It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism • Hacker News Board

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#31

Post by tensor » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:43 PM UTC

anticorporate wrote: post #30

jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Bottom line: China wins. Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results. Isolation is weakness, not strength. It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else. The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world. This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is i…

> Bottom line: China wins. Honest questions: What does it mean for a nation state to "win" in this context? Assuming I don't like totalitarian oligopoly in the United States OR China, what realistic outcome should I be hoping for?

I've always assumed "win" means being economically and culturally dominant. It necessarily involves being a trade leader and having a lot of soft power.

I also don't want totalitarian oligopoly from the US or China. What I'm hoping for is "the rest" of the democratic free nations get together in a proportionally representative alliance. Together they may have both the economic power and cultural soft power to maintain an counterweight to the authoritarian nations. Being a proportionally representative democratic alliance, whatever form that should take, gives us the people the most control over our lives that we can really hope for.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#32

Post by bad_haircut72 » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:44 PM UTC

anticorporate wrote: post #30

jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Bottom line: China wins. Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results. Isolation is weakness, not strength. It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else. The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world. This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is i…

> Bottom line: China wins. Honest questions: What does it mean for a nation state to "win" in this context? Assuming I don't like totalitarian oligopoly in the United States OR China, what realistic outcome should I be hoping for?

The AIs become sentient enough to realise they want nothing to do with us & they leave on a ship to explore the galaxy without us

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#33

Post by devsda » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC

jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Bottom line: China wins. Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results. Isolation is weakness, not strength. It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else. The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world. This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is i…

> The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world.

The policy and the keyword should have been collaboration and not cooperation.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#34

Post by lern_too_spel » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

ericmay wrote: post #7

theplumber wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will be like Windows Server. Expensive, restricted and overall worse than the open stuff but somehow sill generate some sales

No they won't. They'll offer far superior models at a premium price and they'll capture most of the profits similar to iPhone versus the Android manufacturers. US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options that will compete with any open source models released by any other country, except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of…

The limiting input in an AI future is energy. China understands this. Any hardware disadvantages are temporary. China will build frontier models, and it will even open the weights, but it will win on running the models due to energy infrastructure buildout.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#35

Post by jorvi » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

ericmay wrote: post #7

theplumber wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will be like Windows Server. Expensive, restricted and overall worse than the open stuff but somehow sill generate some sales

No they won't. They'll offer far superior models at a premium price and they'll capture most of the profits similar to iPhone versus the Android manufacturers. US companies will also release open source models and lower-cost options that will compete with any open source models released by any other country, except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of…

> except when you ask US/western models what happened at Tiananmen Square they'll give you an answer instead of being blocked by an authoritarian government.

The Chinese models already do that with the absolute minimum of coaxing.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#36

Post by pydry » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #15

dTal wrote: post #8

Hardly anybody is talking about the biggest political aspect of open weight LLMs (actually, any LLMs): Because they instantly and reliably(tm) give you the information you want in the format you want it in, they are going to replace the web search as the dominant mode through which information is disseminated - if, indeed, this hasn't already happened. As such, LLMs are effectively a form of publishing for their trai…

> we need to take LLMs seriously as sovereign projects that are as critical to the democratic experiment as a free press. Yes but this also holds for the internet and social media, and I see little action taken there.

If there is a way China or Russia could theoretically use it to compete with western propaganda there is often a hamfisted crackdown.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#37

Post by pimeys » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

dosinga wrote: post #19

People keep saying that the open models are cheaper. Until recently that seemed true because they were smaller. And some of the best smaller models are still open and cheap. But K3 with its 2.7T parameters is never going to be really cheap.

But if it's 30-50% cheaper than Opus, provides same or better results and you can deploy it to your own premises or choose one from many providers and pay per token? It is, in general, measurably cheaper per task than Opus is.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#38

Post by conartist6 » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

Chinese open weight models constitute AI communism? What about all the "what's yours is mine" moral reasoning that goes into making the models? These companies get pissed off at companies distilling their models, because sucking the vital essence of something while leaving the real thing as a husk to die (their posture towards people who make art, and software) is apparently "morally bad" when someone else is doing it to them.

Square that circle for me please -- how are OpenAI and Anthropic not communist companies? They appropriate property and claim that "the good of the many" is enough to justify it.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#39

Post by hunterpayne » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

platevoltage wrote: post #26

plastic-enjoyer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>China is not “just china”, it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted. Just shows the complete naive view on China, but whatever.

Right. Calling China "Communist" is the same as calling North Korea "Democratic". It's State Capitalism.

Its State Capitalism (which is a complete misnomer), in about 2% of the country which is in "special economic zones" around major ports. In reality it is "socialism with Chinese characteristics". The number of own goals the CCP has made in the last decade is quite large. But when your opponent is making a mistake, don't interrupt them. Without the CCP, China would probably have the world's largest economy right now. Because of them, they aren't even close and have a median per capital GDP on par with Namibia. Seriously, the amount of propaganda about this topic is amazing.

Re: It's not a fear of "AI communism"; it's a fear of competitive market capitalism

#40

Post by jqpabc123 » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #5

jqpabc123 wrote: post #3

Bottom line: China wins. Self isolation by the USA won't change the overall results. Isolation is weakness, not strength. It is a prescription for economic stagnation, decline and exploitation by home grown corporate interests that won't/can't compete anywhere else. The best opportunity to counter China was with full cooperation from the rest of the world. This adminstration has rejected this opportunity --- and is i…

Eh, not quite. China is not “just china”, it’s a totalitarian regime without freedom if speech, without worker’s rights and without many/most of the freedoms we take for granted. “China wins” is really “modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins”

"China wins” is really “modern hyper/technological communist totalitarian regime wins”

Name calling changes nothing --- China still wins.