alt Hacker NewsNo they won't. They'll offer far superior models at a premium price and they'll capture most of the profits similar to iPhone versus the Android manufacturers.
US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options that will compete with any open source models released by any other country, except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government.
Whenever I have these conversations it's like, ok do I believe the incredibly smart people running Google, Facebook, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, Amazon, and more who have careers, companies, and trillions of dollars at stake, or do I believe random people on the Internet who say "Open AI and Anthropic will be like Windows Server and open-source models will be better"?
Without extremely strong evidence to the contrary, I'm going to go with what the smartest people in the room are doing. The model and economics make a lot more sense, and fears about Chinese open source models are overblown. When you're behind and frantic you release open source software. If American companies somehow fall behind they'll just release their own better open source software/models and undercut China using the exact same strategy. So either both sides get to employ this strategy and neither has an advantage, or the spend and research matter and America for now has an advantage.
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> They'll offer far superior models at a premium price
> US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options
This is wishcasting. People are raising the alarm because models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 have already displaced demand for frontier models in highly demanding fields like security research. There's no amount of money that you can pay for "premium" access to Mythos, so those researchers are taking their money to inference providers that give them comparable models.
It's okay if this is your prediction, but it's not particularly grounded in the present scenario.
> ok do I believe the incredibly smart people running Google, Facebook, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, Amazon, and more
Why do you conflate all of these businesses with vastly different business strategies to one another?
Apple and Facebook do not have the same AI strategy, same for Amazon and Nvidia or Google and OpenAI. Many of these businesses made expressly terrible choices that hamstrung their ability to capitalize on AI profits. FAIR failed to scale their early Llama models into a service; Apple abandoned OpenCL too early and invested in a dark-silicon NPU coprocessor instead of supporting CUDA's multi-trillion dollar ARM rollout; Google went all-in on hardware research and failed to create a frontier model that moved significant tokens; OpenAI forfeit the frontier to Anthropic, and Anthropic bent over backwards to appease American censorship demands and push cringeworthy marketing campaigns to capture LLM mindshare with Claude.
There is no "American companies" coalition. They're all reacting in drastically different ways and your eagerness to conflate them suggests that you don't have any real position outside tribalist "us vs them" pugilism.
> except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government.
The Chinese models already do that with the absolute minimum of coaxing.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- Upton Sinclair
The limiting input in an AI future is energy. China understands this. Any hardware disadvantages are temporary. China will build frontier models, and it will even open the weights, but it will win on running the models due to energy infrastructure buildout.
The incredibly smart people aren't the ones running those companies. They're the ones actually creating the products.
They already offer “superior models at a premium price” but the issue is that they are not that much superior than the open models and in some cases are even worse(I.e Anthropic Fable refuses to fix a login/signup page, not to mention any kind of actual opsec work).
You already can do more with open models than with proprietary models because you can’t tweak the proprietary models to your liking. Just as OpenAI and Anthropic went from 0 to a trillion they can go back just as fast.