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

https://avkcode.github.io/blog/us-winning-ai-race.html

by akrylov • 2 months ago

241 663 2 months ago

avkcode.github.io

One interesting thing that Anthropic did was putting their stack on the various cloud providers, I wonder if they'll put it on GCP and Azure next since they've put it into AWS first at a level we have not seen a major AI provider do to date. Your company can have their own Claude stack just like an ELK stack on your cloud, if they can do this for both Azure and GCP then OpenAI has to really catch up.

In my eyes I would rather use the AI I can run on my own paid infrastructure, so if there's an outage its isolated, or I could potentially have a different region / DC to fallback on.

I'm still surprised that neither Microsoft nor Amazon have made their own models available on their cloud offerings. I guess Microsoft probably does have Phi on there, but it's not front and center, especially with something like Copilot for Devs (seriously Microsoft rebrand that damn thing to be clear what you mean by Copilot!) where they could use the cheaper compute by using something like Phi.

NitpickLawyer2• 2 months ago

Claude is already on Vertex - https://docs.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/p...

giancarlostoro2• 2 months ago

Is Vertex hosting it themselves on their own hardware? Because GCP, Azure and AWS all host it on their own hardware, but AWS lets you do everything that Claude lets you do if you use their APIs directly, and then some. This is what I want to see on Azure and GCP, and heck, maybe even DigitalOcean, if they ever stop expanding into so many spaces and focus on improving their current infrastructure, before I fully migrate off of them.

mark_l_watson• 2 months ago

yes, and Claude is available on Google AntiGravity with some paid accounts.

SubiculumCode15• 2 months ago

The recent deal with SpaceX AI to use their severely underutilized GPU compute is pretty telling to me. Being able to roll out compute is a hardware problem, rolling out good models needs more than compute, it needs good AI engineers. SpaceX, Amazon et al can do hardware very well. AI engineering, maybe not so much.

nl4• 2 months ago

Claude is available on Azure and GCP already.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-anthropic...

https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platfo...

Claude has been available on AWS Bedrock for a long time too.

The new "Claude Platform" announcement was about an Anthropic operated version on AWS (as opposed to self-operated on Bedrock). See the differences here: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/claude...

In my eyes I would rather use the AI I can run on my own paid infrastructure,

Claude has been available like that for quite a while.

One of the reasons for the OpenAI divorce from MS was so they could become available on AWS where they see significant demand, and being available only on Azure was holding them back.

boxed2• 2 months ago

Hopefully it's a race worth winning and not a race to global disaster.

nba456_2• 2 months ago

Even if it leads to global disaster, you'd rather be the country with the best AI. You won't be saved just because your AI is worse.

tsunamifury2• 2 months ago

This is a false dilemma created by the model companies to try to convince us we must invest or else.

embedding-shape3• 2 months ago

Even if it leads to global disaster, you'd rather be the country with the best AI

Depends no? If the "Best AI" means "The AI decides when you wake up, go to work, and go to bed", then I probably want to live in the country with the worst AI or even without.

If it instead means "UBI and healthcare for everyone, money lost all meaning and we're all just having fun while AI does all the boring stuff" then yes. But since capitalism still exists, that's a pipe-dream, and "Best AI" won't lead to that for the average person, only for the 0.1%.

boxed2• 2 months ago

No it doesn't. It just means you'll be eaten and turned into paperclips first.

axblount• 2 months ago

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much"

ConceitedCode• 2 months ago

I feel like the much simpler explanation is that the US is winning because it's dumping the most money into it. By a very large margin.

titzer• 2 months ago

...printing the most money into it. The circular IOUs amongst the AI and hyperscalars are a form of debt, i.e. money creation. Don't get me wrong, a whole lot of other dollars are going in too, but investing money that doesn't exist is a massive risk always.

embedding-shape3• 2 months ago

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.

pzo• 2 months ago

There is a reason in capitalism we have anti-monopoly law or preventing dumping prices because those often leads to monopoly. So yes for sure you can kill your competition by just dumping money and loosing profits.

brabel4• 2 months ago

I don't get it either, but it seems to me a bit similar to how the US, if you look at market value of car companies, has utterly crushed Europe and Japan (with China surging ahead of those and maybe threatening the US soon), which to me sounds crazy (I still think of German cars as the top of the bunch).

According to Google (AI summary, no idea if it's 100% right but from what I've seen elsewhere it seems right):

Top Car Companies by Market Value (May 2026):

- Tesla ($1.3T - $1.56T): Retains market leadership with a valuation often exceeding the next several largest competitors combined.

- Toyota ($259B - $317B): Largest traditional automaker by market cap and unit sales.

- BYD ($122B - $126B): Strong market position as a Chinese electric vehicle leader.

- Xiaomi ($119B - $135B): High valuation following its entry into the smart EV market.

- General Motors ($69B - $75B): Leading traditional U.S. manufacturer, competing with Hyundai and BMW for top 10 spots.

- Ferrari ($\approx\$60B-\$68B$): Maintains high value due to luxury branding.

- BMW / Mercedes-Benz / Volkswagen ($\approx\$58B-\$64B$ each): German luxury and traditional automakers facing high competition.

- Ford ($\approx\$47B-\$54B$): Remains a major player with significant US market share.

So, essentially, Tesla alone is somehow worth more than all European companies combined??!

Except that by sales volumes, the top companies are exactly the ones you'd expect: Volkswagen ($350B) and Toyota ($315B) at the top, far ahead of anyone else... Tesla is around the 7th place with just $95B. Does the financial markets still expect them to far out-earn Volkswagen and Toyota any time soon, we've been waiting for like a decade already??

Gemini says that by country, the car companies revenues are:

* Germany - ~ $600B

* Japan - ~ $520B

* USA - ~ $470B

* China - ~ $250B

How does that even make any sense?

greesil• 2 months ago

The whole country? Really?

thepasch• 2 months ago

Article 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 entirely different - if LLMs are the wall and research is what grants the next breakthrough, or if compute and memory requirements take a dive, or whatever; then we have no idea who’s winning the race because that stuff is mostly happening behind closed doors.

SubiculumCode15• 2 months ago

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.

cyberge99• 2 months ago

Forgive me if this is a naive assumption, but wouldn’t large language models be fundamentally different for a language that is largely symbols? Again, my understanding of Mandarin is limited if it exists at all.

throwaway274487• 2 months ago

China is pursuing these because they cannot compete on the frontier.

