[micromacrofoot]

So much is invested in the huge American AI companies that China undercutting them with clones that work almost as well can actually hurt the US economy.

They're at the point where copying can get people 90% of what they want anyway, the moat is drying up.

[stusmall]

If you remove the word "AI" from your post it also describes the last 20 or so years of US/Chinese economic competition. They are real, serious competitor but also there is a lot of value in that last 10%. Some buyers need the best and you can charge a premium for it.

The speed in which a copier can catch up to a leader is faster than every before, but everything is faster these days. I think the threat is if can these labs catch up and pass American labs while keeping costs low, but I don't see that happening.

[bergen]

>Some buyers need the best and you can charge a premium for it.

Yes, and that is how you get a top-heavy k-shaped economy I believe. It is harder and harder to sell premium A+ products, because most people can only afford what works. If my old ice cream vendor charges me 25% more but puts chocolate sprinkles on it i'm going for the non-sprinkle version.

[ajross]

> the last 20 or so years of US/Chinese economic competition

Only with some industries, mostly electronics and light manufacturing. The rest of the history of software products doesn't look like this at all. China cloned Amazon and Meta fairly well (but only within their local/captured markets) but not Microsoft or Google and absolutely not Apple. Entertainment and culture exports are still effectively zero (like, what, three blockbuster films?) where the US, Japan and Korea define pop across the globe. Heavy industry is mixed, with decent success in consumer vehicles now but little purchase in stuff like heavy equipment or shipbuilding.

Basically it's complicated, and not really a point well suited to that kind of generalism.

[wtfHN26]

> China cloned Amazon and Meta fairly well (but only within their local/captured markets)

Americans order Chinese products from SHEIN and Aliexpress type websites.

So China did penetrate the US ecommerce market, but they are not taking on Amazon directly.

People are buying from the Chinese and reselling on Amazon, which has a good logistics network that Chinese companies can't possibly build in the USA.

> absolutely not Apple

You need to look up Oneplus to see how many people were using their devices till they announced exit from Western markets.

The Chinese Android phones are essentially replacement for a big chunk of Apple ecosystem.

If these cheap mobile devices didn't exist - Apple could possibly be selling many more devices.

> China cloned .... Meta fairly well

TikTok is giving Meta a run for their money in USA.

They had to be restricted via threat of regulation to offload stake in TikTok USA.

> Microsoft

They didn't compete with Microsoft directly as entering Western Enterprise market is hard for the Chinese. Even Google can't beat Microsoft there till now.

[massysett]

“You need to look up Oneplus to see how many people were using their devices till they announced exit from Western markets.”

The final part of this sentence shows why there is absolutely no need to look up Oneplus.

[microtonal]

Oneplus is owned/backed by Oppo. Their other phone brands like Oppo, Realme, etc. are really popular worldwide. They removed Oneplus from some regions (e.g. EU) where some of their other brands are more popular.

I'm not sure if you are from the US, but if you are, it really gives you a distorted image of what the worldwide smarphone market is like.

E.g. in many European countries, it is 1/3 iPhone, 1/3 Samsung, 1/3 others (which are mostly Chinese brands).

[wtfHN26]

Seems like you are not aware of the situation.

To get a better idea on the topic that you commented on and views of members of HN

You can read comments on this post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932539

[cgio]

Not British, but taking UK out of the definition of pop, is a bit too rough a cut. Also France. Look at the queues outside pop-glamorous stores. And was pop-art a pop artefact? Is TikTok redefining pop? Movies is an old measure, and even US has fallen with just franchise dominating. I think as a globe we are much more integrated and co-dependent, occasionally also in bad ways, than we appreciate.

[ajross]

I'm talking about economic activity more than the passports of the individual artists. And no, TikTok is a software product (a social media platform), not popular culture. There's absolutely popular culture being created and driven there but it's 100% NOT coming out of China. Are you high, as it were?

TikTok competes with Meta, not Olivia Rodrigo or BTS.

[cgio]

I am not high, I have kids, and can tell you they barely care about Olivia Rodrigo or BTS. You dispel passports as irrelevant for one leg but base your argument on them for the other. The contradiction is sufficient.

[WhyNotHugo]

> Entertainment and culture exports are still effectively zero (like, what, three blockbuster films?) where the US, Japan and Korea define pop across the globe.

And this is really sad, because they have thousands of years of cultural heritage and also plenty of great films. Somehow, they've failed at exporting this completely.

[gf000]

Well, another way to put it is that the western markets managed to keep it out via propaganda and other soft influences on people.

[nerdsniper]

> Heavy industry is mixed, with decent success in consumer vehicles now but little purchase in stuff like heavy equipment or shipbuilding

Uhh, China does over half of the world’s shipbuilding.

China is also responsible for 25% [1] of the world’s heavy equipment manufacturing and is considered to have double[2] the CAGR of the global average for heavy equipment manufacturing.

0: https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-dominates-shipbuilding-i...

1: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/constructi...

2: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/heavy-co...

[vrganj]

Xiaomi did a quite good job copying (and surpassing!) Apple.

They even got the car Apple always wanted, but never managed to build.

[micromacrofoot]

the difference is that the US economy is currently over-investing in AI to the point where it's a significant portion of the economy, it's the biggest competitive opportunity in quite a while

[adventured]

China isn't undercutting anything. Kimi has to be hosted somewhere and is extraordinarily expensive to operate at Fable-levels of capabilities. The moat is (and will always be) the cost to actually operate these models, and that cost will continue to soar, it will not reverse, and the hardware will never keep up such that at-home use somehow becomes economical.

It's like releasing a cutting edge search engine, proclaimed to be on par with Google. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, you need to actually run it somewhere. One of the core moats for Google has been the cost to scale and compete globally with a search engine, which only a few entities on earth could even attempt. Somehow the HN crowd forgets this every single time. The same claims were endlessly made regarding Uber, as though the app was the hardest part of competing with Uber. Here's a hint: the model isn't the only super hard part of the total process at this point. Try running something akin to GPT 5.6 for a billion users, see how much that costs.

The winners will be the owners of the subscriptions and API usage. That's going to be OpenAI and Anthropic as of now, possibly Google will stay in the fight with their scale advantage focused on the consumer. It will never be the open weight models out of China. Who is going to invest the trillion dollars into infrastructure needed to run the latest version of Kimi 3-5 years out, for a billion users? There's only one entity that would ever consider it, and that's China domestic.

And the real money (for a sustainable business model allowing for constant massive reinvestment & infrastructure maintenance) is in pairing up advertising, which is another spot where the open weight models from China will never compete. It doesn't matter if the HN crowd hates this outcome, nothing will stop it from being the future core of mass consumer usage. And the business use will stay with subscription + API use as well: the best option for that today is OpenAI and Anthropic.

[micromacrofoot]

If you think Open AI can make hundreds of billions of dollars selling subscriptions for a chatbot I have a bridge you may be interested in.

[bergen]

>Who is going to invest the trillion dollars into infrastructure needed to run the latest version of Kimi 3-5 years out

Everybody that is concerned about their data ownership and residency, and how the US political system is behaving right now. There is a huge incentive to cut off ties with API and subscription providers, especially those based in the US.