Comment by bulbar
9 hours ago
China doesn't care about money. Imagine a world where it's globally normalized to ask a Chinese LLM who to vote for, what happened in Hongkong, about the Uigurs, or if Taiwan is a country.
They will burn as much money as necessary to make that happen. And they have a virtually infinite amount of liquidity.
This is one explanation. However, if Xi Jinping believes that whoever reaches superintelligence first becomes the next global hegemon, doing this (and more, cough cough Taiwan) suddenly looks very sane solely as a way to kneecap the competition.
The goodwill/propaganda are convenient, sure, but my guess is that they aren't the primary motivation. Another possibility is that if no takeoff happens, pressuring OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability would exacerbate any damage overinvestment has done to the US stock market/economy.
FYI the United States do not recognize Taiwan as a country.
There's only 12 countries that do on the planet, the most "relevant" of them being Guatemala and Haiti.
As or the LLM topic: you can download weights of chinese models and remove any censorship and bias. Can you do so with american closed ones?