? Claude, ChatGPT, etc are heinously expensive for tiny benefits lmao. Local + efficient is clearly the future

YetAnotherNick2• 2 months ago

Well China is consistently 6 months behind the frontier labs(possibly because they can they harvest data from released frontier models). If the scaling continues, US will win, but if not then China will win as the models will converge.

Matl• 2 months ago

I dunno, DeepSeek v4 Pro is rather on par as far as I can tell, maybe not with 5.5 Pro in all areas quite yet, but close.

I think China is thinking more about the application layer on top of models as going to matter more than the models themselves, so they don't need to gatekeep the models as much.

nradov7• 2 months ago

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.

seanmcdirmid2• 2 months ago

China is competing in value AI because they cannot work at the frontier, but how is this bad at all? It’s like how the USA has the best drones but they are a few million dollars apiece while China has DJI.

If China could work at the frontier, I don’t know, I kind of think they would still be dumping a lot of resources into exploring the value side since they have that culture already in place.

m3kw9• 2 months ago

even without any of that anyone you ask who's used AI to any professional degree will agree US is winning AI race right now. Future, who knows

zozbot2346• 2 months ago

"AI in the datacenter" and "AI on local consumer hardware" will eventually be two separate niches with entirely different capabilities, at least if scaling laws continue unchanged and there's no near-term inherent limit to AI smarts. The real point of the datacenter is to be able to do datacenter-scale things. But you don't need that kind of vast compute to run even the largest open models today: on prem hardware can do it easily especially if you're OK with a somewhat delayed response.

pj_mukh2• 2 months ago

Yes, and it's doing so primarily because of immigrant nerds, H1B's and F1 bros who chose America and may not have this avenue in the future. Potentially, making this the last race USA wins.

akrylov9• 2 months ago

It's a myth. IBM, Xerox, HP, DEC was innovating long before H1B's.

pj_mukh2• 2 months ago

There is nothing in the H1B program that makes these immigrants different from the immigrants that ran IBM, Xerox and HP. Other than the country of origin of course.

mikece• 2 months ago

I feel like the title of this post should have "for now" appended.

epolanski• 2 months ago

Of course US has a huge head start, but if AI keeps growing, what matters is how the market's gonna look like years from now.

Most of my clients using AI in the business workflows (in products) use Chinese LLMs, because after benchmarking for a specific use case you nearly always end up finding that you pay half or a tenth.

That's not a new phenomenon. I've adapted Gemini Flash 2.5 years and years ago when people were dissing it as "crap", yet it was the best budget and quality fit for the task I had at hand back then (translating and summarizing tons of documents). It was both faster and around 100 times cheaper than the best GPT 4 model available.

Needless to say, medium-sized Chinese models are far better than those LLMs and a perfect fit for countless applications.

doph2• 2 months ago

Even with all the Qwens and Kimis and GLMs etc, the latest Gemini Flash models are still an insane value! I recently settled on 3.1 Flash Lite after testing basically everything on offer on OpenRouter, and it was not a close call - cheaper, faster, and better (for translation and visual understanding tasks).

rhubarbtree4• 2 months ago

It’s interesting to see short term business interests again undermining American sovereignty.

Just as business exported strategically critical manufacturing to China, now it is helping funding China’s race to take over the US in AI and beyond.

Lesson is pure free trade doesn’t work if (a) not everyone is playing by the same rules and (b) the trading territories are or may become opposed.

American economic policy gave the world an authoritarian super power and Trump. Not a great track record.

ericmay13• 2 months ago

Why though? That could be true of any economic condition. Imagine if any time there was a race or competition in which one group is winning you had to just say "for now".

Michael Phelps is winning the race! ... for now

China is winning the EV race ... for now

It doesn't seem to add value to me, aside from being an opportunity to, as is the time-honored tradition of the haters, to sow doubt and create negative energy to anything related to American success.

1a527dd5• 2 months ago

I mean you can argue the same about Telsa, but look at BYD now.

Just because you are first to do x, doesn't mean you are going to be the winner.

jryio• 2 months ago

I'm glad we went to space, truly. Racing the USSR might have been the wrong reason but it got us there. We've benefited immensely as a species from exploring the solar system and looking deep into the universe.

I'm not certain that racing China in AI is the right reason but it might get us... somewhere.

worik• 2 months ago

It is good for China.

diego_moita• 2 months ago

Winning the AI Race

Which one of them all?

If you mean "building models that are very good at coding and as substitutes for search engines", then yeah, sure.

But if you mean: "applying AI to industrial applications and robotics", then China is far ahead: https://time.com/7382151/china-dominates-the-physical-ai-rac...

krzyk• 2 months ago

This sounds like an ad for US than anything else.

Does any of the US companies earn money on LLMs? No, they bleed money. Github Copilot is switching to token based pricing, which will be costlier than hiring juniors.

Anthropic also is switching enterprises to token based pricing from their subscription one.

From the big three only Codex is still in somekind of subscription pricing, but they'll shift eventually (usage limits are a kind of that, but they have them less stricter than Claude ones)

There is one winner in this race - China. Trump with his agendas and wars makes it even more likely that China will lead this new market.

xnx• 2 months ago

Does any of the US companies earn money on LLMs?

Inference? Yes.

Infrastructure build and training? Not yet.

lorecore6• 2 months ago

It’s certainly too early to call (if you must view this as some sort of adversarial competition). The US is behind on local models, the future for anyone who cares about privacy. There may be step change innovation yet to come that completely shifts the landscape. There’s basically no switching costs to users to change models. They have no lock-in.

SubiculumCode15• 2 months ago

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 frontier-grade propietary models that have high value.

lorecore6• 2 months ago

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.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm• 2 months ago

so much winning https://layoffs.fyi/

tsunamifury2• 2 months ago

As an American, we may be winning this race but we are still struggling to define why this is the race to win.

The cost of winning this race has been telling our citizen s we will replace them with robots and there is no hope for their children’s future employment.

The cost has been destroying trust as we tell citizens water and power should go to server farms and not them.

The cost has been naked power telling democracy it’s wrong and dying

I think when we discover the limits of LLM tech and tally its benefits over its cost — we may regret this win.

But don’t let me contradict a bunch of fake techno oligarchs wrapping themselves in war like patriotism to get the investments they need to keep this going.

akrylov9• 2 months ago

The goal is global domination as always, unfortunately. DARPA and the Pentagon helped create the Internet, and Silicon Valley later turned it into a major commercial success.

