alt Hacker NewsIt puts all US companies at a price disadvantage and forces American company to shoulder the load of training frontier models most will never need while the rest of the world has cheap AI access.
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Lots of people want this outcome. We now know that the closed-weight model isn't an effective moat, but if the closed-weight model business fails, the open-weight business has nothing to distill, and model progress slows.
I suspect this is part of why China dipped into their vast strategic oil reserves to reduce purchasing and offset the shortage caused by Trump's blunder in Iran. If energy prices get too high, training will slow. They know they can pirate our models at 95% fidelity, so they want training to continue so they can pirate the next ones also.
The keyword in your sentence is "access". The rest of the world would have cheap access to AI, but no ownership of anything at the frontier. If the US joined the rest of the world, declined to develop frontier AI, and allowed itself to become dependent on cheap Chinese AI, once that dependency was fully realized it would eventually translate into a lack of access to the frontier. That doesn't matter until, suddenly, it becomes the single most important thing to the entire country's future.
China is making a simple bet: that the US will offshore AI in favor of cheap tokens, just like the US previously offshored manufacturing in favor of cheap goods. They're doing this because they know that if they alone possess frontier manufacturing and AI capabilities, then they alone can build the world's most powerful technologies in the future which combine the two (e.g., robotics that will revolutionize all their industries, domestic life, and military far beyond any other country).