While Google has certainly failed with their products before, by and large as a company they are "too big to fail" at this point so to speak where the myriad products they offer have become a very significant part of the digital infrastructure on which much of the world runs.

Anecdotally I've also switched to DuckDuckGo in the past because I didn't want Google looking over my shoulder on my browsing history (this was pre-AI), but I ended up coming back because I felt the search results weren't quite as good (or perhaps it was just in my head, and the differing UI was enough to throw me off).

And this may be a contrarian opinion, and while I hate the idea of Google mining all of my data and monetizing it, I actually find value in the AI 'previews' that Google provides (and will often ask it follow up questions as a means of getting 'free' LLM responses back for 'easier' prompts that I don't want to burn Claude tokens on).

I don't think it's a matter of apathy as much as it is a matter of the rich and powerful are the ones pulling the strings.

You're referring to a very small subset of the American population. It's ironic because you seem to be claiming Americans are closed-minded here but I think that may actually describe your mindset as well.

A big caveat here is that many US companies (particularly in sensitive industries, like defense) will likely not want to (or not be allowed to) use Chinese models for anything of substance.

Not sure if this is still applicable today. afaik the wealthiest borrow extensively (despite not needing to) because of the myriad benefits and tax wizardry they're able to benefit from as a result.

Most investors are focused on multiplying their investment many times over, and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in net income a year is not big enough.

And this is one reason why the world is burning (literally and figuratively).

Code doesn't need to be novel to be useful. There's a reason why design patterns are a thing in software.

There are widespread reports about how foreign actors (not limited to China) have infiltrated critical networks across many industries in the US en masse and are simply waiting for the right time to exploit them. Frontier models are simply another attack vector (and much more easily exploitable when you think about it).

The fact is that there is potential for this with any cloud-hosted model, whether it is intentional by the actual company building the models or a malicious actor is able to exploit a vulnerability.

Collectively we should really be getting angry with wealth inequality but those with wealth stir up any number of other issues (e.g. race, religion, gender, etc) in order to divert attention from them continuing to get richer at our collective expense.