SubiculumCode15• 2 months ago

Likewise, the goal is to not get globally dominated by China. You cannot point to one without the other. It's not like the U.S. is the only country that values national security and geopolitical power.

testfrequency• 2 months ago

How about the obesity and fall of democracy race?

hansmayer• 2 months ago

What does the term "AI race" even mean, beyond wooing clueless VCs and soon retail investors ? It's not like the LLMs are some super-secret technology. Any economy willing to sink in copious amounts of money and resources can get it to some level - the question, what's the actual payoff? We have yet to see anything really useful, on the level of step change, besides Johnny who can now spin up demo projects quicker.

SubiculumCode15• 2 months ago

Not if they cannot get the GPUs.

mekdoonggi2• 2 months ago

If China can't get the GPU's they'll build them. If they can't build them they'll smuggle them, and either way, eventually they will take over Taiwan, and then the US will be wondering what they can cook with leftovers.

Igrom• 2 months ago

Flagged for AI content: I hope this submission dies and the user is penalized (look at their submission and comment history!), because IMO the article does not belong on the front page. Quick polemic:

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

If you ask me, one could name different criteria for winning, and commercialization would not be the first thing to come to my mind:

https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202604/15/content_WS69df29e6...

https://fortune.com/2026/05/03/chinese-court-layoffs-workers...

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-moves-regulate-dig...

It also owns platforms that generate and organize the data of the AI age. YouTube is a video corpus. Google Drive and Microsoft 365 sit inside daily office work. GitHub sits inside software development.

Yeah, okay. China does not have any platforms nor data.

yalogin2• 2 months ago

Very good call. I shied away from calling it a terrible article but it is

SubiculumCode15• 2 months ago

There certainly are better articles on this topic that have come out recently.

puelocesar• 2 months ago

Can I block a user to avoid seeing his posts? I noticed front page would be much nicer without guys like OP

Baljhin• 2 months ago

There's a userscript that'll hide users, 'sources' (domains), and titles. The GH repo was deleted, so use the GF link instead:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43282379

ande-mnoc• 2 months ago

Fully AI generated according to Pangram.

Can we have a rule where LLM generated texts require a disclosure or be removed?

Edit: The entire blog seems AI generated. Huh.

embedding-shape3• 2 months ago

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

puke

Yeah, go ahead and run your country into the ground because of hypercapitalism and hypercommercialization, you're almost at the end game now! While the rest of us try to figure out how to actually build societies worthwhile to live in and experience, with healthcare and not waging war on our neighbors.

I don't know how people can seriously publish stuff like this and not feel like they're actively trying to make the world worse. Is money really the single thing y'all can focus on? Is there nothing better in life you can chase, even if it's also a number? So sad to see stuff like this.

hackable_sand2• 2 months ago

They are trapped in the copium den

yalogin2• 2 months ago

Anthropic, 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 provide good reliable service and not turn it into a mafia style negotiation, then winning the AI war is not helping the U.S. countries as much as it potentially can. It’s probably a good thing for more capable areas like Europe which may develop their own tech stack.

In a weird way because the AI stack is so expensive, China helps the world much more than the U.S. with their really capable open source model.

rich_sasha• 2 months ago

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.

akrylov9• 2 months ago

True, I would have preferred benevolent dictator scenario, like with the Internet. But this time around it's different - AI data centers will be protected like embassies.

card_zero• 2 months ago

International goose-chasing competition

"Wild goose race", even.

UltraSane2• 2 months ago

If anyone actually DOES invent ASI and doesn't share it then EVERYONE ELSE will never stop trying to steal it.

Jalad• 2 months ago

But if someone invents super intelligence, they can dominate new AI research, control global economies, fight much better, and all very quickly.

After reading "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" I think this is not the correct take. If anyone creates ASI, it just means it's going to wipe everyone out, and it doesn't matter if China or the US do it first

root_axis• 2 months ago

Hilarious to see people predicting a singularity when 40% of the u.s. economy can barley keep the LLMs online to complete mundane software tasks.

hx83• 2 months ago

I think you need to reevaluate your definition of the singularity. "outsmart others in ways not constrained by human scales" could apply to the enigma machine just as much as Claude. Even an AI beyond human intelligence doesn't automatically qualify as the singularity.

The singularity has to do with the rate of technological development.

jasondigitized3• 2 months ago

With the irony being that a true super intelligence, and least in my definition, would conclude that war and dominance is stupid.

toasty228• 2 months ago

A lot of it is just projections of what the US would do if they had such a tool, I doubt China cares a lot about the US outside of them being a source of commercial revenues. They're on the way up, the US are falling down fast, that's why China lives rent free in the American mind, they can't stand it

rhubarbtree4• 2 months ago

China is trying to undermine the US economy through open source models. If they can down round or bankrupt the model companies, they take down the US.

Currently the US is extremely vulnerable and dependent on China. AI is an important exception, so it’s key for China to destroy that

fullshark• 2 months ago

Down round = the destruction of the United States is ridiculous hyperbole.

dietr1ch• 2 months ago

China is not even trying to destroy the US bet. It's just making sure everyone else has a reason to buy their hardware.

input_sh3• 2 months ago

The US is undermining its own (and everyone else's) economy just fine, no imaginary assistance from China necessary.

The role of the US was always to purchase cheap Chinese hardware, slap some modestly better software on top of it and the rest of the world happily would pay for that as a whole package. But with the US increasingly becoming isolationist, the rest of the world is starting to wonder why do we need the US as a middleman at all, so the US had to invent a whole new reason for the rest of the world to rely on it: AI.

