[razodactyl]

Not sure I know where I fall regarding your point: Yes to trade secrets, but also science and AI should be for the good of all.

OpenAI seems to be trading roles back with Anthropic becoming misanthropic. I hope they both start heading in the direction of how the AI field was prior to LLMs.

Collaboration and benefit for all should always be the primary motivator.

[georgemcbay]

> Collaboration and benefit for all should always be the primary motivator.

Of all the things to never happen, this is never going to happen the most.

That train left the station for good once hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars were involved.

On the bright side, in the long run I suspect the vast majority of the value of AI will not be captured by the model making labs and the vast investments in them are going to implode, so...

[fragmede]

implode, how?

[reinitctxoffset]

They're in a price war with the People's Republic of China running flat out with the full backing of a government that literally does not care if they ever see a financial return on the investment, they just want to drive the value of LLM training and inference to zero because we banked the market on it being arbitrarily high margin forever. China was like hold my beer.

They have a staggering surplus of grid capacity and can bring more online without any difficulty. We couldn't get a serious nuclear project done if Jeffrey Epstein was offering private flights to the ribbon cutting.

In the United States at any given time more than half of the FLOPs are badly misallocated, Meta has like, a double digit percentage of the total capacity going down the drain every day and has for years. That's a conspicuous example but on OpenRouter rankings it's rare to see more than one or two American vendors in the top 10, sometimes the top 20. But 3rd, 4th, and 5th place are all merrily burning half the compute duplicating effort and missing key innovations because we stopped publishing real results. In China if DeepSeek makes a breakthrough it's at Zhupai and Moonshot and MiniMax and MiMo and Qwen that week.

Our only lever, export restrictions, seems to do nothing but breed multiply antibiotic resistant super hackers who just get more efficient and immediately propagate all of those efficiencies to the rest of the Chinese AI industry.

At the beginning of 2026 there was one Chinese lab with a model that had any real relevance fielding modern tool users. Today in July there are like, eight lagging the absolute frontier by maybe 3-6 months. Barring some massive bend in some curve 3-4 of the top 5 and 6-8 of the top 10 will be Chinese and open weight by January.

The great irony in all of this is that our current playbook is straight out of the 1960s USSR, and the PRC's current playbook is straight out of 1960s USA. We're the ones with the opaque decision making and gross resource misallocation driven by the personal agendas of a shadowy cabal of frenemies wired back channel into government in the form of the individuals rather than the offices. They're the ones with a thriving marketplace of ideas powered by robust public/private partnership and a paved path running bidirectionally to the university system.

It's going to implode because the Kruschev system does. Theirs is going to thrive because the Kennedy system puts a man on the moon before the decade is out.

[maxglute]

>full backing of a government that literally does not care if they ever see a financial return on the investment

There's no evidence of this, the parsimonious explanation is PRC AI, by virtue of being sanctioned, simply is not able to run magnitude more expensive compute model, and even if they could, they don't have the $$$ or market cap to do so. So they optimize and involute margins like they do in everything, and US misallocated expensive flops because the entire industry has been financially engineered for phat margins along the entire producer supply chain is just cherry on cake. Like wipe out the 50%+ margins from toolmakers, fabs, gpu/memory/data center components to some reasonable level and US is overpaying for tokens by a stupid multiplier on top of actual compute misallocation due to incompetent infra. Maybe PRC AI has unsound economics, but it's structurally simply not able to misallocate as much as US who will find a way to financialize compute to point of absurdity.

[satvikpendem]

The US can just ban Chinese weights being used in US companies.

[reinitctxoffset]

If the Trump administration decides to annoint Altman and Amodei in defiance of market forces it will rapidly discover that it no longer has the sovereign bond auction pricing power to prop them up. This isn't 1998: the Treasury has taken five major body blows in the last 25 years, the world's energy markets, maritime insurance regimes, electronic payments rails, and moral authority in places like the UN Security Council are effectively bifurcated. Oil and money and data and people just flow around the United States now. Canada's sovereign debt yields tank harder when the market is spooked, that's the North American flight to quality.

