> In a world where open-weight models dominate, the proprietary frontier models of Anthropic and OpenAI will find it virtually impossible to charge monopolistic pricing.

Maybe they can't charge monopolistic pricing (there's a few market entrants anyway today), but they can still charge premium pricing.

Also two things can be true at once.

American and western AI companies or other companies can rightly be part of the chain of general concern from western societies about anti-democratic authoritarian regimes (Iran + friends, China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, &c.) getting ahold of technology while simultaneously also being worried about losing their market position and seeking regulatory rules to entrench themselves against actors who do not share the same values and seek to undermine western businesses with trade practices that are intolerable to our societies.

Hardly anybody is talking about the biggest political aspect of open weight LLMs:

Because they instantly and reliably(tm) give you the information you want in the format you want it in, they are going to replace the web search as the dominant mode through which information is disseminated - if, indeed, this hasn't already happened. As such, LLMs are effectively a form of publishing for their training data.

Which means a vicious fight for control over what goes into LLMs, and strong incentives to widely disseminate useful LLMs that encode your structural biases, instead of some adversary's. We already talk about Chinese models that won't talk about Tiananmen Square, but that's eye-rollingly sophomoric compared to what the stakes are now. Imagine a model that subtly discourages entrepreneurship, because its creator doesn't want upstart competitors. All questions of media bias are multiplied incalculably when LLMs are folded into all of society.

I think we need to take LLMs seriously as sovereign projects that are as critical to the democratic experiment as a free press. Funding needs to be nationalized; training needs to be conducted in the open, on open datasets; fine tuning needs to follow democratic principles. Only then will they be fit for purpose for their inevitable structural destiny: arbiters of human opinion.

Bottom line: China wins.

Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results.

Isolation is weakness, not strength.

It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else.

The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world.

This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is inadvertently working to "Make China Great Again".

http://rdcy.ruc.edu.cn/yw/LATEST_INSIGHTS/b7bdcf47e8a2489085...