The Electric Slide by Packy McCormick at Not Boring provides deep insights on why China is building open-weight models.

These excerpts were particularly striking:

“There are only really three pillars to anything around us, as far as consumable goods. We’ve got energy, intelligence, and dexterity.”

“America is, implicitly or explicitly, making a bet that whoever wins intelligence, in the form of AI, wins the future.”

“China is making a different bet: that for intelligence to truly matter, it needs energy and action. If you control energy and action, making intelligence abundant strengthens your position.

And as humanity infuses machines with intelligence, more of those intelligent machines will be Chinese. This is why China is happy commoditizing AI.

They believe that action is the much harder, and therefore more valuable, piece of the future to own.”

This framing helps me understand the strategic landscape better. While the US focuses on maintaining AI leadership through closed models, China’s willingness to open-source AI models makes more sense when you see it as part of a broader strategy where they already dominate manufacturing and physical infrastructure.