It’s an interesting conversation. We’ll just have to see how it develops. I think the reason that the Chinese models are so cheap is explicitly to strategically undercut US development. However, I wouldn’t underestimate the possibility of these models receiving an outright ban at some point as a protectionist move much like in the auto industry.
The auto industry wasn’t protected; it was kneecapped as part of the great American fire sale. We will eventually get Chinese EVs in the states but they will be licensed as Chevrolet, Ford, etc. The Trump admin is still working out how to maximally siphon from the licensing deals.
Living in the UK now and seeing the sheer volume of Chinese car manufacturers is astonishing. I never realized just how closed system the US made themselves for whatever reason that I am 100% sure it is because certain people couldn’t profit enough from it.
Does dumping even work, as an accusation? The shocking cheapness of Chinese models is in their training. Unless they’re just straight-up lying, and by orders of magnitude, that cost is not a factor in adoption.
Tokens are not commodities. The cutting edge is all broadly similar, but people getting any real work out of these things have justified opinions about which ones are better and how. It is not an industry where you could half-ass your results and compete on subsidized price. Especially when half-assed results are possible with local models that run on your laptop.
Nor do open models provide any serious retention. These companies emit an avalanche of whitepapers. If China tried to close the gate now, the horse is fuckin’ gone. Anyone can see how to produce a from-scratch competitor using institutional quantities of money instead of nation-state quantities of money. Plus you still have the old models. They’re behind, but they’ve narrowed the gap at an alarming clip. Increased pressure toward lower training cost and strictly local inference wouldn’t slow that down. Headline accomplishments from a few years back are already within reach of hobbyist budgets.
