alt Hacker News>Do you think Japan and the EU would be better off if our/their economies were centred around trillion dollar companies that make a product that is 20% better than the Chinese models at 1000x the cost?
Why Japan and Europe don't develop a model that is 20% worse at 0.001x the cost?
Replies
Chinese companies have at least three major advantages:
1. Price of electricity is low because of China's excellent energy policy. Admittedly this should absolutely be a priority of Japan/EU, but it isn't, so first you'd have to start there...
2. Because of #1, China already had massive infrastructure in place for eg. crypto mining that was readily repurposed. Japan/EU never engaged in this fad, so they have to start effectively from scratch in building out the GPU infrastructure.
3. Chinese talent is relatively isolated from the US economy. US-aligned economies must compete with the US for talent. It's hard to develop technology at a reasonable cost when all of your top talent is leaving to get paid 10x as much by speculative gamblers. If you don't have a very good reason to believe the gamblers are making a good bet, it's better to wait for them to go bust.
Added on to all of that... where is the upside? Chinese models are open anyways. There is nothing that merits this being a matter of urgent government intervention at all, it's basically pure downside.
I'm European and I am developing a model that's 20% worse and 0.001x the cost of Chinese models.
Personally I also always just use Gemini-3.5-Flash since for me it's actually a good search tool access that makes a model great.
But I'm not very typical European we have 2000x B300 and I'm in USA and China all the time, and work 16hrs a day without weekends and holidays.