alt Hacker News> the most important race in human history
This feels like it needs a lot of asterisks. A race implies someone will win it - how exactly is China winning by making those models freely available? "The West" can use that tech, it's not locked away in some vault.
This is a very easy question to answer: they're commoditizing AI and compressing margins for the US labs, while their state funds large scale buildouts. It's a decelerating force for the US because it removes dollars that the labs would otherwise put into R&D.
Obviously China will not release models if they ever get far ahead of the US's best models in capability. You can't seriously think that "free models" will remain the game plan if they take an indisputable lead?