They're pouring money to disrupt American AI markets and efforts. They do this in countless other fields. It's a model of massive state funding -> give it away for cut-rate -> dominate the market -> reap the rewards.
It's a very transparent, consistent strategy.
AI is a little different because it has geopolitical implications.
It's not like the US doesn't face similar accusations. One such case is the WTO accusing Boeing of receiving illegal subsidies from the US government. https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/wto-says-us-ga...
I can’t believe I’m shilling for China in these comments, but how different it is for company A getting blank check investments from VCs and wink-wink support from the government in the west? And AI-labs in China has been getting funding internally in the companies for a while now, before the LLM-era.
When it's a competition among individual producers, we call it "a free market" and praise Hal Varian. When it's a competition among countries, it's suddenly threatening to "disrupt American AI markets and efforts". The obvious solution here is to pour money into LLM research too. Massive state funding -> provide SOTA models for free -> dominate the market -> reap the rewards (from the free models).