Comment by Slartie
5 hours ago
China is actively tripping the US up by pushing the open-weight strategy, which is kind of smart. They realized that they obviously will not be able to make Western companies trust Chinese companies enough to just use proprietary models by sending all their data to services hosted by Chinese companies. The US is still able to attract this trust, although it's eroding quickly in spite of recent political events and the current trust is more or less a function of old habits that need some time to change. But China correctly found that - due to there being no old habits to piggyback on - they wouldn't ever be able to compete in this way, even if they had proprietary foundation models superior to their US counterparts, so they decided to throw sticks into the spokes of the US frontier labs by releasing top open-weight models worth billions of dollars in training cost and thereby devaluing the huge proprietary investments of the US labs.
That is absolutely not "do nothing".
Their ‘open weight strategy’ was invented, to Chinas surprise, by the Western press after the DeepSeek event. Of course all the actual systems like Baidu, Bytedance are closed weight and basically all anyone uses. Meanwhile the advanced system are crossing security frontiers: soon only inferior models will be ‘open’ (as with OpenAI, even) the rest closed. — Or where open weighted, they will be impossible to run without a private data center, come with absurd ‘security scrutiny’ licenses like GLM is starting — or licensing requiring a cut, as with Kimi, which is basically a scheme to get western companies to do buildout for them