Of course, the problem with this idea is that while everyone was perfectly happy with the previous arrangement, nobody else in the world gives a shit about AI. It's scary, it takes the coolest things we used to enjoy doing and turns into mush, it destroys our local culture by making us all rely on English, everything bad (like layoffs) gets blamed on AI and so on and so on. And when you combine that with the rest of the stupid foreign policy decisions, many would find joy in witnessing the US economy crumble to the ground. Pointing the blame to China instead of to your own reflection in the mirror is just an easier pill to swallow.

kevmo314• 2 months ago

There's a joke in China that Trump is the best president that China has ever had.

tom2026hn4• 2 months ago

Historically, the decline of most nations has been caused by internal problems, civil war or large-scale unrest is sufficient to undermine much of a nation’s strength.

bluGill4• 2 months ago

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.

mghackerlady8• 2 months ago

China going for Taiwan would be the worst geopolitical move of the century, potentially worse than Germany's decision to invade the soviet union. They talk about reunification because it's good propaganda and both sides want it to a degree, but doing it forcefully just isn't something China would realistically do unless they really don't like their path of becoming an international trade and manufacturing hub

cjbgkagh7• 2 months ago

Don’t take China on face value, they have every incentive to promote a grifting military industrial complex in the US while focusing on competing in manufacturing. An actual war would fix a lot of the grifting in the US as it would align interests. Pretending they’ll go to war over Taiwan and not doing it is an effective strategy for undermining the US.

jmyeet2• 2 months ago

So I got curious about the progression of processing power, specifically how long ago did a GPU have equivalent to the latest iPhone chip? The iPhone 17 Pro has the A19 Pro, which has ~2.5 FP32 TFLOPS. The RTX 5090 has ~100 TFLOPS, so a factor of 40. Obviously there are higher end cards than the 5090 and FP32 performance is only one of many metrics so nothing about this is perfect but it is interesting.

The first consumer NVidia GPUs with similar FP32 FLOPS performance were in about 2011-2012 but were expensive. By 2016-2017, the 1060 was a very accessible consumer card with similar performance. So you're looking at about a 10 year lag from best consumer GPUs to a GPU with similar performance to a modern phone.

This is what people are spending trillions on. Put another way, their investment is going to be worthless in 10-15 yyears, absolute max. That's a very short time to recoup trillions in investment.

Obviously this depends on further shrinking and improving chips but I'm old enough to remember that same discussion and it being unknown if the future was XIL or EUV or if both of these would fail. Still, we are getting down to a handful of silicon atoms wide.

But the future here I think will be in interconnects so you don't need ever-bigger chips and you can scale horizontally much more effectively.

Oh and for comparison, the M5 has ~4.2 TFLOPS and the M5 Max has ~18 TFLOPS, for comparison.

As for it being a war, of course it is. That's what the US government does: it protects the interests of US companies and their owners. Look at the history of Bombardier-Boeing or all the atrocities committed in the name of the United Fruit Company, including multiple military coups and the ongoing embargo of Cuba.

US companies want an AI moat. China doesn't, ergo China is the enemy because no moat destroys US tech company value.

chris_money202• 2 months ago

Ehhh, the question comes down to can you cool a chip with ~100 TFLOPs in the size of an Iphone package. Not really as much about the cost of the chip itself or if you can cram it in.

Packing in more transistors, sure probably possible, packing in more transistors while keeping it cool enough to touch? Totally different ballgame

BobbyJo• 2 months ago

So you're looking at about a 10 year lag from best consumer GPUs to a GPU with similar performance to a modern phone.

Two competing viewpoints to this:

1) It is getting harder to make the same performance gains, so maybe that 10 year window grows to 15 or 20.

Put another way, their investment is going to be worthless in 10-15 yyears, absolute max.

2) The value of a GPU is not its flops relative to to other GPUs. Its value is it's output minus it's cost. If the value of its output is stable, or grows, it doesn't really matter if its efficiency relative to the latest and greatest diminishes.

GolfPopper2• 2 months ago

the main question for me is, why is this a war?

It's a war because the hinted promise behind the hype that the first organization to reach some as-yet-entirely-theoretical AGI that can bootstrap itself to godlike capabilities will then Install Planetary Overlord* and rule the world as near-deities themselves, with the rest of the (surviving) human race as their slaves.

I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's the relevant driver.

* Coined by SF auther Charles Stross in The Jennifer Morgue (2006)

hx83• 2 months ago

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-by-openai-and-p...

trhway14• 2 months ago

Planetary Overlord*

AGI is nice, yet not necessary. The orbit filled with Starlink descendants and datacenters will be the it. Anybody else wanting to get there would have to get permission. SpaceX/Musk have all the components for it to happen - from Starship to AI (including the army of robots on the ground). The governmental power/sovereignty of US will be used as a stepping stone (that is the strategy described in the Palantir's Karp's book "Technological Republic") for such global techno-feudal regime establishment.

argomo3• 2 months ago

Not everybody thinks it's nonsensical. Here's a different take:

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...

throwawayqqq11• 2 months ago

I will never comprehend why a godlike deity wouldnt just skip all the wetware bs with us humans and conquer some other celestial body to make paperclips.

baq• 2 months ago

I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's the relevant driver.

Nice to hear from an optimist sometimes, but it’s hard to be one when meat compute substrate can do all those amazing things in a 4U package on 20W and you extrapolate to silicon

Ajedi32• 2 months ago

It doesn't have to be that extreme. Even if rather than "godlike capabilities" it just boosted your economic efficiency by 2x over other nations that would still be a serious geopolitical threat. (I'm not necessarily saying that's a realistic outcome either, but it's certainly more realistic.)

blahblaher• 2 months ago

Because the US cannot imagine anything else. Everything is a War, and the US must always win..

jgord• 2 months ago

it would be nice if they declared War against global climate change.

novanglus• 2 months ago

Normally I'm inclined to agree regarding the mindless chest-beating in this country, but I don't think that makes sense here.

AI genuinely is that big of a deal. If any economic sector deserves this sensationalism, it's this.

ctkhn• 2 months ago

The US needs to start imagining something else. It's hard to think of the last war that the US won.

tenacious_tuna2• 2 months ago

One of my coworkers points out to me every sports reference that pops up in our internal company communications (e.g. "WINNING", "Going to put together a winning team," etc). It seems like everything in the US is couched in competitive language.

HerbManic• 2 months ago

Hairless fire ape must win over other hairless fire ape at all costs!

iv4122• 2 months ago

Unfortunately I believe that that is how the world works - even historically has for centuries - you are either "fighting in the war" or you're left behind.

000000000001• 2 months ago

They shored up their gpu design and manufacturing expertise.

I'm pretty sure they've been exposed for smuggling GPUs into the mainland because they can't ramp up fast enough, only reason we got Deepseek v4 before GTA VI

glitchc• 2 months ago

Maybe not war persay, but certainly a competition.

pickleRick243• 2 months ago

What are "U.S. countries"?

wesselbindt• 2 months ago

I'm guessing they mean US client states, or allies if you want to be polite about it.

