> China does lead the frontier. If you're a cybersecurity researcher, a biologist or work in any other censored field, there's nothing that the American models can do for you. The frontier effectively begins where abliterated models can be distributed, and America releases none of them at-scale.
Doesn’t sound like it to me. I have yet to find a credible source suggesting Chinese companies are ahead. But if they are we can just let them get ahead, distill their models, and release them open source.
> We have a word for this in software actually, it's called "vaporware"
Prove it. This is just an unsubstantiated claim.
> America's stance towards legitimate cybersecurity research is why American businesses like HuggingFace do their incident responses with GLM-5.2. If American AI is "so valuable" that people can't buy the frontier to fix legitimate problems, then China wins by default. It's already happening in several industry-leading American firms, they're not paying Anthropic or OpenAI to fix their real issues.
Why would you think that companies could only use either leading models or nothing? Companies can of course use lower end models (Chinese or American) for various use cases where it makes sense or is cost effective. That is not an indictment of the state of AI in America nor is it suggestive that China “wins”.
> You might as well let China do the frontier research, and let America focus on hand-wringing over the consequences and writing censorship laws to prevent citizens from accessing uncensored Chinese models.
But then China will be screwed and go bankrupt and all of those things because Americans can just copy and distill their models, do it cheaper, and give them away without censorship. Then China will ban them and we’ll just take the lead again. Every criticism you are leveraging against the United States applies to China too. And you know the censorship bothers them more given the Great Firewall.
> You're just insisting that American businesses are right because they spend a lot of money
No, I’m insisting that they are making a crazy big bet, and that bet seems to make sense to me, and absent convincing evidence from you or someone else my priors are going to go with the folks who have trillions at stake versus an internet commentator (which is also me) saying basically “nuh uh”.
> Compare this to how, for instance, Huawei works, and you'll see pretty quickly why ego-poisoned businesses like Apple are the antithesis of free market competition. Apple doesn't want to compete, they want to make money. They love ignoring genuinely innovative technology
And yet, I’ve got an iPhone, iPad, and a MacBook Pro. Apple is a $5 trillion company and captures the majority of smartphone products. You might be right in your idealism, but your wrong about what people care about. This is why I bought stock in Meta a long time ago. I hate that product and I’ll never use it and that’s precisely why I’m wrong as an investor if I did not invest. You don’t have to like the company to accept the reality of their strategy. Apple is ego-poisoned, Hauwei is the tech leader, whatever, most people disagree with you and that’s reflected every day at the cash register.
> There are objectively things that their government can finance that the United States cannot reciprocally copy.
Not quite true, we just have a higher bar. Also planned economies are all but a matter of objective fact less capable of economic performance when compared to market economies. China for example has financial issues right now, over-built, &c.