The outcome is plausible. Open weights models though look like a tactical more than a principled play by Chinese companies to overcome the disadvantage and difficulties to access western markets. Two issues:
1. If market conditions change they might decide to close down like Meta did.
2. If as you said models keep getting more expensive to train, is an open weights strategy financially sustainable?
edit: typo
I think (and have heard) the Chinese govt is also interested in trying to embarrass the US as well by showing off their capabilities (so there's a political angle, too)
All countries see AI as a geopolitical concern. An open source strategy is smart. It’s effective and also builds good will / soft power. Many see Chinese AI companies as the good guys and root for them. I’m pro open source and also celebrate but still aware this is most likely just the means to an end.
I used to work at Mozilla. I think we are missing a player in the market with a more principled open source approach.
That's probably pretty likely, but if we're honest, are LLMs built and funded by a hostile Chinese authoritarian regime any more dangerous or harmful than LLMs built and funded by a hostile American authoritarian regime?
China absolutely does not have my best interests at heart, but America's technofascism is probably more immediately dangerous and harmful. Americans genuinely have more to fear from America than China at this point.
One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does.
And while I use and love the open weight models, it seems likely to be pretty hard to prove conclusively that they have no reinforcement-learning-trained proclivity towards curling specific URLs if the topic happens to be some very specific thing that the government is interested in, when used to drive agents.
So it depends who you are. If you're a company, you might have something to fear. If you're a private citizen, maybe not so much.
I don’t think US companies could ever fully trust models sponsored by foreign adversaries. How would you ever verify they are safe?
Provenance of training set is going to be critical. It’s largely ignored now, but the first time a malicious exfiltration occurs it will go off as if a bomb was detonated.
Only way would be an actual open source model: code + training data
You're moving the goal post here. The parent never mentioned anything about the Chinese models themselves being dangerous or harmful; that's a totally different topic.
The point they were making was that the most successful open models- those coming out of China- are made my companies that are using those open models to get exposure in Western markets. The goal is to undercut the Western dominant players, not out of any particular "open source" philosophy, so it wouldn't be wise to expect them to continue providing open models long term.
Define technofascism lol.
Fascism was laid out by Mussolini in the 1920s - it amounts to the idolatry of the state.
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." B Mussolini
Also defined as Corporatism: the union of state and corporate power.
Which country do you think is closer to Mussolini's model ?
Fascism was strongly influenced by Futurism and its optimism for a machine-powered future where technology will bring forth utopia and order.
It’s no wonder than Thiel & co. are rediscovering Futurism, and blind faith in the machine is basically what Silicon Valley is all about.
I think the term 'techno' in 'technofascism' is doing the work here, because--just as you claim that historical fascism is the idolatry of the state--technofascism is the idolatry of technology and intelligence. Modern accelerationism, as espoused today by people like Marc Andreessen in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, is really just another rehash of Italian Futurism, which was closely intertwined with Italian Fascism and one of its intellectual foundations. It was, essentially, a progressive ideology. The idolatry of the state does not vanish, but rather gets transformed and re-imagined as a technology, e.g. network states, platform governance, companies that function as sovereign entities. The idolatry shifts from the nation-state to the infrastructure that replaces it. Also, you don't need to look far to answer your own question about corporatism, as you defined it yourself. Now, who's currently moving between Silicon Valley boardrooms and government offices?
Fascism is not merely idolatry of the state. That is simply its ideological mask, its method for currying the favor of its base. To say that this is what fascism is at a fundamental level is to mistake its superstructure for its base. But how is Fascism structured? How does society reproduce itself? Is there a fascist mode of production? No. The state mobilizes its population so as to target scapegoat(s) while simultaneously expanding in order to secure the spoils of war. Without scapegoats, there is no Fascism. And a state requires social cohesion to mobilize its base. Thus without cohesion there is no Fascism. At minimum, social cohesion requires the ability to sustain and motivate a critical mass of the population. Thus Fascism requires the continued maintenance of the capitalist mode of production in order to persist, but it simultaneously undermines capitalism due to A. the continued need for war machines and B. the need to punish a scapegoat, which both siphon value from the rest of the economy, thus dooming the entire enterprise. This is why fascism burns out and leads to doom for all parties involved wherever it has been tried. Any definition of fascism that ignores this is historically inaccurate and practically useless.