The speed in which a copier can catch up to a leader is faster than every before, but everything is faster these days. I think the threat is if can these labs catch up and pass American labs while keeping costs low, but I don't see that happening.
Yes, and that is how you get a top-heavy k-shaped economy I believe. It is harder and harder to sell premium A+ products, because most people can only afford what works. If my old ice cream vendor charges me 25% more but puts chocolate sprinkles on it i'm going for the non-sprinkle version.
Only with some industries, mostly electronics and light manufacturing. The rest of the history of software products doesn't look like this at all. China cloned Amazon and Meta fairly well (but only within their local/captured markets) but not Microsoft or Google and absolutely not Apple. Entertainment and culture exports are still effectively zero (like, what, three blockbuster films?) where the US, Japan and Korea define pop across the globe. Heavy industry is mixed, with decent success in consumer vehicles now but little purchase in stuff like heavy equipment or shipbuilding.
Basically it's complicated, and not really a point well suited to that kind of generalism.
Americans order Chinese products from SHEIN and Aliexpress type websites.
So China did penetrate the US ecommerce market, but they are not taking on Amazon directly.
People are buying from the Chinese and reselling on Amazon, which has a good logistics network that Chinese companies can't possibly build in the USA.
> absolutely not Apple
You need to look up Oneplus to see how many people were using their devices till they announced exit from Western markets.
The Chinese Android phones are essentially replacement for a big chunk of Apple ecosystem.
If these cheap mobile devices didn't exist - Apple could possibly be selling many more devices.
> China cloned .... Meta fairly well
TikTok is giving Meta a run for their money in USA.
They had to be restricted via threat of regulation to offload stake in TikTok USA.
> Microsoft
They didn't compete with Microsoft directly as entering Western Enterprise market is hard for the Chinese. Even Google can't beat Microsoft there till now.
The final part of this sentence shows why there is absolutely no need to look up Oneplus.
I'm not sure if you are from the US, but if you are, it really gives you a distorted image of what the worldwide smarphone market is like.
E.g. in many European countries, it is 1/3 iPhone, 1/3 Samsung, 1/3 others (which are mostly Chinese brands).
TikTok competes with Meta, not Olivia Rodrigo or BTS.
And this is really sad, because they have thousands of years of cultural heritage and also plenty of great films. Somehow, they've failed at exporting this completely.
Uhh, China does over half of the world’s shipbuilding.
China is also responsible for 25% [1] of the world’s heavy equipment manufacturing and is considered to have double[2] the CAGR of the global average for heavy equipment manufacturing.
0: https://www.csis.org/analysis/china-dominates-shipbuilding-i...
1: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/constructi...
2: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/heavy-co...
They even got the car Apple always wanted, but never managed to build.
It's like releasing a cutting edge search engine, proclaimed to be on par with Google. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, you need to actually run it somewhere. One of the core moats for Google has been the cost to scale and compete globally with a search engine, which only a few entities on earth could even attempt. Somehow the HN crowd forgets this every single time. The same claims were endlessly made regarding Uber, as though the app was the hardest part of competing with Uber. Here's a hint: the model isn't the only super hard part of the total process at this point. Try running something akin to GPT 5.6 for a billion users, see how much that costs.
The winners will be the owners of the subscriptions and API usage. That's going to be OpenAI and Anthropic as of now, possibly Google will stay in the fight with their scale advantage focused on the consumer. It will never be the open weight models out of China. Who is going to invest the trillion dollars into infrastructure needed to run the latest version of Kimi 3-5 years out, for a billion users? There's only one entity that would ever consider it, and that's China domestic.
And the real money (for a sustainable business model allowing for constant massive reinvestment & infrastructure maintenance) is in pairing up advertising, which is another spot where the open weight models from China will never compete. It doesn't matter if the HN crowd hates this outcome, nothing will stop it from being the future core of mass consumer usage. And the business use will stay with subscription + API use as well: the best option for that today is OpenAI and Anthropic.
Everybody that is concerned about their data ownership and residency, and how the US political system is behaving right now. There is a huge incentive to cut off ties with API and subscription providers, especially those based in the US.