I think you view this situation from the US point of view and assume that China has the same guiding principles and values in their foreign policy, for which it doesn't.
They might do what you said, of course.
But they very well might also treat LLMs as another goodwill investment like the Belt and Road Initiative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative) and export the capability to partner countries, for example, in Africa, to strengthen relationships.
A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
In many cases, much of that debt paid for Chinese companies, contractors, suppliers, and imported workers who built or operated the projects.
And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs, mostly with China’s (ie the Laos–China railway, in large part financed by Laotian debt, which may someday bring some benefits to Laos, but mostly serves China’s regional trade ambitions).
Not to say other countries do it better or have purer ambitions or whatever. It’s just the "goodwill" part that made me twitch.
Can you argue that the principle of the BRI is humanitarian and it should benefit both partners, but not equally? Imho, that policy is far better for humanity than blockading Cuba, bombing Venezuela and Iran.
> A lot of it was financed through large (sometimes unsustainable) loans to recipient countries, sometimes leading to unsustainable debt burdens, irrespective of the potential ROI for the recipient (ie Sri Lanka’s port).
I see that you blame China for Sri Lanka, while China wasn't the only creditor there.
> And the infrastructure didn’t necessarily line up with the recipient’s actual needs
> Can you argue that the principle of the BRI is humanitarian
No. You can argue some projects, if done well, benefit both sides. That doesn’t make it humanitarian. It makes it basic foreign policy.
> China wasn’t the only creditor there.
I didn’t say it was. I said Hambantota was a costly development failure for Sri Lanka, and Chinese lending was part of that specific project and problem. Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
Don’t make me say what I did not.
> Easy to say in hindsight.
Yes. That’s why development and debt are hard problems. Also why calling it “goodwill” is, at best, too generous.
> Better than blockading Cuba / bombing Iran / etc.
“The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill. Plus, there are more than two countries in the world. Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
> Yes. That’s why development and debt are hard problems. Also why calling it “goodwill” is, at best, too generous.
One can call the intent 'goodwill'. It doesn't mean that the outcome is satisfactory for your economic expectations. Judging from exceptions is not a valid approach and is a weird take.
> “The US also does very bad stuff” doesn’t make BRI goodwill.
True. I used that as an example of an alternative approach. The reader can decide which one is more 'goodwill'.
> Some even try viable (if self-interested) development policy without bombing people.
What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
> Don’t make me say what I did not.
That conclusion says more about your reading than about what I actually wrote.
> Basically, that unlike your "goodwill" claim, China isn’t just giving away infrastructure for free out of the goodness of its government’s heart.
I shoot back with "Don’t make me say what I did not.", and 'goodwill' doesn't mean 'free stuff', you may want to check the dictionary ;)
One can call anything anything. And intents can only be guessed at, while outcomes can actually be evaluated. The question is whether the label explains the policy.
BRI is state-backed finance tied to Chinese strategic, commercial, and diplomatic interests. Some projects may benefit recipients too. Great. That still doesn’t make "goodwill" a useful description of the principle.
> Judging from exceptions is not valid.
I’m not judging from one exception. I backed my point of view with examples of a broader pattern: debt-financed infrastructure, Chinese contractors/suppliers/operators capturing much of the spending, and projects that often also serve China’s trade and influence goals.
Feel free to provide substantive counter-examples instead of just waving the word "goodwill" around.
> I used that as an example of an alternative approach.
No, you used US violence as a contrast to make BRI look benevolent. That’s whataboutism. "Less bad than bombing" is not the same thing as goodwill.
> What countries are you referring to here: France (Douala and Abidjan ports, North–South railway in Vietnam), Japan (also ports in Sri Lanka, Thilawa), something else?
Given its own propensity to rely on bombing, I would not use France as an example. The EU-financed port and airport in Gaza, for all the good they were allowed to do, come to mind. Japanese development and aid efforts too, even if they, like most if not all state-sponsored efforts, come with strings attached.
> goodwill doesn’t mean free stuff
Obviously. But you’re the one explicitly framing it as humanitarian. If your "goodwill" consists of lending countries money for infrastructure that often serves the lender’s own strategic interests and pays its own companies, then I’m going to question the framing.
Unless, it just occurred to me, you meant "goodwill projects" in the sense of "projects aimed towards generating goodwill among recipient countries (and their population) toward China".
In which case, I’d still argue the frame is too narrow, but acknowledge I misunderstood your initial point and apologise.
More likely the PRC sees the open-weight models' progress as a way to prevent an existing dominant player from cementing their (finicky) lead and pulling up the ladder.
That strategy happens to have beneficial side effects to the global Hoi Polloi, but to attach any kind of benevolence to it would be naive.
How would open-weight models benefit PRC better than their own closed-weight models, but still available at lower prices? If anything, open-weights can be distilled far easier.
Thinking like a business vs. thinking like a state.
If you see a given technology as fundamental[tm], you want to ensure that you will retain access to it AND its ongoing development. China may well foresee a possible future where US imposes export controls and global sanctions to block PRC from having access to the necessary equipment to either train or use the most advanced models - let alone its alternate parallel universe where US might go as far as prevent anyone else than US themselves having the most advanced forms of the technology at all.[ß]
To ward off such a scenario, China doesn't need to become the sole leading supplier. They only need to guarantee that nobody else can even try to block them off, and that the technology itself can never be yanked.
Because lower prices with closed weights would be severely compute constrained which would tightly cap the damage to american firms. As it is there's a plethora of providers (many of them american) serving up the cheap open weight models. Even tightly regulated industries with security concerns can use the latest deepseek.
It also enables further R&D using the open models as a starting point. That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off. In that sense it provides a long term hedge by minimizing the damage in the worst case scenario where china ends up suffering a crushing defeat in the AI race for whatever reason.
> Even tightly regulated industries with security concerns can use the latest deepseek.
That is not necessarily true, as "tightly regulated industries with security concerns" are also afraid of deepseek models generating vulnerable code. Even a possibility of that prevents those industries from deployments.
> That doesn't benefit china directly but it does serve to further undermine the lead that the american frontier labs have which limits their future ability to cut geopolitical adversaries off.
So, basically, competition is bad for US models? That argument doesn't address open-weights. And it doesn't work the other way around, because in that case China should be releasing close-weights instead.
> So, basically, competition is bad for US models?
Having less of a lead is bad for US frontier labs.
> That argument doesn't address open-weights.
Open weights does far more to further that goal than closed weights ever could. The bit right before the sentence you quoted was about enabling further R&D using open models as a starting point. In the same way that open weights serves as a force multiplier when it comes to flooding the market with cheap inference it also serves as a force multiplier if your goal is the raise the R&D floor. In this scenario a reasonable move for a capable opponent that's lagging behind is to attempt to raise the floor of the whole market so as to erode the position of whoever is in the lead.
Also consider that (as I previously mentioned) raising the capabilities of the global market as a whole serves to minimize damage in a worst case scenario. If you find yourself needing to depend on a foreign supplier for a key technology then it's better to have as many choices as possible from as many different jurisdictions as possible.
Well, you are wrong. Maybe you should visit and learn more about China to understand it.
For starters, China's society is high-individualistic with a strong sense of community and with high respect to their elders.
On the contrary, US's society is hyper-individualistic with a strong sense of family and basic respect to their elders.
