alt Hacker NewsChina aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one (which is already subsidized) in order to gain foothold. The difference is that in the US subsidies come from VC, while OP implies subsidies come from the AI labs that buy the training data (which may as well also be VC backed, so just one extra hop).
This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom where the one with most money gets to stay in the market. As with most venture capital startups. I believe this VC tactic is a well documented "cheat code" to bypass market forces and build a monopoly. I find it hard to compare that with a free market.
However, I don't really mind China "stealing" from Anthropic. For us consumers we are getting the cake and eating it too. I.e we are getting rapid improvement to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in funding, yet the market remains big enough that there's a chance of it not ending up as a monopoly in 20 years. And venture capital are footing the bill. A part of their investment is practically being redirected to fund Chinese AI development. It lets us live out our lives as happy CAC farmers[1].
So I would argue its not as much of a "cheaper solution" as it is intentionally and maliciously abusing another company's product to extract more value than the billing plans intend (given an average user), and further subsidizing the product by selling this data to competitors. But I don't necessarily think its a bad thing for us end-users. Nor for the market. But it is bad for Anthropic and its investors.
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Chinese models are years ahead of american models on multimodal comprehension, better yet,they publish on what makes the models tick and release weights openly.
Chinese research outout, publically released, has also contributed in big ways to features present in every single US model. Yours is a bit of an unfair take I'd say.
Besides, claude will think its chatgpt sometimes, so clearly this isn't a problem restricted to china, turns out unethical companies will do unethical things /shrug
> China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one
So basically like US companies subsidizing offerings with selling user data, ads for crypto scams, manipulation for elections, making people addicted to gambling and so on?
Seems fair and an improvement as you can choose between that and not. Unlike say offerings from Meta where the data selling and efforts to further gambling addiction is always included.
> China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one (which is already subsidized) in order to gain foothold.
In my economics classes, we were told that (in a "free market" argument) the best thing to do if a subsidy is making something you want cheaper is to use it. You're getting your thing, and at a reduced cost.
(I'm not really replying to you per se, I'm curious how "free market" folks in these comments would respond to this.)
Which part are we supposed to have an issue with? The selling data to offer cheaper compute? Products taking over markets with below cost pricing because they have money and ruining the free market?
Because all of that is considered totally okay when every single US big tech company does it.
All I can say is lol. DeepSeek showing 3 order of magnitude efficiency gains over the performative capital furnace that was training and inference absolutely moved the bar here.
> This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom where the one with most money gets to stay in the market. As with most venture capital startups. I believe this VC tactic is a well documented "cheat code" to bypass market forces and build a monopoly. I find it hard to compare that with a free market.
Why? Lots of people try this tactic, but hardly anyone ever succeeds. Meanwhile, the customer benefits.
A trillion dollar ipo jist occurred for a company whose main line of business is almost entirely subsidized by government contracts
> This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom where the one with most money gets to stay in the market.
That's, uh, pretty much exactly how oligopolistic markets function.
> I find it hard to compare that with a free market.
Well, to have free market you need to remove as much barriers to enter the market as possible. Huge capital investments required for entry and intellectual property laws are two examples of such barriers. Subsidies kinda supposed to help alleviate the first one.
I mean, for what it's worth, we have subsidized Anthropic by allowing them to train on copyrighted stuff. (I know it is still legal, and I support the legality, but the economics are what they are with people's content paying a big one time subsidized cost (to the level of at least 500B).
So, the least Anthropic can do is pay it forward.
> China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one
Chinese labs are also pursuing legit frontier-advancing R&D into efficiency and publishing papers in the open, a culture that's in retreat at top American AI labs