And the Biggest AI race here seems to be whether US can innovate faster than china is scaling...
Lies. China is innovating, the US isn't. Any attempt to pretend like our science infrastructure is superior to theirs is hilarious. Trump has GUTTED actual science in the US. Our AI companies barely innovate; they're too busy trying to rig the system for themselves.
We seem to be getting a lot of "China AI, oh no" articles lately.
It's understandable. After all, for years now, the Radar Trends To Watch on O'Reilly is at least half filled with AI news. AI news is dominating the entire tech world. Connect to that you can hardly look at AI lately without seeing how Chinese models have so rapidly taken up the slack of western models for a fraction of the cost.
Their means of doing for are a tad controversial, because distillation verges on free-riding, nevermind the usual "Hah! The copyright thief is complaining about being stolen from, that's rich!" rhetoric. And since everything in tech has been about AI lately, it's reached the point where tech stocks tumble every time China releases a new model.
So yes, on this strange little timeline we're on, chatbots being poached is somehow a threat to a national economy.
Distillation isn't always cheaper, it depends how it's done. There are two big issues. First, obviously if you copy another model, it's hard to be better than this model. You'll also copy all the mistakes of that model. You'll never have the best model. And second, models aren't just their results, even more the most advanced ones. Distillation means you can copy the results, but if you don't copy the architecture, you might end up with an inefficient model, able to copy some results, while requiring much more energy to do it. But the mistake would be to consider China is only doing distillation, and I think it's very far from the truth. Some media focused on that because they still have a bias and think China is still underdeveloped everywhere in the country. They've been wrong for 10 years but it takes time for everyone to realize it.
I don't think they should be blocked, but it's not like China hasn't blocked US competitors during the last decades to have its own tech companies. And it clearly worked, so.
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But we also hold ourselves to higher than standard. If not, are we any different than China.