I find this author's line of argumentation tenuous as best. I don't recall the memo that forced the West, and the US specifically, to rush along in a AI-first, or really, AI-only strategy.
I also recall clearly when OpenAI stopped publishing open models, or the safety concerned Anthropic was arguing they need regulations to smother competition from all sides.
Neither have we collectively even begun to assess the true economic cost of dashing to build trillions of data centers, in either first or second order effects.
One thing that does seem clear is that the benefits of AI, as the US practices them, seem, as always to be intended to be concentrated in the hands of the few.
But all these points are about the social context. To return to the substance; how did China induce a capitalistic psychosis of profit chasing in our society? Is it a long malaise of inequality that meant the only path of ascension for smart capable individual was software development, a path that VCs were dreaming of removing to make capital more efficient for themselves? The same VC's that now want to cry they no longer have the lead over open weight models, that their investments and dreams of exclusive access are now defunct?
I don't dream of Chinese overlords, but neither am I blind to the US version. I rarely feel revulsion of this level, except when coming across a hypocritical, vacuous piece that demands, somehow, that we should do something about the fact that other people and societies might, for some reason, not want to follow in spending untold trillions into this technology. And if releasing an open model is all it took to collapse the US economic model, maybe that's the sign that it was on it's last legs.