It has nothing to do with just giving up and going 'Wellp, I guess China wins.'
China and the US are obviously very different culturally in just about every way possible. This difference makes for great competition. Someone in another topic mentioned something that seemed pretty insightful to me - in that where LLM companies failed in the US was in basically becoming clones of each other, whereas DeepSeek (and now perhaps Baidu) were going in a different way, and that way turned out to be better.
US companies will inevitably copy these strategies, one way or the other, as will Chinese companies copy what ends up working well from the US (see their latest rockets looking more than a little inspired by Starship). And the true competitiveness ensures in the end that the main people who will win will not be whichever guy ended up founding an AI company first, but you and I. It's how capitalism is supposed to work - companies beat themselves down into a race to the bottom, and society reaps the rewards. It only gets really messed up when there's no "real" competition, which is an increasingly frequent state of affairs. But that definitely will not be the case here.
Expect the same thing from India in the future as well. Their economy is advancing rapidly, and soon enough we're going to have another 1.4 billion people able to fully utilize the outliers such a population entails to similarly drive things forward in their own unique way. It's a great future for the world as a whole.
China and the US are obviously very different culturally in just about every way possible. This difference makes for great competition. Someone in another topic mentioned something that seemed pretty insightful to me - in that where LLM companies failed in the US was in basically becoming clones of each other, whereas DeepSeek (and now perhaps Baidu) were going in a different way, and that way turned out to be better.
US companies will inevitably copy these strategies, one way or the other, as will Chinese companies copy what ends up working well from the US (see their latest rockets looking more than a little inspired by Starship). And the true competitiveness ensures in the end that the main people who will win will not be whichever guy ended up founding an AI company first, but you and I. It's how capitalism is supposed to work - companies beat themselves down into a race to the bottom, and society reaps the rewards. It only gets really messed up when there's no "real" competition, which is an increasingly frequent state of affairs. But that definitely will not be the case here.
Expect the same thing from India in the future as well. Their economy is advancing rapidly, and soon enough we're going to have another 1.4 billion people able to fully utilize the outliers such a population entails to similarly drive things forward in their own unique way. It's a great future for the world as a whole.