alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
They have the same values. Domination it is. People are people. Really no difference between the US and China. None at all.
Belt and Road wasn’t goodwill.
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.