The administration could probably put some serious friction on open weight model use in the Fortune 500 for a little while, but the opposition never got such a gift right before a squeaker midterm. And outside of major enterprises with puckered ass compliance departments? Not a chance. It's popular around here to forget Uber and AirBnB and yes, OpenAI and Anthropic all got their start flagrantly breaking the law and grew lawyers and lobbyists faster than anyone could enforce it. And this time everyone from the DNC to the EFF would be holding hands wearing "Save The Models" t-shirts. Not even NVIDIA is remotely pretending they're anything but all in on GLM 5.2, they had an NVFP4 quant up by the time most people read the blog post.

And the Trump Administration isn't exactly enamored of Comrade Amodei at the moment, being as they're appealing the lawsuit Anthropic brought against the Pentagon during a shooting war.

Forcing the American proprietary AI megalab financing event was our fiscal Ukraine Special Military Operation, the market is calling the bluff and neither the capital markets nor the Federal Reserve has the dry powder to absorb this one.

The Treasury auctions will flat not clear in an orderly way. We can't raise 2-4 trillion dollars on a dime in 2026 and if CoreWeave turns out, as many suspect, to be Patient Zero? It would be that big a hole.

We play by the same rules as everyone else now. I hope we regard it as being worth it, but I fear we will not.

[adrian_b]

NVIDIA appears to play on several parallel paths that may compete with each other.

On one hand it appears to cooperate with OpenAI and Anthropic, as big customers.

On the other hand NVIDIA cooperates with Palantir, providing the HW for its "Sovereign AI OS" (a turnkey system including HW and SW for local inference and post-training/fine tuning) which uses the slogan "The future of AI is on-prem" (i.e. not as a customer of OpenAI or Anthropic, but using an open-weights LLM, e.g. a fine-tuned NVIDIA Nemotron or a Chinese LLM).

Presumably with the goal of promoting their competing solution, Alex Karp (Palantir CEO) has delivered a few weeks ago a very harsh criticism of Anthropic and OpenAI (who allegedly inflate the token consumption and they might also steal the data of their customers, which must be sent to them).

So NVIDIA both cooperates and competes with OpenAI and Anthropic.

[solenoid0937]

It is in OpenAI, Anthropic, and the US Gov's best interest to slow China down and ban Chinese models. Literally none of what you wrote prevents them from doing so.

Once China starts to get scary, Commerce will export control GPUs and declare Chinese models "foreign munitions." Any nation doing business with the US will not be allowed to use these models either, and that will be the end of that.

It is just not in the US's interests to fund China in the race to AGI.

[alightsoul]

There's no need for a ban. There's already no use at all of Chinese models in the US simply because they're Chinese.

[satvikpendem]

That's false, there are many companies using Chinese models in the US, Airbnb for example.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-20/airbnb-s-...

[reinitctxoffset]

As of writing, https://openrouter.ai/rankings shows only Opus, Sonnet, and GPT 5.5 in the top twenty by usage (Opus and Sonnet both have two slots on the 4.7/4.8 and 4.5/5 splits respectively, read that how you will).

I don't know how much business OpenRouter does in Europe (they have some GDPR text in some settings pages I think) but it's zero in China.

You might also consider the countless companies that do nothing but open weight LLM inference: Together (of Tri Dao fame), Fireworks (founded by my old colleague), Baseten, SambaNova (of Chis Re fame), and too many more to count, there's a new one every week. Plus NVIDIA does a ton of this business via NIM and shit.

I'm trying to be reasonably polite because it's possible you literally didn't know that, but this reads as a troll, so, if it is a troll please stop.

[rightbyte]

> They're in a price war with the People's Republic of China running flat out with the full backing of a government that literally does not care

There is nothing to support this. You get cheap Deepseek tokens by foreign providers too.

It is the same thing with automakers. They complain about not being able to only make luxuary cars with high profits with BYD raining on their parade and blaming the Chinese gov.