American Closed Source vs. Chinese Open Source: A False Dichotomy(senteguard.com)

14 pointsby djwide6 miesięcy temu4 comments

American Closed Source vs. Chinese Open Source: A False Dichotomy

https://senteguard.com/blog/#post-h2V9GtUh5Xts9NTzH4zu

4 comments

djwide6 miesięcy temu

It’s a call to patriotism. China versus America. “Who will you back?” This has become a common plea from the Silicon Valley elite over the last six months. I heard the move up close at the Harvard Kennedy School, where a visiting Eric Schmidt warned that AI may soon cross into autonomous self-improvement, argued that someone will need to “raise their hand” and impose limits, and then pivoted into the geopolitical register, contrasting American and Chinese trajectories and urging policy and funding choices aligned with “American values.” Others have also made versions of this argument in different forums. Tarun Chhabra, head of national security policy at Anthropic, has made a similar argument, urging an “American stack” and treating model governance as a geopolitical contest. Putting aside the awkwardness of nationalist messaging coming from the Bay Area’s long-time borderless “global citizens,” the incentives are not hard to see. If you can frame the open vs closed models debate as a national security referendum, you can frame restrictive rules as patriotism and you can frame “responsible control” as synonymous with dominance by a small circle of incumbent providers.

The posture makes sense once you consider two facts. One: industries which may live and die on capricious regulatory rule making must make their case to those with their hands on the levers of power. In 2026 America, those hands are professed patriotic Republicans. Two: Big Frontier LLM is losing the tech battle, or at least losing the easy assumption that America’s lead is automatic and permanent. They are on their back foot so they must frame the open vs closed model debate wrongfully as a fight between America and China. America cannot afford to lose a battle to China and by extension Anthropic, OpenAI and Alphabet cannot afford to lose to their competition.

Yet there is nothing inherently Chinese about open models and nothing inherently American about closed models. If anything, it is the opposite. Open models are decentralized, inspectable, forkable, and difficult to monopolize. That aligns with an American instinct to diffuse power, prefer competition over permission, and distrust single points of control. Closed models concentrate capability behind a small number of gatekeepers, wrapped in secrecy, and sustained by privileged access to regulators. That logic is far closer to centralized control than to open competition. The real fault line is not America versus China. It is democratic diffusion versus unnatural scarcity, and good tech versus bad tech.

Full article linked.

popalchemist6 miesięcy temu

Agreed with everything you said! Somewhere in the last 10 years, Silicon Valley has gone full swing in support of "say whatever gets you the result you need, even if it's outright misleading, propaganda, or a lie" (I'm looking at you Sam Altman). Corporations always tend toward fascism, their agendas are aligned.

elbci6 miesięcy temu

Take a look at that sea of kids taking the GaoKao to get into Beijing univ and you know the software stack is lost already, it's now only about the fabs (hence the Greenland?).

djwide6 miesięcy temu

Either way, not sure protectionism and siphoning money to frontier model owners will help us.

But also by that argument they would have beaten us to frontier model tech as well. Their education system appeared better than ours 20 years ago. We could have a bigger and broader conversation comparing the two systems and China's has a lot of flaws