Most people won't care if the products are useful. Chinese EVs, Chinese HSR, Chinese industrial robots, Chinese power tech, they are already selling. LLM isn't just a chatbot, it could be a medical device to help in areas without sufficiently trained doctors, for example.
Most people may not care but that doesn't matter if the government cares. I will not be surprised if countries restrict LLMs to trusted countries in the future. Unless there is a regime change in China, seeing it adopted in other countries may be an issue.
It is a very large world though, and nationalism is more of an American shtick at the moment. It is totally possible that countries have to decide to trade with China or the USA (if they put down an infective embargo), but then it really depends on what America offers vs. China, and I don't think that is a great proposition for us.
Nationalism is not merely having having a moment as an "American shtick", though I don't know much about how widespread it is in non-Western developing countries. Certainly might not be so much, there.
The real possibility exists that it would be better to be an independent 'second place' technology center (or third place, etc) than a pure-consumer of someone else's integrate tech stack.
China decided that a long time ago for the consumer web. Europe is considering similar things more than ever before. The US is considering it with TikTok.
It's not hard to see that expanding. It's hard to claim that forcing local development of tech was a failure for China.
Short of a breakthrough that means the everyday person no longer has to work, why would I rather have a "better" but wholly-foreign-country-owned, not-contributing-anything-to-the-economy-I-participate-in-daily LLM or image generator or what-have-you vs a locally-sourced "good enough" one?
We are definitely heading into untreaded territory. It is one thing to use Chinese EVs, but using a knowledge system that will be censored (not that other countries won't be censored) and trained in a way that may not align with a nation's beliefs is a whole different matter.
> using a knowledge system that will be censored (not that other countries won't be censored) and trained in a way that may not align with a nation's beliefs is a whole different matter.
this is the exact same story told to the public when Google was kicked out of China. you are just 15 years late for the party.
