Again, that's besides the point. So the state is an investor in DS, and? Many companies in Western capitalist economies receive initial state funding, especially startup grants. The real point to make is: does the state purposely fund the structural expenses of all those companies at a loss in an effort to undercut the competition and without which they would all go bankrupt and the cost of inference would be naturally much higher and couldn't be possibly optimized? I have yet to see evidence of that, especially given the continuous and prolific R&D from Chinese labs (or the panic at Meta when DS-r1 came out) that does show optimization gains are in fact possible.
An angel investor is an investor who provides early-stage capital to startups and entrepreneurs in exchange for ownership equity. That is not a grant or initial state funding. That is ownership. There are very few examples, especially prior to Trump, of government ownership/stakes of public companies.
But I will concede this: Due to the opaque nature of the Chinese economy to public scrutiny, we might never know.
I am sure, however that substantial use of Chinese inference (not their models per se, but on their servers) is, in aggregate, presents a substantial national security risk for the West. Heck, AI all by itself, without even considering other nations, is a national security threat of the near future, where national security is broadly construed as any threat against its people's welfare, no matter the actor.
>That is not a grant or initial state funding. That is ownership. There are very few examples, especially prior to Trump, of government ownership/stakes of public companies.
Maybe not in the US (although Musk getting state subsidies comes to mind), but very common in Europe. Quite a few founder friends of mine have gotten started with state funding (through various R&D promoting agencies). Angel investing is not the only startup funding structure out there