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

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

#301

Post by ericmay »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #284
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…

Corporate america is the past . Momentum is carrying capital out of the country. Pay attention to rate of change.

What source are you using for your claim that capital is flowing out of the country? I'm curious to read more about it.

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

#302

Post by irishcoffee »

nba456_ wrote: post #95
nodja wrote: post #48

No, the US is _leading_ the AI race, but the race isn't over. What's the point of leading the race for 90% of it, if they're gonna slip on their own sweat and fall down by the end? In non metaphorical terms, what's the point of spending billions of dollars rushing to get the best AI tech at all costs, when the competition can distil your progress and catch up in 6-12 months while only spending 1% of what you spent. E…

> No, the US is _leading_ the AI race, but the race isn't over. When someone says their football team is winning in the first half, do you say, "Umm, no, they're leading, not winning!"

I find it very strange that the GP felt the need to correct a difference between leading and winning. If you're at the front of the pack in a race, you are both leading the pack and winning the race.

If your team has more points than the other team, you are both leading the contest and winning the contest.

It is a distinction without a difference.

The elephant in the room, and where the analogy breaks down, is that a race has an end, the finish line. A sports match has a victory condition of some type. Nobody has a damn clue as to the victory condition of this hyperscalar craze. Anyone who says otherwise is incorrect.

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

#303

Post by thinkingtoilet »

mordae wrote: post #277

No, they are not. They are winning because West is forbidden to use Chinese models for anything work-related.

>No, they are not. They are winning

You agree they are winning though, right? China is known for not playing fair, stealing industrial secrets, etc... that reputation matters and it's a good reason why the US is winning. Is the US perfect? No. Does the US play fair? No. Spare me the whataboutism in the comments. The bottom line is most people think the US is a safer bet and that's why we're winning. I personally wouldn't trust either government, but if I had to choose, I feel like I at least have a chance at secrecy and due process with the US. Obviously that is being eroded day by day, but you literally have no due process in China.

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

#304

Post by akrylov »

SwellJoe wrote: post #229

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. Copil…

>> And, yet, the US AI companies are not actually making a profit, right?

I think they already, actually making profits especially Antropic. But think how important it's from a business standpoint - the entire software stack from OS to Databases to browsers will be rewritten in the near future, for a company such as Oracle or IBM it means their bread and butter/cash cow can be replaced. It's worth almost any kind of Capex. And from Washington standpoint it's more important than F-35 program or even Apollo mission.

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

#305

Post by mariopt »

mordae wrote: post #277

No, they are not. They are winning because West is forbidden to use Chinese models for anything work-related.

True, many people don't know GLM 5.1 and Kimi 2.6, really on par with frontier models. There's also Minimax 2.7, DeepSeek 4, Qwen, Xiaomi 2.5 Pro, etc.

China is leading in open source frontier models, so I don't really see how the US wins this one. At some point, companies and people will start running their own models in the cloud and locally, Chinese models will be everywhere.

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

#306

Post by nradov »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #290
nradov wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those guys are all on the same private group chats.

Why would Mark Cuban be in those group chats? He was never based in Silicon Valley, and the closest he got was selling a website to Yahoo in 1999. After that, he has mainly sold sports and his media personality for TV shows. Moreover, why would leaders of trillion dollar big tech companies subject to myriad securities laws be discussing intimate business details with random people that have no domain expertise or inf…

I don't know why. You'll have to ask the chat group administrators. I'm just telling you how things actually work.

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...

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

#307

Post by fragmede »

exe34 wrote: post #297
hx8 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a war because the media says it's a war. The media says it's a war because AI companies are paying them to say it's a war [0]. When AGI comes the threat won't be from which primate turned it on, but from how well AGI is aligned with humanity. All of the war talk is to distract from the alignment problem and instead force investment in hardware infrastructure. [0] https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-b…

Before AGI can choose for itself, it will depend on its creators to decide what it values and how it behaves. We can see how that works whenever grok gets the answer factual.

Elon's basilisk

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

#308

Post by ericmay »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #288
ericmay wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 offeri…

> free iPhone with a mobile plan I get your point but in what sense is that "free"? What mobile plan giving you an iphone doesn't come with explicit debt?

Here's an example from 2025 with a major US carrier - Verizon: https://tech.yahoo.com/phones/deals/articles/want-free-iphon...

They run various schemes like this all the time, you can also trade in your existing phone a lot of times for pretty favorable terms. I've traded in phones that were a few years old and gotten $1000+ for them, especially when switching providers.

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

#309

Post by eskibars »

jxf wrote: post #286
mordae wrote: post #277

No, they are not. They are winning because West is forbidden to use Chinese models for anything work-related.

My understanding is that it's not that the _models_ are banned, but rather the _platform_ is banned. It is acceptable to host, say, `deepseek-r1-distill-qwen-7b` and run it yourself, for example. It is not acceptable (to the authors of these bans) to download the DeepSeek app and run it on your work device.

I just left a job for a German B2B software company which sold primarily to large automotive, defense, and aerospace companies. Several of our customers specifically banned anything with the word "DeepSeek" -- hosted or self-hosted.

There's still a lot of naivety on what the difference is between models and platforms, and its easier for a lot of these big companies to just make a blanket statement like "nothing DeepSeek" than for their procurement teams to try to understand and negotiate with each vendor. They don't see the potential benefit over the potential risk of somebody misinterpreting or getting it wrong, so they outright ban it.

Most people that approve or buy software simply also just don't understand how models are being trained or if it's possible/how far a model could go to "introduce backdoors." A backdoor could be, from a business perspective, a model which has been trained to give answers that could hurt western business in a "strict text mode" or produces payloads in a programmatic mode that are intentionally trained to introduce software vulnerabilities.

Anyone can make arguments against these for a variety of reasons (looking at the transparency of both sides and comparing, etc) but for many reasons today and for better or worse, many Chinese models are being banned on big software contracts, which gets back to the title of the article

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

#310

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

chromacity wrote: post #300

I continue to be impressed by our collective willingness to engage with obvious AI slop, as long as it also talks about AI. Sincere question for any of the nearly 300 folks seem to be arguing about the article: why? The author couldn't be bothered to present their case, so they probably don't care about our opinion. They just want traffic and search ranking with the least amount of effort. The community is literally…

This is HN equivalent of pretty girls changing clothes on TikTok. You would learn more about AI from reading a cereal box than this blog.
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