upvote
What you said is not "a matter of fact" because it's simply untrue.

These companies were not "created by" the Chinese government. Specifically, I'm talking about DeepSeek, Zhipu, MiMo (Xiaomi), Kimi (Moonshot), Qwen (Alibaba). "Subject to" certainly does not mean "created by", it just means that the government ultimately has the power to tell them what to do. The US government has the exact same power, hence why none of us has access to Fable at the moment, but you wouldn't say that OpenAI or Anthropic were "created by" the US government.

There is zero evidence that open-sourcing their models is part of some grand strategy from the Chinese government. In DeepSeek's case, I think it probably is a genuine commitment to open source, for the others I think it's probably just a convenient business decision to gain market share (though Zhipu is probably more aligned, given their academic lineage from Tsinghua).

At some point in the future, the Chinese government may decide it's not in their national interest for Chinese companies to open source their frontier AI models, and DeepSeek et al will be restricted from doing so. I'm well aware of that. But until that point in time, the rest of the world is unanimously better off with open-source Chinese models. We should put as much reliance on Chinese companies long-term as we do on American companies - zero.

reply