alt Hacker News>They are owned by the state
They are by all accounts, not. Z.ai for instance is a public company according to wikipedia. Moonshot AI is private but all their investors are private companies. Alibaba, as we all know, is a massive publicly traded tech conglomerate.
Moreover even if we take the more charitable view that they're controlled by the CCP, and therefore will continue releasing models for free, that seems as questionable as the prospect that private investors will continue shoveling money into anthropic/openai.
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The core employees of z.ai are billionaires, because of the equity given to them in the past, which in their system is not antecedently evaluated. Much of the past annual expenditure of OpenAI has been the same, handing out equity - but because of the different legal system it is given an evaluation and listed as expenditure. Meanwhile the expenditure on compute for training and inference are apples and oranges again as the state is all over this with moonshot and z.ai and so on .
China has "classroom game capitalism", where companies can play the game, but the teacher still has uncontested, absolute, unilateral control in everything and anything. All the parameters of the game are managed by the teacher, and the teacher is the one who creates the foundations for the direction they want the game to move in.
Don't forget, Jack Ma of "publicly owned" Alibaba, had to go into classroom time out after seemingly forgetting that its classroom capitalism and not real world capitalism.