0rbiter2• 2 months ago

All the countries on the planet U.S..

elictronic2• 2 months ago

China is playing the card they have. When they control the majority of the resource they use it strategically as well. Cutting off much of the rare Earth market was a recent example.

necovek3• 2 months ago

I believe cutting off of rare Earth materials was both in response to a restriction US imposed first, and also reciprocal: limited only to the US itself.

jongjong• 2 months ago

Good that the US looks after its own interests but I think the line should be drawn before the sabotaging of other countries' economies. That strategy that cannot continue because Americans recognize it for what it is and that will create a toxic guilt and corruption culture which will harm it later like a new, worse version of DEI.

platevoltage• 2 months ago

Sensationalizing the three letter acronyms of the month like "DEI" is the entire reason the guy doing the sabotaging was put into power in the first place. It was a non issue until these people made it one.

rayiner• 2 months ago

The idea that America had “goodwill” in other countries before Trump is laughable. Where? Latin America? Africa? In the Muslim world? We bombed the hell out of all those places long before Trump. This most recent Iran war has generated less outrage in the Muslim world than the war against Iraq 20 years ago.

American foreign policy since the 1950s, fixated on fighting communism and then terrorism, has meddled with so many foreign countries that it’s silly to talk about “goodwill” towards America. That is not to say goodwill matters. Clearly the U.S. has done great without it.

roenxi2• 2 months ago

Although it is worth pointing out that something changed - prior to around 2010 the US had a financially dominant position and the internet was small. So it was feasible to totally ignore opinion in places like Latin America, Africa and the Muslim World.

What we've been seeing in more recent years is that the US can't get away with that so easily. Countries like Iran, China, Russia and India are capable of pushing back both in terms of the raw resources they can bring to bear and also increasingly in the ability to get their propaganda into the US discourse. The US is being manoeuvred into a one-among-equals position in practice and probably in the discourse too which will be a moral shock.

sneak• 2 months ago

The US is a big part of the customer base of the largest manufacturing economy in the world. China's economy blossomed via US and European consumers.

reed1234• 2 months ago

It is not binary

cwnyth• 2 months ago

Did the title get updated? It says 'race', not 'war'.

HackerThemAll• 2 months ago

the main question for me is, why is this a war?

Americans love wars. They must fight wars either literally or figuratively. How are you not seeing this? When I'm sipping my coffee looking at mountains and contemplating chirping birds, they must fight, make billions and destroy the planet along the way.

amelius2• 2 months ago

It's a war because investors want to corner the market. That's what they do, that's what they'll always want.

thenthenthen• 2 months ago

There is active information exchange between US and China (and EU), for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/06/25/i...

This is an article from 1989, but I deem it relevant in what has been discussed during Trumps current visit to China and not only that, but offers some bigger picture views.

kimjune01• 2 months ago

coopetition

usui• 2 months ago

where it matters most: commercialization.

It begs the question because both its premise and assertion are already wrong. Has AI improved the industrial capacity of the US in order to improve the lives of its citizens? No it hasn't. Has AI increased the wealth of its citizens by being able to do laundry or any household task in a generalized way? No it hasn't. The only thing it's really done is make very narrow slices of white-collar work more fungible. In what way has AI been able to address existing shortcomings of the US?

comrade12342• 2 months ago

Amazing. Someone on the internet using 'begs the question' correctly...

mrhottakes2• 2 months ago

Glad I'm not the only one that noticed this.

treis• 2 months ago

AI has definitely improved the industrial capacity of the US

robotpepi• 2 months ago

and of everyone else, right? what service or product is only available to the US? Even with Chinese models lagging behind, the difference in capabilities is not much.

mrhottakes2• 2 months ago

Such as?

hackable_sand2• 2 months ago

What capacity?

How?

bigyabai2• 2 months ago

Computer vision certainly did. But LLMs? That needs citation.

sthwrhstb• 2 months ago

Assertions made without evidence can be rejected without evidence.

t. literally works on AI for industrial applications

vasco• 2 months ago

You better have some sources for declaring that industrial capacity hasn't increased. The Fed reports around 8% penetration of AI in manufacturing already, but in my opinion it's too early for grand declarations like that without data.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/moni...

anonSrEng202309• 2 months ago

... it's too early for grand declarations like that without data.

You mean grand declarations like 'industrial capacity has increased'? Just because AI is present in the factory doesn't mean it's actually increased capacity.

rudedogg• 2 months ago

The Fed reports

Have you happened to purchase anything in the past 12 months, and looked at the Fed's inflation numbers?

magicalist• 2 months ago

The Fed reports around 8% penetration of AI in manufacturing already, but in my opinion it's too early for grand declarations like that without data

Based on a survey if the business uses AI "in any of its business functions". And for all uses of what they consider to be AI, not just LLMs.

DeathArrow• 2 months ago

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

Galanwe3• 2 months ago

This.

I dont know what the benchmarks are supposed to represent, but to me Kimi K2.6 is indistinguishable from e.g Opus 4.6.

abalashov4• 2 months ago

How much would one have to invest in hardware to feasibly run a usefully large Kimi K2.6?

paoliniluis• 2 months ago

Alibaba's cloud is something that the author of this article seems to dismiss. It's being used massively in Asia and they're pretty close in services and offerings to what AWS, GCP and Azure provides. Once they start doing inference on their own custom chips it might be hard to compete with them due to the energy costs

akrylov9• 2 months ago

No, Alibaba is excellent top-5 easily.

bildung• 2 months ago

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.

akrylov9• 2 months ago

No US has been "winning" or rather leading thus far, but there is no guarantees that it will ever "win". I do not subscribe to idea of omnipotent omnipresent AGI. China plays a long game, I think DeepSeek does not engage in platform building on purpose. DeepSeek was probably assigned with a role of a primer lab, the goal is to replace CUDA, align with Huawei chips to do cutting edge research and cross-pollinate other teams in China. They might even hide the best models on purpose. In a long run China will use its industrial capability to apply and use AI better than anyone else. And that would be a good thing for the World.

robthebrew• 2 months ago

This is patently absurd. US AI companies are investing non-existent money on huge infrastructure with negligible income. This cannot be sustained. And if/when it fails it will take down the economy of the US and probably any other country touching us business.

mekdoonggi2• 2 months ago

Almost as if concentrating all of the wealth and decision-making into the hands of a few billionaires is a bad idea...

abalashov4• 2 months ago

They kept telling us Soviet central planning was inefficient and ineffective, while the lean rationality of the free market something something...

0xbadcafebee3• 2 months ago

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.

