This makes no sense when you zoom-out. None of these companies, be it Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, are profitable in the AI department, they're all bleeding money and using funds their parent company and/or investors, primarily investors gave them. The Chinese models are keeping up with them, while offering the models for free and able to run on consumer grade hardware, and more importantly they train them for cheap. AI models are an extremely volatile product that can be outdated in the matter of a few weeks. Meaning you have to keep dumping resources into developing better models which has no end-goal besides infinite scaling. Lets look at how users behave in the real world:"I don't use Gemini because it's worse than Claude at XYZ." That's it. Now Gemini has a worse model and people are going to Anthropic... what happens when Anthropics model is arguably worse than everyone else's? What does it matter if they can commercialize if their product is objectively worse?

I understand that America dominates in distribution, integration, enterprise contracts, ecosystems, infra... The article isn't wrong, it's just that that dominance is fragile and requires constant upgrading.

But what is the point of that if you have to infinitely scale because the opposition is right behind you at all times ready to usurp you... You CANNOT scale infinitely, the VC money will run out at some point and then everyone will have to downscale everything to meet the real costs associated with SOTA models, they'll have to be able to use subscriptions, and other monetization to cover those insane costs, we just saw SORA shut down because it was bleeding money far too fast while the Chinese released video models that far surpassed it back to back to back...

EDIT: Hell, one of the most critical aspects is integration of the models into other products, and even on this end open-source is keeping up (and will eventually outpace when the VC money dries out) with these big companies.