This is what I hate about how Chinese think. They want to play kumbaya but they setup conflict by saying nothing, doing nothing. Here for instance the Western narrative is there’s a huge battle ahead over AI between the West and China. No there isn’t. The West will have theirs and China will have their own. What’s wrong with that? Because no one challenges the Western narrative, there’s going to be conflict because people are going to believe one has win over the other.
What we have learned from tech, from the arrival of the internet and the subsequent explosion of e-commerce, is that often winner takes all.
Amazon did not make a penny in profits for years and years and years but their stock price kept going up, because everyone knew Amazon was the best platform and they were going to win.
That is not surprising. In the past, with computers, it was all IBM.
Then with the PC when that became affordable for the masses, it was Bill Gates MS-Dos and Windows that became the winner take all.
The Americans, their leading tech companies and the stupid Biden administration, thought that they will be the winner takes all with their big capital investments and sanctions against Chinese tech firms, in this new thing, the AI of LLM.
That has blown up in their faces in the most dramatic way.
With DeepSeek's costs structure, and it open source philosophy, and world leading performance in some metrics, this is a prime candidate for that winner takes all.
The Americans thought it was going to be them, as the winner takes all. DeepSeek current benchmarks, really is like getting hit across the head with a steel bar.
So, to conclude this post, I would agree with you, that the Chinese mentality, tends to try to avoid direct conflict.
However, we Chinese, we compete, we like to compete, and some of us loves to compete.
Even the Chinese girl buys some handbag to compete socially.
In a way it is good, but sometimes we can get carried away with it.
