Effectively they are saying "yea don't crowd our data centers with small queries, go ahead and send your frontier questions to our frontier models. Oh btw those us models? You can run something about as good for free from us if you want hah." It's a power and marketing move. It's also insanely smart to keep up with it to remain sustainable as a brand. Especially given how small their investments into this are.
Look at anthropics growing pains. Deepseek has other hosts spreading their brand for free while they grow. Brilliant honestly. In my opinion it makes anthropic and openai look clueless on a lot of levels.
China is playing a different game here. To them this is commoditizing their compliment and building good will. The Chinese economy doesn't teter on the brink of collapse to deliver frontier grade LLMs. Nope, Alibaba just made qwen because it needs it. It needs efficient models. Similarly, in China they manufacture and automate so much more than the US ever could. LLMs to them are a topping not the whole meal like they are in the us.
They're state companies, not some kind of ethical VC charity fund project.
If the US’s fascist experiment continues past the current president, we’ll absolutely be nationalizing frontier companies or exerting equivalent control.
I'm glad I get reminded that TDS is real, but everyone forgets that Bush, Obama, and Biden all did things with executive power that Congress ignored or provided little real oversight for. And Congress has proven over the last several decades that their oversight is rather meaningless for the goals of American voters rather than special interests.
But it's all Trump's fault is much more convenient.
Absolutely not. There is huge difference in the their behaviors.
> But it's all Trump's fault is much more convenient.
It is not just Trumps fault. Trump is logical consequence of what conservative party became. J.D.Vance and Miller are as much fascists if not more. The whole party worked for this for years and created this.
> And Congress has proven over the last several decades that their oversight is rather meaningless for the goals of American voters rather than special interests.
Of course congress in general is not the place to stop republican party from their fascists goals, because republicans in the congress support Trump 100%. They stand by project 2025 100%. They are doing oversight all right when it comes to blocking democrats.
The idea that the party that made Trump big, promoted ideas he build on and created project 2025 is supposed to be counterbalance to itself is absurd.
https://try.works/#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-re...
It did work for Deepseek for sure and it seems to move the needle for Xiaomi's MiMo; but will it be enough for Qwen and Gemma? Those are the models you can actually run without going all-in on AI (but only with gaming GPUs and such).
The compute required to run these models is still very far out of reach for the average consumer, yet known enthusiast, therefore they still sell inference, whilst also getting consumer goodwill for providing open weights.
China? Im getting ready to watch the URKL (universal robot knockout league) go on. The USA is dicking around with failed robot dogs.
The USA has been a failed country, coasting on massive inertia. But the tech avenues from a article I cant find showed the USA 8/64 areas excelling. China was 56/64 areas excelling.
Smart people in China design fast manufacturing lines for $25k/yr.
Smart people in the US design bond hedging strategies or ad-pixel trackers for $250k/yr.
China is in the stage the US was in 60 years ago, and eventually those high paying, high impact jobs will suck the intelligence out of all the "blue collar" work. Just like it did in the US.
Dodging politics, the power structures in us industry need serious revamping.
USA exports and exported services, especially in IT. And a lot. USA has nothing to export is true only if you intentionally ignore stuff USA exports.