Technology

The Western model was doomed to failure from the start. The only barrier to entry was being able to download thousands of TBs of internet archives/books and to have a lot of compute.

The math for these models isn't proprietary and most CS students are exposed to machine learning and neural networks while in school.

The only advantage western companies had was the ability to buy up the entire hardware market, pricing out domestic competition, and to use their politicians to manipulate trade policy in order to restrict sales of critical hardware to China.

Every US tech company has dumped billions investing in an unsustainable business model with the hope of buying a global monopoly by strangling competition.

China can destroy all of that by making their models open weight. The real money is in finding and implementing custom AI solutions... not in charging for access to the models. By having freely available models, they're making the barrier of entry as low as possible.

Not to mention that the insane amount of money being poured into hardware by US tech companies has created an environment where building fabs has a much shorter ROI, which also helps China's development in that sector.

US companies are playing Monopoly while China is playing Civilization.