them. You'd be careful not to give away that same leverage to a competing power if you can invest a few billion now and cover your bases.

dr_dshiv  1 day ago

Assume, crazy business, that china wants what’s best for the world. Recognizing the danger of an AI arms race rapidly producing uncontrollable superintelligence, it focuses on open weights to reduce the economic incentives for further advancement of AI beyond the “highly useful for humans” stage.

Seems like the only thing that could avert an intelligence rapid take off. Everyone wins except for shareholders.

this_user  1 day ago

> China wants the US economy to flounder.

Why would they possibly want their largest customer to flounder?

  • bunderbunder  1 day ago

    I think lot of Americans overestimate how much China needs them. (Understandable, I suppose, since the UK made a similar mistake vis-a-vis the EU about 10 years back.)

    From a Chinese perspective I expect China’s largest customer is China. These days it’s actually kind of wild how many Chinese consumer products aren’t (and won’t be) available at US retailers. And a lot of them are quite good.

    For a while now China’s wanted to reduce its dependence on the US for a variety of reasons. And undermining the US tech industry, whose products the US government likes to use as a cudgel, may serve that goal quite nicely.

  • andriy_koval  1 day ago

    It is largest customer for now, but they try to boost internal consumption as well as diversify client-base. US is also competitor, so China is interested US to fade at least in competitive areas.

shimman  1 day ago

The fact that the US economy is load bearing towards unprofitable projects while things like medicare for all or universal childcare continue to not exist is just a damning indictment of the country.