"Frontier labs" makes it sound like there's some special sauce to these companies. There isn't, other than very smart people working on problems.

Guess who else has that? The Chinese companies developing open weight models. In fact, the vast majority of AI science comes from China. They might still be playing catch up in some areas, but they're also leading in others (famously DeepSeek's inference architecture as an example).

There is IMO a non-trivial chance those labs will eventually surpass the US ones and become themselves "frontier", and that may happen sooner than a lot of people expect.

Of course, it still remains to be seen if they will keep publishing the weights at that point.

Chinese labs are gated by lack of compute, at least until they can build their own EUV machines.

At some point, they'll stop releasing models for free and will need a license.

> At some point, they'll stop releasing models for free and will need a license.

Is this a guess, or do you have any information to back that inference (no pun intended)?

It's my long standing view.

There are already rumblings of CCP wanting to control export of top tier frontier models.

> Of course, it still remains to be seen if they will keep publishing the weights at that point.

I mean if they don't then the US companies could just release their weights and chop the Chinese off at the knee's at that point (reversing what is currently happening).

Opening the weights isn't just a technical thing, it's a geopolitical decision which likely in part comes from the top of the CCCP (by either request or just implicitly allowing it).

Open weights is not a CCP thing. It's a business decision because Chinese labs do not have a good distribution strategy in the west/outside of China.

This is nonsense, at a policy level the Chinese government have actually been moving towards restricting larger models. I'd eat my hat if Europeans in particular aren't paying licenses for weights in a few years if it means getting to host the models on home soil, there is draft legislation (CADA) making its way through at the moment that would even require this in many circumstances.

> But the goal posts will move

On both frontiers and open. And lately the gap has been closing so if anything yeeting Anthropic etc is getting more viable over time

> will find new areas that have a need for absolute frontier

And they will keep it to themselves to extract the value for as long as possible.