AI is part of China's 5 year plan and been given special blessing by Xi Jinping directly.
That pretty much translates to blank checks from the party without much oversight or expected ROI. The approach is basically brute forcing something into existence rather than organically letting it grow. China is notorious for this approach, ghost cities, high speed rail to nowhere, solar panel production in the face of a huge glut.
Ultimately though, there is an expectation that AI will serve the goals of the party, after all it is their trillions that will be funding it. I guess the core difference is that in the US AI is expected to generate profit, in China it is expected to generate controlled social cohesion.
They might have dozens of reasons, but they already did what they did.
Some of the reasons could be:
- mitigation of US AI supremacy
- Commodify AI use to push forward innovation and sell platforms to run them, e.g. if iPhone wins local intelligence, it benefits China, because China is manufacturing those phones
I can see how it would be in China's interest to make sure there was an LLM that produced cutting edge performance in Chinese-language conversations.
And some uses of LLMs are intensely political; think of a student using an LLM to learn about the causes of the civil war. I can understand a country wanting their own LLMs for the same reason they write their own history textbooks.
By releasing the weights they they can get free volunteer help, win hearts and minds with their open approach, weaken foreign corporations, give their citizens robust performance in their native language, and exercise narrative control - all at the same time.
I don't think they care about winning hearts exactly, but I do think they (correctly) realize that LLM models are racing rapidly toward being commodified and they are still going to be way ahead of us on manufacturing the hardware to run them on.
Watching the US stock market implode from the bubble generated from investors over here not realizing this is happening will be a nice bonus for them, I guess, and constantly shipping open SOTA models will speed that along.
Because it doesn’t make sense. The reason there’s a bubble is investor belief that AI will unlock tons of value. The reason the bubble is concentrated in silicon and model providers is because investors believe they have the most leverage to monetize this new value in the short term.
If all of that stuff becomes free, the money will just move a few layers up to all of the companies whose cost structure has suddenly been cut dramatically.
There is no commoditization of expensive technology that results in a net loss of market value. It just moves around.
How does it not make sense for Chinese AI companies to undermine American proprietary AI using open source AI? That’s already happened somewhat openly and dramatically with DeepSeek. In fact it seems to me that that was the moment when public perception about the inevitability of OpenAI dominance began to falter.
But the spend on AI is globally is still measured in the tens of billions? Tiny in the grand scheme of things. So what 'money' is moving up? Not revenue, and in the case of a bubble bursting, not speculative capital.
Open source is communism after all? In any case, maybe everyone realized what Zuckerberg was also saying from the start and that is that models will be more of a utility, rather than advantage.
