The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization • Hacker News Board

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#221

Post by zozbot234 » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #98

Jamesbeam wrote: post #76

No, it’s not. It’s all about adoption and the bigger picture. The US is an untrustworthy, isolated island in the AI future if you vote another idiot into office in a few years. If you’ll still be able to vote at all, that is. The largest part of the world is not the US. The cutting-edge US models are way too expensive for most parts of the world, and that also shows in adoption. China is building an ecosystem of open…

> While most of the US AI sphere will collapse under the pressure of making profits I think deep down, sama knows this and that's why he's pushing for "Universal Basic Compute", which really means forcing every US citizen to become an OpenAI subscriber.

That's nothing new, we had BASIC computers back in the 1980s.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#222

Post by 127 » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

lorecore wrote: post #164

46493168 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it about China that makes you trust them more?

They're far less imperialistic and I view them as better global citizens than the US. I think they've cultivated a much richer culture than the US as well.

You should read about the difference between a land empire and a sea empire.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#223

Post by ericmay » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #184

ericmay wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ? Claude, ChatGPT, etc are heinously expensive for tiny benefits lmao. Local + efficient is clearly the future Corporate America is where the money is, and corporate America will dictate what products are successful by virtue of spend. Individuals aren't going to be paying $100s or $1000s/month en masse for these models but businesses will be. Being local and efficient isn't that important at this stage but even so…

> You buy an iPhone even though the cheap-o Wal-Mart Android phone for $100 "does the same thing". People buy iPhones because of status signalling and network effects, neither of which appears to apply to AI model choice. LLMs are already rapidly on the way to being interchangeable commodities.

No they don't, it's not 2008. Anybody off the street can get an iPhone or a free iPhone with a mobile plan. They're commodity products. Even homeless people have them.

To the extent LLMs are commodity products you're right (so far), but that is limited to the main model providers, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, &c. with interoperability on cloud platform providers and other technology providers like an Apple offering you a choice of LLM with Siri or something.

If you want to suggest that some other model is in the same bucket as those primary 3, it goes back to the crappy, cheap phone analogy which is accurate. Yea you can make calls with it, but you make calls better with an iPhone.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#224

Post by riazrizvi » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

Ppl don't understand Commercialization is not incidental to the Western system, it's why we beat out Communism. Commercialization incentivizes ppl to build, bc ownership and control.

The FSF was not an attack on commercialization, it was about giving users more freedom with their own copy.

AI commercialization is why we will always be a few steps ahead in AI.

The Chinese and Russians are free to join us. It's a pickup game.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#225

Post by logicchains » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #138

SubiculumCode wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a lot of rationalization to me. China is pursuing these because they cannot compete on the frontier. Yes, there is a possibility that all that compute is not needed, but it is a rather remote possibility, and there is no doubt that, given the choice, China would be pursuing frontier model building with closed, propietary-only offerings.

All that compute is not needed. We have an existence proof from biology in the form of natural intelligence that much greater efficiency is possible. However, achieving dramatic improvements in compute efficiency will depend on unpredictable scientific breakthroughs. Personally I suspect that an entirely new hardware architecture will be needed, although I don't have any hard evidence to back that up.

>We have an existence proof from biology in the form of natural intelligence that much greater efficiency is possible.

It's only a proof that it's possible with 18+ years of training.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#226

Post by elteto » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

LucidLynx wrote: post #192

The winner in the long term will be the one that will deliver the best performance and low-memory ratio for local models. Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral are just companies that are making money right now (still not profitable), but will lost their tractions and values in the long term. However, I am more appealing to see how OpenCode Go subscriptions will go in the future: cheaper than big techs, more tokens, and they…

Local models will never compete with large SOTA models, in the same way an iPhone doesn't compete with supercomputers doing nuclear simulations.

They paths will differentiate and split. Probably SOTA models will eventually be locked down and only accessible to state actors because of how expensive they will be to run (already started with Mythos).

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#227

Post by MostlyStable » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

RealityVoid wrote: post #204

Havoc wrote: post #169

Inclined to disagree. The winner here will be whoever can move atoms with AI not take notes at the daily standup. i.e. Think boston dynamics vs unitree They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify.

