[2ndorderthought]

They know very well that China is going to keep releasing world class models at 1/20th the price and 5-300x smaller in size. They also know they screwed up by going full technofacism and there's no way back because of the trillions invested in oligarchs and it endangers the entire economy.

[dyauspitr]

China can’t keep doing that. This is essentially a capture the market ploy that is government back from them at this point at current DeepSeek prices they would have to make a massive loss.

[2ndorderthought]

I think you misunderstood what China has been doing to make the progress they have. They've invested far less and have actual applications because they are the world's largest manufacturer.

In the us we have products we sell to china to automate their factories. China soon wont need those. The US goal of laying off anyone who thinks for money is really different than chinas goals of automating product manufacturing.

Deepseek costs less because it actually costs less. Chinas electrical infrastructure is so much better than the uses. Meanwhile the us has ai data centers running on effing gas. On literal gas generators. The only budget discussions for infrastructure in the us are basically for the DHS too. It's not sustainable.

[CamperBob2]

China can’t keep doing that.

Who or what will stop them?

[aurareturn]

Probably economics eventually.

I also don't think we're going to have top tier free models forever. It's going to end within a few years.

[2ndorderthought]

They aren't spending money like we are. They've been able to do what they have with an embargo on Nvidia cards even.

I think we will see model size shrink more and more and become more efficient. Ideally to the point where they run on high end computers and not data centers. That's the future in my opinion.

At that point you could run them on your phone or chrome book for free or with ads like Google search. Or pay for privacy

[2ndorderthought]

Aurareturn. I don't think they care. Geopolitically China stands to gain a lot by commoditizing it's complement. They don't need a booming insanely profitable ai industry. They are not trillions of dollars leveraged in. I think for them the applications matter more. And they can do just fine with the us scrambling for a few decades. They don't think short term the way the us does. Neither do most countries. They also don't do the individualistic burn everything down for one trillionaire thing.

[aurareturn]

China !== Chinese LLM labs.

[aurareturn]

They may not see the economic value of releasing models for free and then hoping that you'd use their API. Once they catch up more to US models, they will inevitably go closed source. That's my prediction.

I could see a much more restrictive licensing agreement before going full closed source. It could be a scenario where hyper scalers such as AWS or Azure will gain far more value from free Chinese models than Chinese labs such as when AWS often gained more than for-profit open source software than the creators.