The pressure for them to export models is that doing so super-charges the growth of the domestic industry. Same reason why they export solar panels, instead of just hoarding all of them for domestic deployment.
People pay money for the solar panels, though. It's not obvious to me that giving away expensive LLMs for free is meaningfully helping grow the domestic economy, as opposed to foreign inference providers who get their GPUs from Nvidia.
People pay money for the solar panels, though. It's not obvious to me that giving away expensive LLMs for free is meaningfully helping grow the domestic economy, as opposed to foreign inference providers who get their GPUs from Nvidia.