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Weekend Reads
For the last three years, the Chinese government has allowed anyone to use its most capable artificial intelligence models. That generosity was always temporary, and Beijing is now reportedly looking to curb overseas access to its AI technology. America’s first instinct might be to follow China’s lead, but Jason Hsu in the New York Times writes that China’s move presents an opportunity for the United States to take the lead on AI.
During training, AI models acquire and fine-tune billions of individual settings, or weights, that help them answer prompts. China is at an advantage because its leading AI companies, like DeepSeek, allow anyone to download and train their models. OpenAI keeps ChatGPT’s weights secret. According to Hsu, America and its allies should build “open-weight” models that users around the world can download, inspect, and retrain.
Key Insights
1. China is arguably winning the AI race with open-weight models.
“Last week, the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3, which the company says is the world’s largest open-weight AI model and rivals the performance of Anthropic and OpenAI’s best models to date. Alibaba’s Qwen is now the most downloaded AI model family on earth.”
2. It’s not easy for firms to switch to American technology.
“Switching an AI model is not like canceling a subscription. It means tearing out a foundation. A European manufacturer running a Chinese model . . . cannot simply swap in a superior American model that costs more to use and runs on someone else’s servers. . . . A country that can’t switch off a foreign model has handed China a grip on the systems it runs on.”
3. The US government should fund a contract to train an advanced open-weight AI model.
“That contract would give companies in the United States and allied nations a foundation to build on and compete in this arena of AI development. . . . Chinese models have come to dominate in places like Nairobi and São Paulo because China made them free, packaging the model, the hardware, and the financing together. America has the capital and the technology to offer the same package, on better terms, with security standards that even newcomers can meet.”
Quotes may be edited for clarity and length.
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