I’m very much a luddite when it comes to AI, I’m unequivocally against its usage and development. The social and environmental costs AI incurs and proposes to incur are overwhelming. The celebration of AI with Chinese characteristics is often justified by the idea that AI can be useful, and the reason why it’s OK to be vehemently against it otherwise but support it when it’s being implemented by China is because AI can only be a force for evil within the capitalist framework. I agree with the latter point obviously but find it hard to accept that China driving AI advancement is a good thing for the world.

I don’t want to have a debate about whether China is a revisionist state, but I think we can all agree that China has refused to take the role of the Soviet Union in exporting socialism to the world. What happens when it exports AI to countries world over that very much operate within a capitalist framework while China does nothing to advance world wide socialism?

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[–] 20 points 23 hours ago

I think the major material point missing from this analysis is that every major model from China is "open-weight". This means that in principle you could run these models on your own hardware or the hardware of a third party.

Even though most people still use these models hosted by the provider anyways, the threat of high quality open-weight models has been a persistent drag on the valuations, prestige and revenue of the US tech/AI firms. In fact, they started a massive price war in token pricing that has reached all the way to the top of the market

Chinese firms are also a pressure relief valve for monopoly pricing in high bandwidth memory and soon even advanced chips.

I therefore argue that even without "exporting revolution", in practice Chinese industrial policy is hazardous to imperial tech conglomerates on both sides of the Pacific, and I couldn't be happier about it

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