Chinese labs are also pursuing legit frontier-advancing R&D into efficiency and publishing papers in the open, a culture that's in retreat at top American AI labs
At this point this is being repeated so often that completely uninformed users are taking this at face value.
In my economics classes, we were told that (in a "free market" argument) the best thing to do if a subsidy is making something you want cheaper is to use it. You're getting your thing, and at a reduced cost.
(I'm not really replying to you per se, I'm curious how "free market" folks in these comments would respond to this.)
This narative that the CCP is just subsidizing all business to "beat america" is just dumb. Its the build process being made cheaper by the government. Not the final product.
The CCP is the Chinese AI labs.
I am not aware of any US government AI labs (besides perhaps a small spattering of national lab research or the like)
There is very large difference that your either need to be poorly informed or purposely driving an agenda to miss.
Just because Xi Jinping lets companies play mock "private businesses", does not mean there actually is private business. At the end of the day, the CCP still has final say in everything, and Xi has final say in the party. There is no constitution (in the US judges swear to the constitution, in China they swear to the party), and there is no balance of powers.
It's just one guy, running experiments the way he see's fit.
You mentioned propaganda, take heed.
> It's just one guy, running experiments the way he see's fit.
This is moronic. Exercising a degree of control does not equate to making every decision and running every organization.
Also, obviously Xi doesn't make every decision. No dictator ever did that because it's impossible to do. The distinction is that no one has ever (or has the ability) to over rule what Xi decides. So if Xi has a stroke and wants DeepSeek to start manufacturing underwear, they will be ordering sewing machines tomorrow. Any sense of "private" is a farce.
It did not stop solar panels getting cheaper and cheaper because of the whole integration and mass production (with healthy free market competition).
The last subsidies like export value-added tax rebates for solar panels and lower rebates for batteries are ending in 2027.
China their main power is, the ability to have everything inhouse. Yea, they subsidize a lot of stuff until it hits critical mass, and then you have often a healthy industry with lots of competition.
China alone has like a few 100 car manufactures because of the subsidies, and over time there will be consolidation / buyouts etc but the end result is a healthy new industry that exports. With again, everything internally being produced.
This is why our subsidies fail. We do one sector, often a few companies at best. This results in few competitors, expensive prices, and often reliance on externals that can bankrupt those companies. And que how we wasted again dozens of billions in propping up a industry with no competitive edge.
People can cry about China but they are actually doing work, despite the mass amount of corruption. That is the big difference with here... Mass corruption got in the way of national security, plop, people go to jail. Industry quickly gets their ** together. Here ... give billions, and the money vanishes, with no real consequences.
Local governments are over-funding numerous producers (though cheap loans and other subsidies and incentives) creating excess competition. This is an ongoing problem and is a huge misallocation of capital. Increasing demand just drives this process harder and puts downward pressure on margins. As soon as they try raising prices, or just through satisfying total demand, demand collapses and they (almost) all go out of business.
The Chinese model has weaknesses, we should be exploiting them.
So basically like US companies subsidizing offerings with selling user data, ads for crypto scams, manipulation for elections, making people addicted to gambling and so on?
Seems fair and an improvement as you can choose between that and not. Unlike say offerings from Meta where the data selling and efforts to further gambling addiction is always included.
Because all of that is considered totally okay when every single US big tech company does it.
Chinese research outout, publically released, has also contributed in big ways to features present in every single US model. Yours is a bit of an unfair take I'd say.
Besides, claude will think its chatgpt sometimes, so clearly this isn't a problem restricted to china, turns out unethical companies will do unethical things /shrug
Why? Lots of people try this tactic, but hardly anyone ever succeeds. Meanwhile, the customer benefits.
Specifically, examples of people later exploiting their monopoly to charge people more than they otherwise would have paid.
That's, uh, pretty much exactly how oligopolistic markets function.
> I find it hard to compare that with a free market.
Well, to have free market you need to remove as much barriers to enter the market as possible. Huge capital investments required for entry and intellectual property laws are two examples of such barriers. Subsidies kinda supposed to help alleviate the first one.
So, the least Anthropic can do is pay it forward.
In that sense (which could very well be bogus), letting a company violate individual IP of basically every human is less of an economic concession and more of unconsented to IP open season.
Even if one were to drop "economic" from "economic concession" and instead view a subsidy through the lens of a more general concession, one could say that the US Govt gave US AI companies a legal concession to sidestep the copyright protections of other US entities. But the US Govt should only get to undermine the copyright protection of other US entities - who gave American companies the right to violate the copyright of non-Americans?