Yes, incentives are why people go to work in the morning. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA4012-1.html

The US funds (and used to even moreso) scientific endeavors that stand to bolster the entire country all the time. Medical research is the obvious one, DARPA is the defense based one (though oftentimes defense is just a post-hoc justification for a lot of those), the Department of Agriculture is constantly researching improvements to the farming industry, the Bureau of Weights and Measures and the NSA fund cryptography research.

Research and development of new technologies often is a "rising tides lifts all ships"-type deal, which it is absolutely in the government's best interest to support.

For China, the best case scenario would of course be to control a locked-down best-in-class frontier model that the rest of the world becomes reliant on. The US seems to be beating them at that, and "Everyone is reliant on the United States" is a pretty bad scenario. A middle ground, positive outcome is that no one is reliant on locked-down closed models, so they're supporting that outcome.

It's really not that nefarious.

"public" doesn't mean "love and kindness with no self-interest".

We only think "government spending is for hippies" in the US, and only when we don't look at public spending like defense bills.

Of course it's in self interest. It's too bad that the US has gone the other direction and cut public funding for research.

You're fixating on what's a meaningless blip in the story; the technological world was built on post-WW2 US spending that ended 40+ years ago.

> China wants the US economy to flounder

It’s not that simple. If the US economy goes into a recession, it will take large sectors of the weak Chinese economy with it either directly or indirectly.

It’s probably more accurate to say they don’t want American LLMs to become dominant. The huge US data center build out doesn’t depend on Anthropic and OpenAI anyways. Those data centers can just as easily serve Qwen or GLM models.

China is looking after their own interests, but they absolutely don't want their largest export market to struggle. The global economy is not a zero-sum game, and the idea that it might be is the root of many of our policy issues in the US.

I don't think it is true that they necessarily want the US to struggle, I suspect it's more self interest. LLMs seem to be one of the biggest innovations of the last few decades, China probably just wants to make sure it's not being left behind and/or made hugely reliant on the US for what seems to be turning into a piece of critical infrastructure.

China has an effective strangle hold on some key sectors (solar, rare earths) and I am sure they relish this position and the leverage it gives them. You'd be careful not to give away that same leverage to a competing power if you can invest a few billion now and cover your bases.

Assume, crazy business, that china wants what’s best for the world. Recognizing the danger of an AI arms race rapidly producing uncontrollable superintelligence, it focuses on open weights to reduce the economic incentives for further advancement of AI beyond the “highly useful for humans” stage.

Seems like the only thing that could avert an intelligence rapid take off. Everyone wins except for shareholders.

> China wants the US economy to flounder.

Why would they possibly want their largest customer to flounder?

The fact that the US economy is load bearing towards unprofitable projects while things like medicare for all or universal childcare continue to not exist is just a damning indictment of the country.

I don’t think that’s true. The US is China’s most valuable trade partner.