China hasn't just refused to take the role of exporting socialism, that phrasing is actually from long-running explicit policy of the CPC and its leadership. It is an intentional strategy for their own nation-building project, though one should just focus on the material history.

As for LLMs, it's just another industry among many. What is uniquely harmful today is the intense tech-finance gambling on it, the so-called "hyperscalers", which just means huge amounts of resource use using finance capital to make bets on having monopolies on it later. Lose billions, trillions for 5 years and then ramp up prices when CEOs consider you "essential", or so goes the gambit. This is incredibly wasteful and most of it has no legitimate use case.

Chinese industry is being more coordinated and is far less impacted by finance capital and monopoly seeking. Both exist, including the latter, but the party is much more involved and can make corrections. In combination with their academic institutions, Chinese models tend to focus on attenuating the excesses of the "hyperscalers" by focusing on models that can be trained with lower power requirements and releasing open weights so they can be used widely on consumer grade hardware. The latter is fundamentally in opposition to monopolization at the point of consumption, though training is not and won't be without a distributed open computing approach. And while there is still a lot of pointless or obscene use of LLMs, they tend to be used in a way that is more pragmatic.

The situation is basically the same as for every industry in China. Its purpose is to grow productive forces in a way deemed strategic, a balancing act that requires constantly weighing different forces. They decided that sitting out LLMs was less strategic than using them and growing domestic expertise, but in their own strategic direction. This means the warts will also be there and a new round of contradictions. Actual bad things will happen, like wasting resources on a data center. But this also already happens in their general strategy of building productive forces and being enmeshed in export markets. They build most of the pointless consumer products you can think of because it builds their productive forces, keeps exports up, centralizes production so they are "too big to fail" geopolitically. And those productive forces have a domestic boon. Being the best die mold production center on the planet means they can produce almost anything at scale in almost any material. As a result, something like new batches of trains come together at a speed and scale that's mind-blowing. It can be built out to support the people, to support solar energy, to electrify, and so on. The boons of industrial capital with their worst excesses significantly diminished.

This is all true with their LLMs as well. Not a pure good, but a much better method and one chosen strategically to position themselves against the imperialists.