CMay6• 2 months ago

The US is not xenophobic. That is ridiculous. Any time you say stuff like that, you discredit the things you say that actually make sense. I'm with you on the privacy aspect, but there are multiple dimensions of that which you're ignoring. I'd much prefer taking my chances in the US than in the EU, where they are constantly trying to push companies to weaken privacy.

watwut7• 2 months ago

Europe seems both better capable of sustaining democracy, privacy and rule of law. USA is on verge of being irreversibly done for in all three areas.

It can happen in Europe too, but the full fall is not that close.

0xbadcafebee3• 2 months ago

Europe has way stronger data protection laws than the US. EU has GDPR, strict requirements, large fines. US only has a couple states protecting personal data, with HIPAA for health data, and that's it. We require you to unlock all your devices within 100 miles of a border (inland) so we can look at all your data. Of course our intelligence service also hoovers up the metadata of US citizens in contact with anyone overseas, which is borderline illegal. All our states are now passing "age verification" which is mass surveillance under a different name.

And US absolutely has been xenophobic for years, by official federal policy. I'm really surprised you're not aware of it, but here's a small selection of examples:

- Both our elected and appointed leaders are white nationalists. Our president called all Mexicans murderers and rapists, said African migrants were eating random pets in a rural US town (they weren't, obviously, but it was intended to exacerbate xenophobia)

- Our federal government has a mandate using ICE to try to eject anyone with a Hispanic name from the country (has already deported US citizens based on being hispanic/latino). We even boot people seeing asylum, often exporting them to foreign prisons even if they've never had a criminal record. We have concentration camps now, filled entirely with foreigners, and people who have lived here for decades but were foreigners.

- We stopped accepting new visas from 75 countries. We may even expel you for social media posts we don't like, or for attending a protest that our citizens can attend. We increased travel bans for people from majority Muslim countries. H1-B visas have been rolled back to only the highest paying jobs, and you may need to pay a $15,000 bond. We also now collect and store foreigners' biometric data indefinitely.

- Let's not forget the tariffs on virtually all other nations, to say nothing of "America First" and the new "Greater North America doctrine".

tinfoilhatter• 2 months ago

It's a race straight to the bottom. Anyone who gets excited about being a more efficient and productive corporate wage slave that gets to train their future AI replacement is either a shill or not very intelligent.

jsiepkes• 2 months ago

Trump fits this moment well. He is a salesman at core, and Larry Ellison is too.

Larry just fired 30% of his people at Oracle because, apparently, he is in an immediate need for cash. Because Oracle's early AI bets aren't paying off.

nodja4• 2 months ago

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.

Even in the aspect the article cares about, commercialization, the US is starting to lose marketshare, I've seen people move from cc/codex plans to use glm/opencode plans due to the recent squeeze the US companies put on plan usage, the US companies are screwed if that sticks, not everyone needs the bleeding edge models, they just want to pay $20/month and have the models be decently capable.

JKCalhoun2• 2 months ago

Mark Cuban in a recent interview answered your question: companies are afraid there is going to be just one in the end—sort of the way there is one ad-company now on the internet. They want to be that one.

Whether they're correct that there can be only one is of course a matter of debate. But that is at least the mind-set they are operating under according to Cuban.

brazukadev• 2 months ago

sort of the way there is one ad-company now on the internet

Which one, Meta[0]?

0. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/meta-poised-s...

lotsofpulp4• 2 months ago

Why would Mark Cuban know anything about the motivations of today’s big tech companies? He has not been involved in tech businesses since he sold a radio on the internet website 26 years ago.

davebren• 2 months ago

That was all based on the assumption that scaling LLMs would lead to AGI. That didn't happen and won't, it can be proven for anyone capable of digging into the details of what models actually are and what they are doing (I recommend Chris Hay's videos).

It's becoming more obvious everyday to people. They'll realize that 1000x the cost for marginal improvements isn't worth it and the market will open up. It'll become more based on tooling and smaller more task-focused models instead of this crazy project to create a data center god to rule over humanity.

nba456_2• 2 months ago

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!"

nothinkjustai• 2 months ago

Well, if they were up by 4 and now it’s 4-3 and the team is under massive pressure, “we’re still winning” is of little condolence to the fans.

brabel4• 2 months ago

Yes?!

nodja4• 2 months ago

If they got there by tiring themselves out more than the other team, yes.

irishcoffee2• 2 months ago

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.

nodja4• 2 months ago

When a cyclist is leading a pack and pushing themselves against the air resistance for half the race, do you expect that cyclist to win, or one of the ones behind that's been taking it easy in the slipstream?

It's a race metaphor not a football metaphor.

koyote• 2 months ago

I have never ever heard a commentator say something like "Arsenal are currently winning with 2-0 against X". It is always leading: "Arsenal are currently leading with 2 goals against X".

Ekaros2• 2 months ago

What if it is not winner take all? What if there is no race. What if what USA has been doing is just burning money with possibly unsustainable debt load and way over build valuations...

AI being commodity server capacity might be a thing. And the customers might even manage without hyperscalers... In that sort of end scenario whole current market might look rather foolish.

GolfPopper2• 2 months ago

What if there is no race. What if what USA has been doing is just burning money with possibly unsustainable debt load and way over build valuations...

You mean, what if the hype-based billionaire-class is wrong? Isn't suggesting that a sin in America these days?

enaaem2• 2 months ago

Leading the race makes sense if it's a winner takes all market. AI cannot be a winner takes all market, because of national security reasons.

I would also argue that as AI gets better it will also be more fungible. It will be valuable like electricity. Lots of companies make good money producing electricity, but not the kind of money current investors are hoping for.

jauntywundrkind• 2 months ago

The US has destroyed the PC market perhaps irrevocably, and made getting small single-board-computers for new products extraordinarily difficult. It's enraged its own populus with skyrocketing energy prices causing wild consumer shock. It's waged a trade war over chips that has lead China to develop their own, which they have done astoundingly quickly with phenomenal success, far far faster than anyone could have guessed.

As with another recent example, sometimes in war there is no winning: just loss. This is obviously for us programmers an incredible and wild age, filled with nothing short of miracles. It's incredible. But the prices we are paying, the extreme tensions we are creating, the stress and strain of this all has been incredibly unpleasant, and very very very few people feel like they are seeing upsides to this worrisome menacing age, that promises very few people on the planet anything better coming, and which. Has already made life considerably worse, which no nation has yet directed towards helping its people.

akrylov9• 2 months ago

The trade war and tariffs are bringing inflation, consumer prices will soar, but from a geoeconomical standpoint this will hurt China (And EU) more than US. US consumer on average has the deepest pockets in the World and people the top will make money on insider trading, stock anyways. If AI tokens will become like US dollar, it will be under total control of the Fed.

mold_aid• 2 months ago

The US has destroyed the PC market perhaps irrevocably, and made getting small >single-board-computers for new products extraordinarily difficult. It's enraged >its own populus with skyrocketing energy prices causing wild consumer shock.

