I know why China is releasing open source LLMs en mass even though China isn't known for OSS. I've never seen anyone talk about this before.
They learnt from the failure of Japan that was the world leader in computing. But the US ended up taking everything by the 90s. Particularly due to Intel and Microsoft.
But what does this have to do with OSS? There's a big market for OSS particularly in enterprise. And I believe the world would be a very different place if Japan had went for the open source route instead instead of fighting a losing battle for dominance against US software monopolies.
If China can produce viable open source LLMs in a world where the US takes the private LLM monopoly, China will be able to undermine this monopoly and cut deeply into its revenues. It's not about the money. It's about not letting the US take the whole cake in a race they are ahead in just like they did with software.
They learnt from the failure of Japan that was the world leader in computing. But the US ended up taking everything by the 90s. Particularly due to Intel and Microsoft.
But what does this have to do with OSS? There's a big market for OSS particularly in enterprise. And I believe the world would be a very different place if Japan had went for the open source route instead instead of fighting a losing battle for dominance against US software monopolies.
If China can produce viable open source LLMs in a world where the US takes the private LLM monopoly, China will be able to undermine this monopoly and cut deeply into its revenues. It's not about the money. It's about not letting the US take the whole cake in a race they are ahead in just like they did with software.