People pay money for the solar panels, though. It's not obvious to me that giving away expensive LLMs for free is meaningfully helping grow the domestic economy, as opposed to foreign inference providers who get their GPUs from Nvidia.

Giving away open weight models, if you dismiss altruism as a motivation from the outset, is a way to salt the earth while at the same time building mindshare.

It makes it harder to extract decent margins from models at or below the quality of the open models, and so makes it harder both for new entrants and for any existing providers that are depending on cheaper models for revenue. At the same time you make people comfortable with your product.

It's the IP version of dumping products below cost if you're capital rich and want to winnow down the competitive field while "buying" customers.

They are dumping products (models) below cost. It's just that they are not dumping their latest and greatest products (models).

The models they dump may not be good by the latest Chinese or US standards, but they are far and away better than anything anyone outside of China or the US is able to come up with.

So until we start seeing EU models or South American models or African models that are better than the models being dumped onto the market, China will not be giving us anything better.

And again, it's gonna be a long long time before the rest of the world even gets to the effectiveness of some of the Chinese models being dumped. Let alone competing with the best models China or the US possess.