> If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.

It’s a lot less surprising when you understand the tactic of economic dumping, which China has used for years to attack industry front-runners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

They’re not giving away the models because they love freedom and want to generously offer gifts to the world. They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.

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bigyabai 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.

Isn't that just how competition works? Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing), so why isn't their tactic also considered dumping? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't stealing IP and subsidizing model inference because they love freedom either. They're doing it to undermine industry competitors and attract people to their brands.

The US government deliberately chased a strategy of denying China access to powerful Nvidia hardware. Shipping efficient and cheap LLMs is their only option, just like Jensen Huang warned would happen. And now that China's smaller models are reaching the frontier, everyone cries foul.

	▲	bjelkeman-again 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It is probably a naive point of view that I hold (I haven't thought it through properly) but the western capitalist version is that investors providing money to do dumping of prices is ok (as long as you are not considered a monopoly) and the Chinese state sponsored capitalism is considered dumping as it goes against the agreed WTO rules for how international trade is supposed to work. The western capitalist governments (probably with a lot of lobbying support) wrote the WTO rules. Not trying to defend either way, but it seems to be different economic and political systems trying to gain dominance over each other.