Comment by ericmay
5 days ago
Spot-on and really well written post highlighting the challenges here. Really it just comes down to the US and surrounding sycophants and China. There just isn't any other game in town. For the US to just, well, give up on AI development would be civilizational suicide. I wouldn't put it past us though, most Americans in particular are so weak minded they only care about cheapest possible product. It's interesting to see how well propaganda campaigns have been working to harm American interest in AI and related technology (data centers are a bit of a different story). Young students are applauding guest speakers giving them the news they want to hear about how AI is bad and they need to tear it all down, while in the real world those same students are actively committing career suicide by refusing to innovate or adapt. It wouldn't really matter except that they vote, and those votes will wind up doing harm under the guise of doing good, but really it's a matter of delusion that we will all pay the price for.
Anyway the good news is everyone says China's strategy of just releasing open-weight models is the coup de grace for American technology companies and all the investment, research, all of that stuff by all of these companies who certainly don't care to survive and continue making trillions of dollars and can't possibly be managed by the same genius engineers who post on HN will just go away.
And then once that happens we'll just do what China did, and let them build a bunch of AI capabilities, scale out data centers, invest trillions, then we'll just release open-weight models too and then what?
You don't need to know a whole lot about AI to realize that most people on the Internet that are commenting on these stories haven't thought about how the real world works for more than two seconds when it comes to this stuff. China can enact a strategy, we can copy that strategy and even improve upon it.
Surprise Pikachu.
You (not you) can't claim a lead is unimportant and this undercutting strategy is so good and then simultaneously say the US can't do it back to China. That's dumb. If the lead doesn't matter everyone will stop doing AI research because being undercut is too expensive. How likely does that seem, and why isn't China stopping research if that is true and they just need to keep releasing open-weight models? Sorry, but being on the leading edge matters a whole fucking lot. As I've written in other posts this is like a cheap Android phone from Wal-Mart versus the latest iPhone. There's a reason you buy the iPhone and not the cheapest Android phone you can find even though they have all the same apps and both make phone calls.
I'm open to changing my mind here, but I have yet to see a convincing argument. Just a lot of pearl-clutching and China fear mongering.
We can see the same situation play out with manufacturing capability.
The USA has recognised that it needs more manufacturing capability. But rather than just build that capability (which is what the Chinese state-planned economy would do, and did) it tries to incentivise private companies to build it. Which didn't work because the companies building domestic manufacturing face competition from Chinese imports. The investment money can get better returns chasing property deals or rent-seeking monopolies.
In the "we can do it back" case, it still takes a US private company a lot of time and money to distill their model off the Chinese model. There has to be a lot of profit for them to do that. That profit isn't really available - it's a competition with all the other models, and no monopoly rents. There's for sure a viable business there, but it's a "lifestyle business" not the 1000x growth business that VC's want.
> We can see the same situation play out with manufacturing capability.
I don't think manufacturing is a great analogy and we should be careful to try and compare these two very closely. But the closest comparison would be iPhone versus Android. Many more people use Android, and the phones are a lot cheaper and can be produced in mass, but the iPhone is the dominant phone and captures much more market share.
> There has to be a lot of profit for them to do that.
Sure... but if China is just subsidizing AI companies to copy/distill/whatever American models it's fair for the US (as it would be for manufacturing) to work to block those models. But also you have to remember that the US is in the lead, so while there isn't profit that I'm aware of to be had now, if the Chinese caught up then presumably there would be some level of profit. There's good and bad here though too because, well, as you can see in China's over-built housing market the government makes a lot of bad assumptions and mistakes and is subject to forces that can cause less than desirable outcomes. It goes both ways a bit.