> Still not sure how I feel about China of all places to control the only alternative AI stack, but I guess it's better than leaving everything to the US alone.

Fully agree. From a US perspective, that sucks. For everyone else it's pretty great.

At this point the world's opinions of China are better than those of the US in some polls. One country invests and helps build infrastructure on a massive scale globally, the other alienates allies, causes countless conflicts, and openly threatens to end civilizations.

Indeed, even if one isn't partial to China, there's reasons to be glad that an increasingly hostile US has powerful competition.

> This is about who will dominate the world of tomorrow.

For this you'd need a technological moat. So far the forerunners have burned a lot of money with no moat in sight. Right now Europe is happy just contributing on research and doing the bare-minimum to maintain the know-how. Building a frontier model would be lobbing money into the incinerator for something that will be outdated tomorrow. European investors are too careful for that - and in this case seem to be right.

> Indeed, even if one isn't partial to China, there's reasons to be glad that an increasingly hostile US has powerful competition.

This is how I see it. The US has openly threatened multiple times to annex my country, and has repeatedly threatened every western nation. Letting the US have a monopoly on... well.. anything, is really bad for the world. The more countries that have their own production for various critical things like computer chips, medicine, etc, the better it is for the world at it distributes power.

People in the US don't seem to understand that with the current administration the US is seen as a potentially very hostile nation. While I don't think China is a friend to Canada or the west, at least it provides alternatives when the US tries to use it's monopolies against us. And vice versa too.

>Building a frontier model would be lobbing money into the incinerator for something that will be outdated tomorrow. European investors are too careful for that - and in this case seem to be right.

Strong disagree here. Mistral does great work, in the long term being a few months or even a year behind is a non-issue. Also Cohere just merged with Aleph Alpha to continue producing foundational models. It's extremely important that the middle powers continue to do this.

Yeah it's confusing. I mean China has work camps for Uighurs and is very brutal on Tibetans etc. OTOH, their leader is not setting the world on fire every second week and compared to Trump seems like the paragon of reason on the surface. Of course we know it's a facade but man what crazy times to live in.