Couldn’t you say the same argument about VC funded startups? They lose money following a strategic goal.
The main difference here is if a startup goes underwater all the tech is usually lost. The Chinese weights are not going anywhere if the labs fail.
The VC money is only contingent on the strategy eventually bearing fruit. I do imagine going open source -> closed source could work for some model companies who get enterprise/ecosystem buy-in but the probability of ROI is lower.
I think open source will remain competitive among smaller players and adjacent industries wanting to avoid lock-in with the majors. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc are all out to win - they require profit extraction from their R&D. China seems to have, over the near term, accepted that they can not (or at least have not) pull ahead and so open source collaboration speeds the collective development, keeps them close to the frontier, and ensures their industry has access to learn from and implement. The USA playing export controls games with Fable made that aspect very stark.
But I agree that's the catch - it doesn't make sense to throw money at open source models in hopes of direct return, so you need a nation or conglomerate to do it so as to control the technology they rely on.
This is true for any company following an open source strategy. You'll have the weights but you'll need to run inference, figure out your system prompt, sampling, quantization, etc etc. Loads of tuning.
elasticsearch the first example that comes to mind. you can run it yourself but elastic gives you so many lessons learned and tunes ootb that it sings with relatively little effort, though still reqiures some.
about a million dbs i could make the same comparison for