[digitaltrees]

China is giving away AI for free so it’s harder to make money. The same strategy they did with solar panels. Sell them at a loss long enough until the manufacturers go out of business and you’re the only one surviving. Then flip to extract monopoly profits

[randbyte]

Instead we got home solar system become very affordable over the past decade.

And driving out US manufacturers isn’t even the main goal for China. They know their huge risk on reliance on petroleum and was doing everything they can to mitigate that. Building out a huge solar manufacturing base is their answer. Now they are reducing petro imports YoY.

[bigbadfeline]

> China is giving away AI for free so it’s harder to make money.

That might've crossed their minds but that wouldn't move their hand, not even a finger. Politics is the primary driver here, here's the deal:

AI is the new Internet

China foresaw a world where they'd be blocked from it and Anthropic's ongoing attempt to block their own country form it shows how right the Chinese were.

[TurdF3rguson]

Does that apply to US open weights models too? Was Llama an attempt by Meta to destroy America's economy?

[digitaltrees]

Yes. Releasing open weights seems to be an effort to slow down competition. Facebook was behind. Grok was behind.

Don’t get me wrong, I am glad they are doing it, I personally use open source models. In part to not spend money on the other APIs. So it’s clear that some percentage of what would be paying uses choose to not pay. The other part of opensource is free community labor. How much development work did Facebook get for free around the core infrastructure of react by open sourcing it? A massive amount that they did pay for but benefit from.

The point is, it may benefit society, and yet that social benefit wasn’t the motive for them releasing it as open source.

[devmor]

I don’t think the motive matters to a large extent if the effect is good.

[galaxyLogic]

Motive probabaly doesn't matter in the end, outcome does. But understanding the motive is a good thing.

[devmor]

Isn’t that the standard economic playbook for all well funded businesses at this point? Walmart, Uber, Amazon, etc