The question is also what game they're playing. Deepseek came out of a hedge fund. I think it's no coincidence that their publications tend to have a large impact on AI stock prices.

Destroying the growth story of overvalued stocks is an interesting investment strategy. It's not even new. Shortsellers understandably get terrible rep from execs, but their actions are more often in the public interest than you'd think. Normally it's exposing fraud, but here we get the really fortunate side benefit of what could eventually amount to the most significant contribution to the general software community since Linux.

Which is a good thing. Self-serving motives are more reliable than altruistic ones.

They are focused on the things you do when you are not over-capitalized and you can’t get unlimited nvidia hardware to train on. And the results speak for themselves.

Meanwhile we in the US are blocked from buying Huawei GPUs and retirees are boasting about the nvidia in their portfolios.

Are they behind in models, or behind in VC money to burn on subsidized compute offered to the public and early customers?

Genuine question.

> Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.

US labs in Google, Meta and SpaceX are not leading, none of them managed to build something on par with GLM 5.2.

Care to explain to me why they still don't collaborate and still choose to do it in private?

Also, historically, China has always viewed intellectual property as public property. Similar to open source.

Not everyone is motivated by greed

Projection is a funny thing. It causes people to misread situations all the time. Southern slaveowners feared violent retribution from freed slaves, for example [1]. It was pure projection and said more about the South than it did the slaves. The reality was there was no violent retribution. It was the opposite where the former slaveowners continued to inflict violence on the formerly enslaved.

I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them.

A better reading (IMHO) Of the situation is that China believes that AI shouldn't be used simply to mint a few more trillionaires but the benefits should be shared with society. Why do I say this? Because we now have 70+ years of China doing exactly that. The transformation in China all the way from rural villages to Tier 1 cities has been utterly astounding. China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty.

In some ways we're at a similar point to the late 1990s and 2000s when Microsoft execs complained that Linux, being free, destroyed intellectual property value. Linux should be a perfect example of how people can and do act altruistically, or at least not in a way to bait-and-switch to enrich themselves.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1d26grm/in_the_...

> Chinese labs are also still behind, so they’re incentivized to collaborate and have no reason to do it in private.

Even if they're ahead they don't have enough GPUs to scale. Open sourcing is hence a good strategy to at least get market share (even if not $).

True!

So the marketplace is working.

Regardless of where they are, the Chinese will always share their progress, as they're collectivist/cooperative at their core, compared to the individualistic/competitive US.