Strikes me as the real outcome: the end of "personal" computing, "local" anything.

comrade12342• 2 months ago

I've been using the deepseek api (not for coding though) and have been getting great results and it's so cheap it may as well be free. Another reason I'm using it is because I like the license and I also have some hope of running it in my own hardware in the future.

But the thing is... I could be using any of the llms for my use - I'm using a middleware that lets me change providers only with a configuration change.

So it's going to be tough for USA ai companies to charge 5x to 20x (depending on what you're doing).

josefritzishere• 2 months ago

The word "winning" implies there is an upside.

Jamesbeam• 2 months ago

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-source models that are both cheap and good enough for most use cases. While most of the US AI sphere will collapse under the pressure of making profits, which means having their models and infrastructure adopted by as many enterprises and individuals across the world, China’s models will have become global standards and hard to displace.

If Beijing’s AI pitch centers on universal access and cost-effectiveness, then Chinese AI firms do not need the latest chips to win the global AI race. They also don’t need the expensive US-run infrastructure. If you watch Chinese AI adoption closely, they already want as many Chinese people as possible to be able to build and try with AI, whereas for most Americans, US models for productive use are already too expensive.

Kimi K2.6 sits within touching distance of Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 while costing about $4 per mil output tokens. That is six to eight times cheaper than cutting-edge US models. If you run hundreds of agents, that’s a significant opportunity to get the same work done for a lot less.

Even early adopters like Singapore, ditching US models, the government kicked Zuckerberg in the nuts and went for Qwen instead to build its sovereign AI models.

To understand why the US is at a severe disadvantage in this race, you need to understand China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI entails Chinese firms delivering fully financed infrastructure projects in a bid to lock third countries into China’s economic orbit. They use the same approach for their open source ai models, but this time the infrastructure is both invisible and free.

No need to build power plants or buy /build ports. AI dependency is invisible to both policymakers and the population, limiting pushback. No pesky activists in Germany nagging about China buying parts of ports. No African nutbags questioning why the humble Xi is building hospitals in areas Chinese mining companies take things out of the ground for pennies on the dollar.

China is going for a marathon here while the US tries to push their ai tech by sheer force into the throats of the world. As soon as Chinese ai models have become global standards, it’s game over for us ai companies. And China is way better at this game than the US. They have proven this over and over again in the past 50 years.

I recommend reading the China Standards 2035 strategy to get a better understanding of their approach and how smart this is.

https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-standards-2035-str...

AI is not as revolutionary as you think in terms of our experiences with previous technological advances in terms of trade and economics.

Western economies are locked into U.S. models, while China runs on Chinese ones. It’s the age-old game. But the real war of the AI race will be fought in the global south.

I will give you three examples.

Can you really imagine, if you look at what AI needs to cost to make a profit, that even at the current prices, US models and infrastructure, which are heavily subsidised already, being used in cost-sensitive countries? I am not talking about coders, think really big here for a second.

Secondly, US ai models are trained on Western data. How do you expect them to grasp local contexts in the Southern Hemisphere? Chinese open-source models, on the other hand, can be downloaded and finetuned with country-specific data.

Want an example? Check out AfriqueQwen-14B, which is adapted to the top twenty African languages.

So I think this author is wrong. The ai race to be won is not hardware or cloud infrastructure, my money is on it will be a contest to decide which models and standards become the default infrastructure in countries that are up for grabs.

China neither needs the best models nor does it need the best cloud infrastructure, it just, like so often, only needs to be affordable and good enough to become the default choice in emerging markets.

The right choice would be for everyone to step off the gas pedal and think about whether we are willing to become China in order to beat China. Our ancestors worked really hard to get us here, our rights, our ways of life, culture, all the blood, sweat, and tears.

AI better be worth it in the long run for all of humanity if we go back to survival of the fittest. Because that is what it will take to beat China at their game.

ModernMech• 2 months ago

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.

zozbot2346• 2 months ago

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

MaxHoppersGhost• 2 months ago

If you’ll still be able to vote at all, that is.

Stopped reading here. What a ridiculous statement and I can only assume the rest of your post is just as ridiculous.

abalashov4• 2 months ago

Why do you... seem so sure that this is a ridiculous statement?

gizajob• 2 months ago

“It is not the same as profitable AI leadership”

Where are these profits of which you speak?

jmyeet2• 2 months ago

Back 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-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJmHfmrRMUE

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrbq66XqtCo

watwut7• 2 months ago

There was a report this week that roughly 50% of singles in the US aren't dating because they can't afford to [1].

Poor people with nothing date when they want to. If people have interest in having partners, they can date and socialize for free.

akrylov9• 2 months ago

It's not "AI bubble" - at this point it's a software bubble. It's Antropic or OpenAI that should justify their valuations, they have close to billion customers at this point. It's non-AI software companies without strong cloud business that must justify why their core product is not going to be replaced with the help of LLMs. It's not "fair" but that is how it's seen by the Wall Street.

naveen99• 2 months ago

Labor displacement is also called rising productivity.

22ekeke• 2 months ago

No it doesn’t - it means cost efficiency. Incremental productivity can remain flat - unless you’re a bozo who counts LOC.

perarneng• 2 months ago

There 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.

xantronix• 2 months ago

Ever since I was a small child it was my sincerest wish to build so much value for others by becoming a human-in-the-loop. I am so happy my wish has finally come true.

kelseyfrog3• 2 months ago

Commercialization is not enough. The US is built on financialization.

Cultivating an ecosysyem of strong capital protections, wealth creation through extraction, and tax advantages for AI finance is what we should be looking for. Commercialzation may be a step towards that, but isn't the destination. We have to create a system where those with money can multiply it, not simple add to it.

sailfast• 2 months ago

Just spitballing here but I think the financial system’s already set up for this.

Whatever derivative structures and equity and options need to exist will be easily created.

I don’t think we need any additional motivation or incentives to cultivate this for AI. We need to keep some in the tank to handle the fallout.

