[techpression]

It’s not a service, I hope nobody thinks this is being done ”for the good of humanity” or whatever. Doesn’t mean there’s not a benefit to people, but the financial politics behind it could turn out extremely good for China, and they are very well aware of just that.

[t-3]

Do American companies think about the "financial politics" of their decisions? I somehow really doubt it. Government takes sides and sometimes applies leverage to get companies to do what they want, but that's something separate from "it's a good business decision for Chinese labs to treat models as commodities". There's no need to think about geopolitics - American AI companies could easily take the same approach as the Chinese, but they all want to get exciting and huge VC cash rather than boring and less lucrative Compute-as-a-Service money.

[techpression]

Chinese labs are equivalent to the Chinese state, there’s no separation. Who do you think funds the Chinese labs?

[t-3]

American labs are also funded by the US government. Are they equivalent to the US state? Do Chinese and US labs/researchers exist solely in the international sphere, without any domestic concerns or individual aspirations? The Chinese have a different culture and political system than Americans, but it's not like they're ants without free will or the ability to think. I highly doubt that DeepSeek is operating solely at the behest of the CPC or that they are in business to take down the US rather than to make money.

[Gud]

Before Trump 2.0, this was a decent argument.

[somenameforme]

I think this is a false dichotomy between benevolence and China secretly plotting and puppeteering everything to some grand self serving scheme. Reality is probably a lot simpler and has little to do with either. In China there's intense domestic competition in most industries, including LLMs.

Going open weights is an easy way to gain mindshare in this sort of environment, which is exactly why Meta also went open weight. The difference is that in China you had leading models going open weight which puts a lot of downward pressure on other orgs to do the exact same. I doubt China's grand vision extends beyond achieving the best system possible, and fostering a highly competitive environment is exactly how you achieve that.

The fact that open weight frontier models may also cause the investment bubble in the US to burst is likely incidental. AI funding is a bubble, and it's going to burst. The exact final cause is again mostly just incidental. The economic damage this will cause in the US will also cause substantial downstream damage to China as well, and they generally aren't so big on the whole punch yourself in the face because you don't like another country, that has become trendy in the West. So the idea of a secret economic attack doesn't even make much sense. In the status quo China wins, so they don't even have any motivation to cause chaos.

[slopinthebag]

You gotta remember there are people working at these companies with their own motivations, beliefs, and values. And to the extent that their government allows them to, they will act on those.

I think the people in the Chinese labs have a different set of motivations, beliefs, and values that make them more amenable to sharing AI as a common good rather than some economical advantage. I've heard that workers in the Chinese labs share far more knowledge between themselves, and the narrative around AI in China is different from what we see in the USA. So it is possible, I believe, that the labs are to some extent releasing open models "for the good of humanity", or at least they believe it is the right thing to do.