It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism • Hacker News Board

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#41

Post by ericmay » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #23

ericmay wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they won't. They'll offer far superior models at a premium price and they'll capture most of the profits similar to iPhone versus the Android manufacturers. US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options that will compete with any open source models released by any other country, except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of…

> They'll offer far superior models at a premium price > US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options This is wishcasting. People are raising the alarm because models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have already displaced demand for frontier models in highly demanding fields like security research. There's no amount of money that you can pay for "premium" access to Mythos, so those researchers ar…

> This is wishcasting. People are raising the alarm because models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have already displaced demand for frontier models in highly demanding fields like security research. There's no amount of money that you can pay for "premium" access to Mythos, so those researchers are taking their money to inference providers that give them comparable models.

It's not wish casting whatever that means. The crux of the argument isn't as much of a capability one as it is an economic one. If China can release open source models like these to displace demand for frontier models so can American companies. It's just that it's not profitable enough for them to do so at this time.

The point about Mythos doesn't strengthen your argument, it weakens it.

> Why do you conflate all of these businesses with vastly different business strategies to one another?

They have different business strategies, but at the end of the day they are all directionally aligned. Even if you wanted to extract a few of these companies and say they're not relevant, you can grab a handful and just make the same legitimate argument. Do I believe you, or do I believe the people with trillions at stake. I believe the folks actually doing the work and with money at stake. I have yet to find a convincing argument otherwise.

> There is no "American companies" coalition. They're all reacting in drastically different ways and your eagerness to conflate them suggests that you don't have any real position outside tribalist "us vs them" pugilism.

Sure but there's an American government coalition which American companies will have to accommodate whether that's regulation, economic schemes, or otherwise. See? You just proved it right here:

> Anthropic bent over backwards to appease American censorship demands and push cringeworthy marketing campaigns to capture LLM mindshare with Claude.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#42

Post by ericmay » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #11

ericmay wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they won't. They'll offer far superior models at a premium price and they'll capture most of the profits similar to iPhone versus the Android manufacturers. US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options that will compete with any open source models released by any other country, except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of…

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

This applies to open-source evangelists and developers too.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#43

Post by jqpabc123 » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

devsda wrote: post #33

jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Bottom line: China wins. Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results. Isolation is weakness, not strength. It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else. The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world. This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is i…

> The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world. The policy and the keyword should have been collaboration and not cooperation.

Ok, fair enough.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#44

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:04 PM UTC

jorvi wrote: post #35

ericmay wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they won't. They'll offer far superior models at a premium price and they'll capture most of the profits similar to iPhone versus the Android manufacturers. US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options that will compete with any open source models released by any other country, except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of…

> except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government. The Chinese models already do that with the absolute minimum of coaxing.

That's like asking what happened at the National Mall!

In addition to the incident you were thinking about there was a large protest in 1976 that the current regime would rather you don't know about, Mao announced the formation of "The New China" there, there were important events in the Boxer rebellion, and many more!

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#45

Post by znpy » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

platevoltage wrote: post #26

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>China is not “just china”, it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted. Just shows the complete naive view on China, but whatever.

Right. Calling China "Communist" is the same as calling North Korea "Democratic". It's State Capitalism.

Both countries are communist countries by the way.

The fact that communism naturally evolves in totalitarianism should be noted.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#46

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:07 PM UTC

There was an interesting discussion on pricing in the recently leaked DeepSeek investor meeting, where CEO Liang Wenfeng went on at length about his personal philosophy on pricing which in the end, for them, comes down to pricing models so as to be able to recoup the cost of the hardware they are running on in 10 months.

He doesn't want to drop prices below that since at their already very cheap prices doing so doesn't increase demand. More interesting are his reasons for not wanting to price higher, which are hard to summarize from memory, but are based around this being a sustainable business model. Pricing higher will only encourage competition.

Note that DeepSeek are not trying to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, at least at this time, acknowledging that they just don't have access to the compute to do so (although they have plently of money). This pricing is not about competing with the west - just his own pricing philosophy.

Maybe DeepSeek is a special case, being a hedge fund, and to large degree developing for their own needs (a bit like Meta, perhaps), but nonetheless they are out there as part of the competitive landscape.

No doubt Anthropic and OpenAI have a radically different strategy on pricing - seemingly more just what the market can bear, but with a company like DeepSeek they are not battling "AI communism", just a de facto competitor with a very different philosophy.

Other companies like Moonshot and Alibaba seem to want to charge as much as possible, at least in part because they are now offering these massive ~3T models that are expensive to serve.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#47

Post by don_esteban » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

hunterpayne wrote: post #39

platevoltage wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Calling China "Communist" is the same as calling North Korea "Democratic". It's State Capitalism.

Its State Capitalism (which is a complete misnomer), in about 2% of the country which is in "special economic zones" around major ports. In reality it is "socialism with Chinese characteristics". The number of own goals the CCP has made in the last decade is quite large. But when your opponent is making a mistake, don't interrupt them. Without the CCP, China would probably have the world's largest economy right now.…

Now, think about all the own goals the USA and Europe has made in the last couple of decades.

And, btw, China actually does comfortably have the largest economy (PPP, i.e. the real stuff you can use), for over a decade.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#48

Post by joe_the_user » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:14 PM UTC

...a United States presidential administration that almost certainly will not be able to deal quickly and competently with a massive financial crisis.

Meh, admittedly this sidenote but ... this is why the Fed is separate from the administration and why the Senate insists on competent people for Treasury while allowing loon like JFK jr for Health. The Fed already quietly supports a lot of capital allocation in the economy and is basically fending off crisis continually.

So-called "modern monetary theory" says the state prints money and exerts control and there's no problem. Yes, with enough, the state can stop any plunge. It's just that means enterprises - in the US - depend on the state rather than the markets. And this promises more of USSR like collapse than a market crisis. See Hyman Minski etc

Edit: and this doesn't mean there can't be a crisis of sorts. It's like 2008 or the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. One player falls, the rest supported, the excess is culled a little and then comes back twice as hard.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#49

Post by jqpabc123 » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:14 PM UTC

tharmas wrote: post #25

znpy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, not quite. China is not “just china”, it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted. “China wins” is really “modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins”

But increasingly this describes Western countries more and more, particularly the United States.

The West thought that free trade and capitalism would change China.

Instead, China devised a hybrid economic system that is changing the West.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#50

Post by jqpabc123 » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #17

znpy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, not quite. China is not “just china”, it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted. “China wins” is really “modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins”

Modern-techno-state_capitalist-authoritarian-ethno_nationalist-regime to be more correct

Jump up and down, stomp your feet and call them bad.

It changes nothing.

It's time to wake up and smell the coffee --- according to the World Bank, when adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), China's economy is already larger than the USA and is growing 2x faster.

https://www.statspanda.com/blog/usa-vs-china-gdp-2026