> It’s the same as the patent argument.

The Chinese are open-sourcing these models - meaning they are literally giving them away. That's starkly different behaviour from that which drove patents and copyright.

There are all sorts of other differences too. If you develop a drug or publish a novel (which are respectively areas where patents and copyright have strong justification), you have to kiss a lot of toads before you get a prince. Once you have a potential prince drug, it takes years and billions to get it into the market. But right now, AI labs are seemingly churning out new prince models almost weekly, on hardware that will be obsoleted in a few years by hardware that makes finding princes faster and cheaper. In fact they rent the hardware, as Moonshot apparently did here.

When innovation is happening at that rate, patents and other IP restrictions just slow things down. If AI patents are aggressively granted and enforced in the USA, I suspect the outcome would be the same as batteries. China swept the market with LFP, and one reason was because while the USA developed them, there was no competition forcing the manufacturing price down because in the USA the patents weren't re-licensed cheaply. China had the foresight to secure a deal allowing them to develop and sell LFP domestically royalty-free. Natural competition within the domestic market took care of the rest. It looks like they are using a similar strategy for AI.

To me it looks like they have come up with a better formula for using capitalism to drive innovation than the one the USA is using.