technology Inkling came out yesterday - an open source LLM by an American firm. It’s supposedly not bad but also not notably good outside of its multi-modal support for audio compared to the leading open source LLMs which just happen to be created by Chinese firms.
What was more interesting than the actual model was the reaction in the American tech world upon its release. Suddenly, American developers were in feeds and comments everywhere cheering on the “smartest American open source LLM.”
Since when did people start caring about the nationality of corporations spending their own money to give you free, open source software? Did any Americans care that for two decades that the namesake author of the world’s best open source operating system was not American but Finnish?
Why do American tech people feel the need to cheer on national LLM development anyways…like it’s some sort of sports team or religion? What’s the underlying motivation for this...is it emotional? or insecurity? or something else? Why does the thought of China possibly making a better LLM seem to present an existential crisis to them?
I’m just a observer from afar so I won’t speculate on their reasons and instead only observe that Chinese developers don’t seem to have this weird nationalist mind virus with regards to LLMs that Americans and some other Western developers have suddenly contracted. At least not to the same degree.
In fact, a Chinese developer I had lunch with this past weekend in Zhuhai told me that while he uses a Codex with Deepseek at work, he’d much rather be using Claude Code with Anthropic's models. Unfortunately, his company finds Anthropic too expensive.
Chinese people in general don’t see American technological successes as an existential threat probably because they've lived in a world of US technological dominance for much of their lives. In contrast, they are often among American technology's biggest fans. Just ask anyone in China what they think of Tesla, SpaceX or Elon! Or Apple! They love them!