If the Chinese government is as involved in LLM development strategy as many people claim, wouldn't you expect them to immediately cease releasing open weight models and restrict access as soon as they start producing the frontier models? I am assuming this is what the USG thinks and is why they are trying to cut off the flow to foreign nationals ASAP.
LLMs are an undeniably valuable tool, and governments like to control those.
Xi Jinping isnt as AGI pilled as US govt. CapEx in US is significantly focused on AI related things like chips and data center. It's more diversified in China as they also invests hugely on renewables, EV, BESS, etc.
How do you know that Chinese don’t have powerful private models already? Maybe they just allow opening the ”bad” models…
As far as we don't know, they might also have operational stargates large enough to let their starships pass through. Actually, every country might have that.
But what is impactless to the wider world will always be as significant as something that never existed.
I talked about this before but China would be in much better position if LLMs turn into a commodidty. Where they can dominate is in hardware, as fast and cheap inference is probably going to be the moat.
My futurology is that most of us will end up on unlimited token plans like we are for mobile data. We don't need the very best model for most tasks and the trend in computing has always been towards cheaper and more efficient unit economics. I do not see this ending any time soon.