Comment by runako
4 days ago
> China is giving them for free despite not making financial sense because they want to weaken US's tech firms ability to compete - because China sees AI dominance as critical for their national security.
Nobody is making this argument because this is a normal thing that companies do. It's so common it is named in business strategy: "commoditize your complements."
There's a 2002 Joel On Software post explaining this using tech examples that were already old in 2002[1].
In the present, Meta is doing exactly the same thing with Ollama as Alibaba (who is funding some of the Chinese labs). Alibaba needs advanced models internally, and does not want to have a dependence on US models that can be arbitrarily shut off by Washington. Alibaba also wants to drive usage of its cloud among companies who are now demanding competitive AI models (which Alibaba may be locked out of providing). However, selling AI is not its core business. Putting cheap AI in the world creates demand for cloud services, which is part of Alibaba's core business.
Not only does this make financial sense for Alibaba, it is fairly basic.
Google gives away consumer software like Chrome and Android (not their core business) to drive search, which is their core business.
et cetera. The frontier labs are exposed in exactly the same has been way every pure play tech company before them. The US labs chose quality as their moat; remains to be seen whether that was a good choice, or if they can add another moat in time.
1 - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
> Putting cheap AI in the world creates demand for cloud services
No, Alibaba doesn't have the right amount of hardware to serve these models.
The part that benefits Alibaba in these open models is to maintain its public reputation so as to maintain its stock price. The core that drives everything else inside Alibaba is its e-commerce.
> Nobody is making this argument because this is a normal thing that companies do. It's so common it is named in business strategy: "commoditize your complements."
It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance.
The reason you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom than most people in China is because it’s bad to run a country like a business, full stop. When you do so, you kill far more people.
> It is common in business strategy, far less so in nation-state governance.
It is not clear why this is bad for Alibaba or China, could you expand on that?
> it’s bad to run a country like a business
The "Chinese miracle" resulting from China's integration with the global economy has lifted ~800 million people out of poverty and raised standards of living quite rapidly overall. A lot has been written on the topic, but suffice to say that it's a fairly unorthodox argument to make that the Chinese have not been well-served by the arrangement.
> level of freedom
The context of this discussion is whether the US government should prevent US citizens from accessing yet another product that is freely available in the rest of the world, to benefit a tiny handful of rich people in California.
Let me be clearer: if you do not hold stock in OpenAI or Anthropic, you likely stand to benefit from more AIs being provided by more providers. Imagine if the government had banned MySQL and PostgreSQL, so we all had to buy databases from Oracle and Microsoft. That would be strictly worse for everybody except employees of Oracle and Microsoft. This is exactly the same thing.
Great points, but I think that banning open source databases would have been better not for employees, but for shareholders.
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> The reason you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom than most people in China
I think it's because every single time the farmers in south america or the philippines try to organise and get out of poverty you guys either bomb them or arm some terrorist to kill them.
But sure tell yourself otherwise if that makes you feel better.
> you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom than most people in China
Whether this is true or not is still open to debate, but the fact that it’s presented as some kind of absolute truth that needs no substantiation is simply ridiculous.
Quality of life seems clear enough to assert:
https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/standard-...
Freedom is harder to quantify and certainly the US is regressing quickly, so China may well become more free without any domestic policy changes.
Well no.. regardless of anything else the median American generally has q higher standards of livin than the resident of pretty much any major country (including Europe). While compared to e.g. Germany or France those in the lower percentiles are probably doing worse China specifically still has a huge amount of poverty. Even if you happen to be legally allowed to live in one of the major cities and have a decent job.. well 966 is still a thing and you don’t get paid $500k like the OpenAI employees allegedly forced to sleep under their desks.
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"you, me, and so many people in the United States still have a far better quality of life and level of freedom" LOL - are you sure about this?
That’s extremely American centered, though? Despite the constant complaining the median American is still very well off compared to almost everyone else. If you go to the top 10 percentile or so them maybe only Switzerland and some very small countries (tax havens, petro states and such) can really compete.
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The words of george orwell has never been so accurate.
"War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength"
Sometimes sure, sometimes unsure but always free to say it publicly. ;)
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