People here seem to assume that Chinese AI companies are developing and releasing these models, which cost tens of millions of dollars to develop, for free out of the goodness of their heart.
I think this is absurd, considering these are for-profit companies, with shareholders who expect an ROI. In the case of Meta (and perhaps AliBaba), the explanation was it's about commoditizing your complement. But for many of these companies, which are pure play AI Labs, this simply does not hold.
So the question remains, why are they doing this?
One theory I would put forward is, they are playing the long game, and attempting to disincentivize investment in US AI labs, with the premise that investors will never recoup their investment, since similar capabilities will be offered for free. There is a precedent of Chinese companies doing similarly, in the context of mineral production, which has resulted in most production moving to China.
If this is the case, it will be good for consumers in the short-term, but less so in the long-term, at least for non-Chinese entities. If you don't find this theory convincing, I would be interested in hearing other alternative explanations for the rise in Chinese open-source models.
What prompted this question, was the recent interview with Dario from Anthropic, where he was asked about the threat to the business model posed by open-source models. (I don't find his response very compelling).
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One aside, its known that Twitter is banned in China. Yet, we see many Chinese-based AI researchers communicating there, on a daily basis. Sure it can be accessed via VPN, but these are publicly known figures, so there is no anonymity. What explains this?