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While I absolutely support these open source models, there is an interesting angle to consider... If I were a Chinese partisan looking to inflict a devastating blow to the US, taking the AI hype wind out of American tech valuation sails would seem a great option. How best to do this? Release highly performant models... For free! Extremely efficient in terms of RMB spent vs (unrealized) USD lost. But surely, these model releases are just the immaculate free market at work. No CCP pulling strings for geo-political-industrial wins, certainly not.
On the other hand, several startups such as Cursor and Cognition+Windsurf are building their new models on top of the open source Chinese models.
Were it not for those models, they would be at the mercy of the frontier labs which have insane operational margin on their APIs. As a result you'd see much more consolidation.
Google Maps, GPS, the Internet etc being free are surely just a CIA plan to take over the world
the goverment might be (relatively speaking) evil, the people are most definitely not.
But they’re literally not free. If it was “war”, with infinite money to throw at destruction of USA AI industry, then why would you be charging and reducing such an outcome
Because subsidizing the necessary level of compute for that is unsustainable. But just giving the model away for free, eliminating that competitive advantage? Well, that itself is free.