alt Hacker Newsslightly ot, but this seems like a good place to ask, since I don't think I have the strategic-business mind to understand it all myself: What's the play here with China having supported publishing open weight models this far? I know the official line is for the good of mankind and all that, but presumably it's more strategic than that. Soft power? Commoditise your competition?
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realusername • today at 8:59 AM
The US economy highly depends on the valuation of the tech giants whereas the Chinese economy doesn't.
Additionally, the financial and technological equilibrium which makes OpenAI or Anthropic possible is rather precarious so they are poking on it, hoping to make it fall.
there's alot of reasons, but one of the more commonly cited ones is that China facing chip restrictions means they lack the compute to provide the models for global usage, and making them open-weight is one of the ways to circumvent these restrictions.