Comment by lelanthran

13 hours ago

> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.

I'm not seeing a problem here; don't all companies have this goal?

9 comments

lelanthran

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Aurornis  12 hours ago

Selling a product below its cost of production can be done as a loss leader or market share tactic, but eventually you need to sell things for at least what it costs to make them.

Economic dumping is a specific scenario where one country tries to flood another country with cheap products in a way that usually has some government involvement subsidizing or incentivizing it. Countries are careful to hide these incentives or subsidies when possible because it's an invitation to trade wars. For China specifically, the state takes ownership positions in companies and has no problem forcing companies in the direction they want.

  • jatora  8 hours ago

    ", but eventually you need to sell things for at least what it costs to make them."

    Gmail, and every other free service would like a word. Net tangential profit invalidates your point. They can loss lead LLM's forever if they are getting other economic benefit from the practice

  • mswphd  8 hours ago

    isn't blitzscaling essentially the same thing, except for when American companies do it (not always within their own country, e.g. spotify, netflix, or amazon)

throwaw12  13 hours ago

It is bad when it's done by nations outside of the West

When West does same, it is capitalism for the prosperity of everyone, healthy competition

Dylan16807  10 hours ago

The problem isn't the goal, it's using vast money reserves to sell at a loss and hamper competition.

  • epolanski  10 hours ago

    Somebody tell the Chinese companies to stop dumping AI, so US labs can keep burning pension funds money wrapped in VC checks fine dumping AI at a huge loss.

    In any case I find the dumping argument stupid: they are giving both the model weights away and publishing in the open their results and how they got there.