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.

If all AI really is classified as a "weapon" for export-control purposes, well... in the US possession of weapons is a protected individual right. The US gov should be training open weight models and encouraging self-hosting.

The article wastes no time getting to the underlying point in the very first paragraph:

Top executives at leading Western AI companies are increasingly warning about the safety and national security risks posed by Chinese open-weight frontier models. What they tend not to mention is that these models are improving rapidly and, because they are freely available, pose a serious threat to Western labs’ business models.

I found the following two paragraphs interesting:

By mid-2026, however, open-weight frontier models from Chinese labs such as Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI had nearly matched the leading Western models in intelligence and performance. Many companies have already begun building their AI systems on top of these free models, avoiding the high cost of closed-model APIs.

Because businesses can host open-weight models in their own private clouds, they can also avoid sending proprietary data to systems controlled by outside providers. Developers can fine-tune the models for specific needs, build applications and tools on top of them, and optimize them for their preferred infrastructure.

I just wish I could buy enough memory to run one of these models locally. Specially Kimi K3

is their a meaningful difference between open weight and open source?

Okay but what about the fact all of this is useless bullshit that will only make the world worse?