China doesn't need to build better AI than the US to win the tech race - The Business Times

Now the Business Times offers a comforting thought: China doesn't even need to build better AI to win the race. Just cheaper, open-weight models that "rival frontier models at lower cost." That's like saying you don't need to bake a better cake than the bakery next door — you just need to sell half-baked cakes for half the price, and call the crumbs "competitive." The US is still agonising over safety regulations, ethical guidelines, and FTC comment windows, while China drops a massive open-weight model, declares victory by default, and everyone claps.

The consultancy crowd loves this framing: "China's strategy is more pragmatic than the US approach." Pragmatic? It's a strategic dodging of the entire safety conversation. Why align a model when you can release it under an open-weight license and let the market figure it out — or not? US labs are bogged down in internal debates about responsible scaling, while the FTC just gave everyone a two-day comment period on AI output steering — which is about as effective as asking a stampede to slow down so you can take notes. Meanwhile, Moonshot's model is already out there, free to download, modify, and deploy without any of that tedious oversight.

The gallows humour here writes itself: China's path to AI supremacy is paved with "good enough," not "better." And if history teaches us anything, "good enough" usually wins, especially when it's cheap and widely available. The US is building a cathedral of regulation while China hands out hammers. So raise a glass to open-weight models — the cheapest way to dominate a race you're not even officially running. Just don't ask what happens when "good enough" becomes the global standard.