"AI" is another monopoly moonshot. Its main promise for capital, aside from being an excuse for layoffs, is the possibility of becoming the only shp in town when it comes to certain activities.

One example is the stock imagery industry. People started using "AI" for this immediately, even when it sucks at it. Replacing the need for hundreds of thousands of people to simulate a ton of different situations, you could just synthesize something comparable. But just "automating" this is not the real end goal. It is to become the exclusive monopoly company on stock images, to create a huge war chest of IPs about the topic so that you can charge massive amounts of economic rent. Stock images would soon become more expensive, not less.

China will be fine so long as this tendency can be resisted internationally. If the above scenario happens, it be another WTO IP fight on slightly different terms.

Another possibility is that piracy and/or open source nerds prevent those monopolies from ever taking hold because once models are trained, deploying them isn't actually that resource-intensive. If there is a "good enough" free stock image generator it will make it very difficult for a monopoly to take complete control.

So these companies are basically betting everything on nobody being able to compete with them, mostly because they have large datasets they won't share.