We are _miles_ behind successful embodied AI. The demos are cool but the success rates are not high enough. You can tell we're on the cusp when level 5 self driving cars are common an you have multiple companies deploying them on the street. Google is doing great work but the poured TONS of effort into it and the thing still needs intense stacks of perception and processing. Much more than I've seen any humanoids pou…

I'm really curious how quickly we would have huge numbers of L5 SDV if we societally accepted ~equal rates of injury and death, both of passengers and pedestrians. I want to be very clear, I'm not advocating for this (and even if I was, I haven't the faintest idea how one would go about getting society more broadly to go along), but part of me thinks that the primary hold up isn't actually capacity but instead standards.

This doesn't really argue against your point, because the standards are what they are, and like I said, I have no idea how one would go about changing them if one even decided they wanted to. And given what they are, it has taken, as you point out, enormous amounts of effort to reach those standards in a practical way.

That all being said, while I agree that SDV's are in many respects easier than other robotics tasks, they are also somewhat uniquely dangerous. Other categories of task, while potentially more complicated, won't have to worry nearly so much about safety, and so may be operating under a different constraint regime. I think this means that we may see adoption happen at a much more accelerated rate than we have seen in the automotive space.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#228

Post by rtkwe » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #220

Havoc wrote: post #169

Inclined to disagree. The winner here will be whoever can move atoms with AI not take notes at the daily standup. i.e. Think boston dynamics vs unitree They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify.

> They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify. Why would an American company outsource manufacturing to China if the labor cost is the same in both places? The entire reason the Chinese manufacturing base exists is to exploit cheap labor. What would be the point of shipping products across the ocean?

Labor is not the only cost in that equation though, there's business regulations, the cost of the operators/repair that troubleshoot and repair the bots when they break, etc. a lot of which could be cheaper still than the price of a container on a slow ship from China.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#229

Post by SwellJoe » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

And, yet, the US AI companies are not actually making a profit, right? They're selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume (or lock in some kind of monopoly position, in a currently non-sticky product). We're all currently enjoying investor-subsidized tokens from the big guys, and that pushes out the reckoning for US AI. But, I think they're beginning to think maybe they need to ring the cash register. Copilot dramatically reducing usage limits and what models are available on its plans, Anthropic playing games with what's included in the Pro plan, etc. I think they're starting to feel the bleeding.

Not only is the investment that keeps US AI companies flying high slowing, I suspect in two or three years, we'll all mostly be using open models and the people making money will be the hardware manufacturers. Even the small models will keep getting more capable. I'd guess a model you can run on a high end, but not outrageously overbuilt, developer desktop or laptop (something like 128GB of unified RAM), will be competitive with the current frontier when it's allowed to search the web and do research and write test code. You can't fit as much knowledge in a small model (80GB of weights can't store the world's knowledge), but I don't have the world's knowledge in my head, either, and yet I can figure out most problems with a little googling and experimentation. The reasoning and tool use abilities of smaller models is where the gap is closing, and that's what will make the huge models obsolete for huge classes of problem.

Already, there are many classes of problem that the easily self-hostable Qwen 3.6 27B can solve that required a frontier model a year ago. When the self-hosted options reach Opus 4.5-ish levels of capability, the argument for paying for tokens for most work begins to look a lot less compelling. And, looking forward, 1.58 bit models are coming. Incredible intelligence density, and still a lot of improvements happening.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#230

Post by Our_Benefactors » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #151

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, frontier model providers don’t take your feelings into account even a little bit. It’s totally irrelevant to the discussion about the service they can provide, because that service is predicated on access to high power GPU slices that local models can’t touch. Those providers won’t be in an existential crisis because some people choose the privacy route, it’s a cost of doing business.

Right but that service being sold is predicated on products being sold to users, yes? Or are we still pretending that the hyperscalers can just pass the same $20 billion between themselves and that's going to be a growth industry forever?

If we are betting on which is an easier sale, $20-100 a month w/tech support included vs $5k-10k and a requirement for moderate technical ability, I would invest in the former not the latter being the proposition that drives the conversation about AI use.