I heard someone analogize token vendors to car manufacturers, where American companies only want to produce expensive options, the people want cheaper/better alternatives, and we ban BYD because those with enough money are more "persuasive"
The analogy is a good one, but your explanation is missing one aspect: the country (USA) does have a reasonable interest in having the capacity to build their own models. The “we need to slow down because it’s getting too dangerous” part is probably more related to “we need to slow our public facing development down so the US government can get the best and the American corporations can trickle out what we decide is safe”
It’s similar with cars. It’s not that American cars are better than Chinese cars on any tangible measurement. But America already shipped most of its manufacturing overseas. Everyone who built those factories is retired. The US should probably hold on to some capacity to make cars, seeing as their entire infrastructure depends on them.
American Ai/Car manufacturers could build cheaper/open models, some do, the big ones do not. It's not an either or, but a spectrum where they have chosen to build only in a subrange
That doesn’t explain the decline of German automotive industry which is now taken over by Chinese cars thanks to massive subsidies by the Chinese government
It’s not a reasonable comparison. In China, every corporation is de facto state run. The Party is in the boardroom and the executives are members of the Party. The CCP will build entire mega cities or pump money into this industry or that according to their plan. China isn't a "state-run" economy but a conditional-autonomy one. Private firms operate freely until they collide with Party priorities. Then the state wins decisively and without due process.
I'm honestly not sure why this is seen so negatively. It seems to be working pretty well for them, perhaps we should do similar instead of whining about others being more effective?
Another point of comparison we might make, how close is Trump's desired increase to the US Defense budget to what China is spending on industrial subsidies? It looks relatively close to numbers in these research papers.
