It's wild how restricting China's access to our GPUs led them to create some of the top & most widely used open source ai models, while the US's models seem to be few and far between.

It looks like Meta has given up on Llama, which was one of the most popular, in favor of going proprietary to make more money.

This also leads me to believe the discussion about China slipping propaganda into their models (the whole "ask it about Tiananmen Square" thing) was never really a thing or at least not a priority for them.

It doesn’t mean that. Low-cost models will still enter the market because China isn’t the only country capable of creating them. If you want to do the manufacturing comparison then it’s like the latest iPhone versus the cheap Android phone from Wal-Mart.

They are both phones and do all the same things but you buy one and you pay a lot more money for it because at the end of the day it is way better. Cheap models capture the slim margin and marginal utility product mix, whereas these “high-end” models capture more of that iPhone market.

China doesn’t want to just be a low-cost manufacturer (you can see this reflected in the ongoing hollowing out of Germany’s economy losing 10,000 manufacturing jobs/month) - they want to make high end models too because the economics and capabilities are far superior.