> What makes you think there would be no alternatives, though?

There could be, they can actually come from open American companies too. Ask yourself why we aren't seeing a thousand or more American AI startups spring into life overnight to build "open" models. Follow the economics.

> What's stopping a bunch of enterprising upstarts from updating all 2.8 trillion parameters, extending them, distilling the model into very competent flash models, or applying targeted RL?

> And that would come into play if the Chinese kill every closed American provider and then go closed themselves.

What's stopping American or European tech companies from doing this today? It's economic and technical capability. I'm very suspicious of any suggestion that it is in any way not incredibly difficult to build and scale up LLMs. Maybe in the future it can be much easier, but in that case you run into a sort of tautology where it becomes easier but the leading companies continue to lead and do so by a significant margin because they're the ones that have the most talent and access to capital.

The premise seemed to be "an open China" versus a "closed USA". I'm not sure that's a great premise. If China can create open-weight models so can the US. If the US can close their models (as clearly evidenced by the article) so can the Chinese.

> What's stopping American or European tech companies from doing this today? It's economic and technical capability. I'm very suspicious of any suggestion that it is in any way not incredibly difficult to build and scale up LLMs.

Seems more economic than technical. If the economics are covered, the technical aspects seem straightforward enough, and may perhaps be fully solved. I think there's proof of this in that there are a lot of different LLMs on the market. Even Xiaomi -- in-between making cars, e-scooters, backpacks, and home appliances -- spun-up an exceptionally capable LLM! (And one which is rather idiosyncratic. It's weirdly good at music composition and generation, which both Opus and Astra cannot do.)

The economic case doesn't exist for VC-funded US corporations, nor does it exist for cash-strapped nonprofits. In China, all such ventures are likely funded by a government development bureau. If Chinese ventures kill expensive closed providers and universally go closed themselves, there's nothing stopping the US or Europe from copying that same playbook -- unless, as may well be the case, they're ideologically opposed to subsidizing strategic industries.