OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

Oh I don’t doubt any of this - it’s just that you don’t usually see the CCP publicly making arguments that they need to sacrifice the long term for the short term. They have a brand for how they public ally justify their decisions, and it’s definitely about the inevitable, long arc of Chinese history of whatever.

> it’s just that you don’t usually see the CCP publicly making arguments that they need to sacrifice the long term for the short term

They do.

These kinds of statements and discussions happen all the time - in Chinese. The "long-termism" trope is largely an English language one because outsiders either severely degrade or severely fawn Chinese policymaking. Additionally, because most outsiders don't speak or understand Chinese, the spectre of China is often used as a rhetorical device to help drive decisionmaking and using "long-termism" is an easy device for that. A similar thing used to be used with Japan in the 1980s and Germany in the 2000s.

And what actually is the long term value of investing tens of billions in (eg.) AGI versus a similar amount in subsidized healthcare expansion in China? Applications based usescases and domain specific usecases of AI/ML have shown the most success from an outcomes perspective for both National Security and Economic usecases.

AI/ML has a lot of value, but a large amount of the promise is unrealistic for the valuations provided in both the US and China. THe issue is in China, an AI bubble bursting risks leaving local and regional governments holding the bag like during the real estate crisis because the vast majority of capital deployed in subsidizes came from regional and local government's budgets, and takes a large amount of capital away from social service expansion.

For a lot of Chinese leadership, the biggest worry is Japanification, which itself set itself due to the three-way punch of the 1985 Endaka recession, the 1990 Asset Bubble bust, and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Much of China's financial leadership and regulators started their careers managing the blowback of these crises in China during that era or were scholars on them. As such, Chinese regulators are increasingly trying to pop bubbles sooner rather than later especially after the past experiences dealing with the 2015-16 market crash and the Evergrande crisis. Irrational exuberance around AI is increasingly being viewed through that lens as well.

Microsoft gets a lot of its revenue from the sale of licenses and subscriptions for Windows and Office. An unreliable source that gives fast answers to questions tells me that the segments responsible for those two softwares have revenue of about $13 and about 20 billion per quarter respectively.

In contrast, basically no one derives any significant revenue from the sale of licenses or subscriptions for web browsers. As long as Microsoft can modify Chromium to have Microsoft's branding, to nag the user into using Microsoft Copilot and to direct search queries to Bing instead of Google Search, why should Microsoft care about web browsers?

It gets worse. Any browser Microsoft offers needs to work well on almost any web site. These web sites (of which there are 100s of 1000s) in turn are maintained by developers (hi, web devs!) that tend to be eager to embrace any new technology Google puts into Chrome, with the result that Microsoft must responding by putting the same technological capabilities into its own web browser. Note that the same does not hold for Windows: there is no competitor to Microsoft offering a competitor to Windows that is constantly inducing the maintainers of Windows applications to embrace new technologies, requiring Microsoft to incur the expense of applying engineering pressure to Windows to keep up. This suggests to me that maintaining Windows is actually significantly cheaper than it would be to maintain an independent mainstream browser. An independent mainstream browser is probably the most expensive category of software to create and to maintain excepting only foundational AI models.

"Independent" here means "not a fork of Chromium or Firefox". "Mainstream" means "capable of correctly rendering the vast majority of web sites a typical person might want to visit".

The prosecution presents windows 11 as evidence that Microsoft can’t do software. Actually that’s it, that’s the entirety of the case.

The prosecution rests.

1. Yes, we're also talking about ChatGPT's free plan here too.

Ads could fund more quota or bigger models for users who don't wish to pay (and/or just make it more sustainable)

Google will almost certainly be doing this with Gemini, and if ChatGPT can't offer as much it leaves an easy reason for people to switch.

2. It does have ads in the default interface, though they're quite unobtrusive. You might also have a blocker. But yes, I suspect their size allows them to provide it mildly "at a loss" to support their ads elsewhere.