I'd also include the other Chinese labs like Moonshot (behind Kimi) and Z.ai (behind GLM). They are innovating and continue openly sharing their research to the public. I believe the founder of Moonshot even shared 40 minute video on Twitter where he goes through techniques that powers Kimi.
The strategy for the most companies in the US has been for a long time to capture the social audience, whatever the mean is. Quality and innovation is the second factor. Capture the market, lock in the users, influence regulation and lobbying to keep the power.
“Buy every new players threatening their business” should be at #3 in your list.
They compete with each other by innovating. The innovations result in more utility for the customer, but the technology isn't made public. Trade secrets are secret for a reason.
The reason people may think that DeepSeek is the "most innovative" is because of what they can observe from the outside, much like people may mistakenly conclude models are the "prettiest of the population" because not everyone is photographed for public consumption.
To compete in that direction, USG needs to learn from CCP to "seize the means of production", which they are sort of doing, but in such an incompetent way that I'm afraid we will probably end up mixing the worst of both communism and capitalism.
No they don't. The U.S. Government is free to launch their own AI labs if they wish -- and even compete with the private sector -- but that doesn't mean they have to confiscate existing investments and capital. But Congress is unlikely to do that, because we've learned in the course of history that in well-functioning competitive markets, publicly-operated services tend to be worse than private ones across multiple dimensions.
Chinese companies are largely where they are not because they're state funded, but because they operate in ways that would be considered criminal in the U.S. If they didn't constantly trespass on OpenAI and Anthropic to try to achieve product and technological parity, they would be too far behind to produce innovative research.
In this case, it feels like they are just funding multiple independent pure research projects and letting the chips fall where they may.
Doesn't even really seem like Europe can coordinate that.
Especially since your 5-day-old account is sus, and thus likely not yet proven not to be a Chinese bot
You can't lead by following the actual leader LOL
The only real innovation I've seen from Deepseek is the out-loud reasoning thing in R1