This is the reason IMO. Fundamentally China right now is better at manufacturing (e.g. robotics). AI is the complement to this - AI increases the demand for tech manufactured goods. Whereas America is in the opposite position w.r.t which side is their advantage (i.e. the software). AI for China is an enabler into a potentially bigger market which is robots/manufacturing/etc.
Commoditizing the AI/intelligence part means that the main advantage isn't the bits - its the atoms. Physical dexterity, social skills and manufacturing skills will gain more of a comparative advantage vs intelligence work in the future as a result - AI makes the old economy new again in the long term. It also lowers the value of AI investments in that they no longer can command first mover/monopoly like pricing for what is a very large capex cost undermining US investment in what is their advantage. As long as it is strategic, it doesn't necessarily need to be economic on its own.
A well-rounded take in an age and medium of reactionary hot takes!
While theres some synchronistic effects... I think the physical manufacturing and logistics base is harder to develop than deploying a new model, and will be the hard leading edge. (That's why the US seems to be hellbent on destroying international trade to try and build a domestic market.)
This may make sense if there is a centralized force to dictate how much these Chinese foundational model companies charge for their models. I know in the west people just blanketly believes that the state controls everything in China. However it can't be further from the truth. Most of the Chinese foundational model companies like moonshot, 01.ai, minimax, etc used to try to make money on those models. The VC money raised by those companies are in them to make money, not to voluntarily advance state competativeness. Deepseek is just an outlier backed by a billionaire. This billionaire has long been given money to various charities by hundered of millions per year before deepseek. Open-source SOTA models are not out-of-character move for him given his track record.
The thing is, model is in effect a piece of software that has almost 0 marginal cost. You just need a few, maybe even one company to release SOTA models consistently to really crash the valuation of every model companies because every one can acquire that single piece of software without cost to leave other model companies by themselves. The foundational model scene is basically in an extremely unstable state readily to return to a stable state of the model cost goes to 0. You really don't need the state competition assumption to explain the current state of affairs.
I'm not saying there is a centralised force - I didn't say the government per se. Its enough to say many of the models coming out of China - the AI portion isn't their main income source especially for the major models that people are hyping up (Qwen, DeepSeek, etc). This model (Qwen) from Alibaba is a side model more likely complimenting their main business and cloud offerings. DeepSeek started as a way to use AI for trading models firstly; then spun up on the side. I'm more speaking about China's general position - for them AI seems to be more of a compliment than the main business as compared say to the major AI labs in America (ex Google). My opinion is that robotics in particular just extends that going forward.
Given as you say the long term cost of AI models is marginally zero, I don't think this is a bad position to be in.