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

Maybe I'm not doing capitalism right, but isn't it supposed to be "The one who profits the most wins"? If you win by just spending, I think you need to adjust the parameters of your capitalistic market.

GLM, Kimi, MiMo, Minimax, Deepseek, Qwen would like to have a word. :)

The whole "race" narrative is silly. It is all built on the assumption that one country (corporation, actually) somehow creates AGI and thus, essentially, the singularity. Great for raising VC, apparently, but at its core this is magical thinking.

Even if any of the US corporations would eventually end up in a scenario where their revenue is at least as high as their inference cost, what harm would that do to the other contenders? It's not as if there is any kind of network effect here that would exlude them from market participation.

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.

I don't think so. From a nation state perspective, AI is a munition. Every advanced nation is going to have their own cyber division with their own AI hosted within its borders. Considering how xenophobic and belligerent the US is, nobody is going to want their national cyber defenses hosted in the US.

On a personal level, I simply do not trust the US anymore. I won't host any of my personal data in a US company. I don't want the US govt invading my personal privacy, and their corporations are constantly leaking and selling private data. I consider US to be rapidly approaching complete autocracy (on par with China) so US-hosted AI is a non-starter. And let's not forget local inference keeps getting more efficient, with higher context and TPS in the same amount of RAM. Within a year even small consumer machines will run local models good enough for basic coding, and in 3 years RAM prices will lower and everyone will be able to afford a decent rig.

Finally, open weight models are now good enough for daily work. They may never be as good as SOTA (SOTA will just keep increasing indefinitely), but that doesn't matter; my car may not be as fast as a Porsche but it still gets me to the grocery store and back. So I use non-US hosted model providers which provide open weights, which are both significantly cheaper than Anthropic/OpenAI, and actually allow me to use my subscriptions without a moat.

But yes, Anthropic/OpenAI are absolutely the new Oracle. They will win for US govt and Enterprise contracts. But that's far from the only users of AI.