The most overlooked event of the year started in late August and is running as you read this: the Marin project out of Stanford is pretraining a 535-billion-parameter model with every metric streaming to the public in real time. It's the largest fully open, live-streamed frontier training run anyone has ever attempted.
Honestly it's just a hierarchy difference between the two countries. In the US, tech/fin/military companies have the upper hand compared to the government (fragmented between 2 parties). Despite the sharades with Anthropic, Tech-fluencers are in control. Compared to china, the government (dictatorship) has more control over Tech companies (take any example from the past 10 years). For them, undermining the US AI supremacy is an objective, and releasing open weight models is the way, and I'm all for it.
Let's not get crazy here. You can acknowledge that the Chinese AI industry has some structural advantages right now without trying to claim anything else. China is still a brutal autocracy.
I don't think it's very common to believe the Chinese people are bad guys. It's the government and its control of the people that's the problem. And no, I don't think the US is immune to that sort of problem either.
The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)
Quickly they'll find a way to commodify the tech
Same happened with electric cars (modern Teslas are joke in comparison with BYD). Same will happen with AI