This is a refreshing perspective.
I hypothesize that, rather than slowly having it disperse in society and allow people to harness it in ways they don't want, they might as well accelerate everything until AI becomes the totalitarian swiss knife - which they can make use of in the best way of course.
Let's see what will happen.
It's trivial for me to download one of their models and run it on my Spark, and there's all sorts of ways to strip out their Tiananmen-denialism or whatever.
If/when the memory price crunch dissipates, even more so. And so far it's only China I see as making moves to increase production capacity on memory, too.
If anything the centralization of capital into US-based Anthropic and OpenAI is far more terrifying from the perspective you're outlining.
Expert in buildout or expert in distillation?
1) China distills and is therefore morally bad.
As you rightly point out, that's not a great argument.
2) China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent.
I think that makes sense. If they only catch up to the frontier through distillation then 1) Their model will never be as good as the model they are distilling from. 2) They will never reach the frontier - they need someone else to do it first.
We're lucky to have China imposing competiton to the western AI megacorps.
If it wasn't for China, I would probably have to spend $100/mo on AI instead of $10 like I do currently while using DeepSeek and MiMo (opencode Go plan).
And while I could do so comfortably, I feel for those who can't. It must feel incredibly isolating to only watch others have access to expensive models to leverage their careers.
I hope SoTA AI becomes an universal right because it will contribute to too much income disparity otherwise.
We've had a taste, and damned if I'm going to have the "means of production" snatched from me already?
I have unlimited tokens at work than i go home what do i do? Spend 200$ per month? No def not.
When Anthropic increased the limits for their 20$ plan, i started again coding with it on a private project and it was fun and i did a lot in that 4 weeks.
From the notes this part sat with me as the real difference:
> As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment. National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration.
Meanwhile... In the fantasy land over here in the US we're constantly being told that it's "coming", "almost here", "too powerful for us to give you access to", "of national security importance!".
And while there may be trace amounts of truth in those overzealous statements we haven't seen a significant improvement in much outside of software development comparative to the spend and environmental impact.
cmrdporcupine•54m ago