They also don't have to inflate profits for a coming IPO.

We buy cheap Chinese goods all the time. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

In this case, at least it’s threatening multimillion dollar salary jobs instead of entire towns of working class people in America or Mexico.

And the Chinese labs actually release their weights. You could call it… open AI.

Big labs ripped videos off YouTube without caring about the ToS, and grabbed as much published literature they could get their hands on, regardless of legality (Books3, The Pile). The goal of "democratizing human knowledge" by way of thinking machines is far too noble to worry about frivolities like copyright and authorial consent, they said. Until it was their output being exploited, and their earning potential threatened.

We just had years of US model providers arguing it was fine to rip off the world’s cultural output for their own profit, why should their work be treated any different?

True, but why would end users care about that? If anything, training on synthetic AI output is more ethical than on scraped human works (of course, not to say the Chinese labs aren't doing the latter)

Chinese are also simply better at making a lot of things cheaper, e.g. solar panels or electric vehicles.