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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
#92Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are the standouts, but the main question for me is, why is this a war? In their own context China has greatly benefitted from this. They shored up their gpu design and manufacturing expertise. If this really is a war, trump is kneecapping the country with his lawlessness and eroding America’s good will. If the world cannot trust China with their data and they cannot trust the U.S. to prov…
There isn't a war today. However China wants Taiwan: war is future option they preparing for - they might or might not go to war but they are clearly preparing. The US is likely to get involved in such a war and I would expect Europe to join in as well.
Don't ask me what Trump is doing though.
Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
#93Back in the dot-com bubble, people started inventing new metrics to "value" dot-com companies that lost money hand over fist. My favorite was "revenue multiples". So instead of a a P/E ratio, it was just a multiple of revenue no matter how much money you lost.
We've invented a new term here too: revenue backlog. OpenAI and Anthropic in particular need to recover probably at least $2 trillion to recoup their capex investments. Now Claude code has had an impact on software engineering but for a lot of AI uses you're just not going to recover $2T on $20/month subscriptions. It reminds me of Twitter trying to dig itself out of a $44B hole and losing half their ad revenue with $8/month blue ticks.
The only commercial product AI sells is labor displacement and the resulting wage suppression. You lay off 10-20% of your staff and nobody is asking for raises. The people left are happyt o still have jobs (and thus a house). They'll work even harder doing unpaid labor of the displaced workers to keep those jobs. That's what OpenAI and Anthropic are selling.
The problem is that if these companies get their way, 10-20% of the population is going to be out-of-work and society is going to fall apart. Data centers are going to be the targets of increased societal desperation and anger as this gets worse.
There was a report this week that roughly 50% of singles in the US aren't dating because they can't afford to [1]. This goes well beyond the well-understood problems of not being able to afford a house let alone start a family. This is a birth rate death spiral in the making.
So, back to OpenAI and Anthropic, the only way they justify their valuations and can make up the "revenue backlog" is if they have a moat. And I don't think that's going to happen. Hardware will get cheaper. Nobody is talking about how the generation of AI hardware will write of trillions in investments for some reason. I don't know why.
But the dark horse here is China. DeepSeek when it was first released (early last year?) was a shot across the bow. We have it and toher models (eg Qwen) that will close the gap with whatever OpenAI and Anthropic produce such that no company will "own" AI in the way that OpenAI and Anthropic need to. In the coming years, China's chipmaking is rapidly closing the EUV gap and Western companies have zero penetration into this market. China doesn't want to be dependent on foreign tech that can be withheld at any moment.
Don't believe me? Just listen to the NVidia CEO say the exact same thing [2][3]. Huang realizes this is such a problem that he's gone on Air Force One to this week's Trump summit in China to try and convince the Chinese to buy NVidia chips.
[1]: https://parade.com/living/nearly-50-of-single-americans-not-...
Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a war in the sense that there's a concern that eventually you hit a singularity and can outsmart others in ways not constrained by human scales. If you make better guns, you're still limited by how many people can carry them. You can't conquer the world just like this. But if someone invents super intelligence, they can dominate new AI research, control global economies, fight much better, and all very quickly.
If anyone actually DOES invent ASI and doesn't share it then EVERYONE ELSE will never stop trying to steal it.
If anyone does invent ASI then everyone else will shortly after even if its entirely independent because all of the players in this space are just making incremental upgrades by throwing more compute at the problem.
There are no magic leaps of true innovation happening anywhere that can't be replicated everywhere.
The only shocking thing about "AI" technology is how ultimately simplistic it all is at a core level.
So the only way the first to have ASI will be able to stop everyone else from having it soon after is if they attempt to use the ASI to proactively murder everyone else.
Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
#95No, 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!"
Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is very much adversarial, and to view it anything but adversarial is to not see the geopolitical reality and the potential national security implications of AI for what they actually are. Moreover, to claim that China is in the lead with local models presupposes that openai and anthropic could not release local models that are better, which is a big assumption. They do not release such models because they have fro…
As someone who happens to have been born in the US and currently lives here, I welcome China winning. I trust them infinitely more than I trust my own government and industry. OpenAI and Anthropic are beholden to the capitalist system they exist under and hence cannot compete on local models. Like you say, they must try to maximize shareholder value. China is unencumbered by that constraint.
What is it about China that makes you trust them more?
Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
#97Article title: “The US is winning the AI Race” Article content: “The US are capitalizing on AI the best” A lot of assumptions there that no one can actually verify as true right now. If commercialization into rent-seeking SaaS landscapes is the endgame, then yeah, the US is winning the AI race. If individualization, local LLMs, and consumer hardware are the endgame, China is winning the AI race. If it’s something ent…
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ah yes, the "deep state." The formless, nebulous, rhetorical tool that is always infinitely liquid enough to fit into or over any container necessary that the user can satisfy their immense personal problems disguised as eternal doomerism.
Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
#98No, 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.
Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
#99There will be no winners in this once the jobs start to disappear. There is no 1:1 with new human-in-the-loop jobs. Its basically in the definition. We go from being the loop to be "in the loop" .. huge difference.
Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its hard not to see that "deep state": group of elite politicians and super-rich, seize more and more power in American society.
Whatever you think about elite politicians and the super-rich, they’re not the “deep state”. The whole idea of the deep state is that it’s part of the state, ie government, so not private citizens, and they’re “deep” ie hidden below the layers of government. Thats the exact opposite of politicians and the ultra rich.
Lol I'm pretty sure the "deep state" just means, "manipulating the levers of power from a place without accountablity/oversight" which covers both these shadowy hidden layers of govt you describe and the shadowy wealthy elites funding and lobbying for whatever. It can be both.