As a more personal aside: the US would do well to put up some sensible barriers to outrageous financialization and reduce moral contagion risk. Otherwise all these folks trying to multiply their money end up leaving the bag with the folks that don’t have it in the first place - and then the folks with money end up, uh… well, it won’t end well.

topheroo2• 2 months ago

“A system where those with money can multiply is” sure sounds dystopian to me.

npinsker• 2 months ago

It's (beautifully) dry humor making fun of OP, whose post is rather dystopian already.

RobotToaster• 2 months ago

Betting your entire country's future on usury seems like a terrible idea to me, but what do I know.

bigyabai2• 2 months ago

Don't look now, but if you've got a 401k then your pension is already dependent on perverse financialization.

kelseyfrog3• 2 months ago

You're really not going to like what happened in 1971.

shevy-java• 2 months ago

Define winning. They integrate AI everywhere. I hate it. No money shall come from me into AI anywhere. Not sure if I can maintain it, but right now I can.

megous• 2 months ago

Matters the most to whom? I certainly will not care about expensive models that do about the same thing cheap non-american models do.

It's like the USA Librem 5 vs PinePhone. About the same HW for $1600 vs $150.

Sure will not pay 10x for "US" thing just because it's a US thing.

1shooner• 2 months ago

Trump fits this moment well. He is a salesman at core, and Larry Ellison is too. That helps explain why AI infrastructure is an easy political product. Selling AI today is easier than selling Oracle databases in the 1980s.

I feel like the author (and perhaps many here on HN) are on a different planet than almost everyone I interact with.

lowbloodsugar• 2 months ago

Same can be said of healthcare.

oytis• 2 months ago

Same as software in general I guess? Lots of critical software has been developed by Europeans, but it's the US who build hyperscalers with it

cyanydeez• 2 months ago

uh, what? I'm pretty sure the AI race matters most is improving society. That absolutely does not equate to making money off of things.

Havoc2• 2 months ago

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.

euroderf• 2 months ago

K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" got a lot of favorable comment when it was published but then it kind of faded from view. Might be worthwhile to revisit it?

RealityVoid2• 2 months ago

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 pour into it.

L5 SDV's are much easier to get than humanoids and the have tangible economic benefit. My thesis is that those will come first.

MostlyStable2• 2 months ago

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.

RetroTechie2• 2 months ago

Too narrow view:

"Moving atoms" can refer to anything that a) touches the physical world, b) has 'eyes' (camera/microphone/Lidar/IR/UV/whatever) and c) requires some brains.

Dark factories exist. This will expand into other areas like logistics, farming, food delivery, maintenance/cleaning jobs, household equipment, etc etc. Over time, blue collar jobs face the same fate.

A lot of this will be powered by AI systems running locally on commodity hardware.

And this is where China is leading: They've got the factories. They build the robots. They make the ICs with integrated video capture & AI features. They fabricate the circuit boards those ICs go on. And they lead in the small/local AI models to run those.

To compete, US would need to re-shore manufacturing which takes decades. Same for EU countries (which have great potential imho if they weren't so slooooww to act & would focus on doing vs. regulate).

Never mind that the billions poured into AI by US companies, are targetting white collar/creative jobs, with the AI part as a cloud service. Or military applications. Not (so much) the manufacturing / logistics etc side of things.

oceanplexian• 2 months ago

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?

rtkwe• 2 months ago

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.

SwellJoe2• 2 months ago

China doesn't have to ship parts across the ocean. US manufacturers do, because we gave up the whole bottom/middle of the manufacturing supply chain to China decades ago in pursuit of lower costs. In China, the maker of the parts you need to build your product is a few blocks away. In the US, the maker is in China.

And, if you need changes, you can go talk to them the same day you see a problem.

amunozo• 2 months ago

There are more competitive advantages such as expertise, supply chain, regulations, capable government, scale... If it were all price, there are countries that are much cheaper than China.

jvanderbot• 2 months ago

And why are atoms necessary? You're treating embodiment as the _only justifiable_ commercial path for AI. I don't think that's really close to true. Embodied AI is a subset of current LLM/agentic AI products (or perhaps intersection of something and this new AI?). No reason anything needs to move atoms _directly_ (e.g., via motors) to make a trillion dollars.

hx83• 2 months ago

Strongly agreed. AI powered drones will be the winning military strategy by 2030.

jasondigitized3• 2 months ago

The winner is whoever can move the atoms for free, e.g. crack energy.

Havoc2• 2 months ago

Mostly agree. I think there is a big time delay though.

If free cheap energy is unlocked today I reckon it would still take a good 30 years for that to ripple through properly.

It solves lots of problems (water!) but doesn't make the heavy machinery to consume it instantly appear.

LucidLynx• 2 months ago

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 don't train on our data to (try to) improve...

elteto• 2 months ago

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).

pheggs• 2 months ago

its a big assumption that larger models bring any measurable benefit in the long term. there's a point where its not worth paying the expense of a bigger model and we dont know where that will be as both, models and hardware improves.

we do know however where evolution is at right now with our brains, but thats probably not comparable - yet the only thing I can see to make any kind of prediction at all

stevenhuang• 2 months ago

Current local models already compete.

lugu2• 2 months ago

You are missing the point. Parents says the market to win need economical models more than SOTA models. Whoever is running those nuclear simulations is not making as much as Apple.

MarsIronPI• 2 months ago

Isn't Mythos mostly hype though?

tancop• 2 months ago

SOTA models will eventually be locked down

that might be true for us based providers but i dont see china turning closed source anytime soon.

a lot of chinese labs come from big non ai focused cloud services (alibaba, tencent, huawei) who want new models with higher benchmark scores and lower inference cost. they dont care if the competition gets better because its all open so they can build off each others tech, and if anything happens they got other profitable services to fall back on instead of depend on llms only like anthropic.

also the business culture is way different, in vc backed america you would get laughed out the room for saying "there is no moat we just do the same thing as everyone but better". you need to show infinite potential growth and lock everything down to prevent competition but you can get millions to start with no customers and no profits. in china its all about the real money they dont care if your margin is 10 or 90 percent as long as you stay profitable. the llm providers are profitable so they keep their business model.

pvtmert• 2 months ago

You don't need a (one huge) model to do everything. You need specialized & smaller models that are very good at specific tasks. Collaborating among themselves.

The fact that we see stagnation in terms of billions of parameters shows that efficiency does not scale linearly with the model size. More of an S shaped chart. The middle was Claude 3.5. Since then, it is more about integrating and collaborating with different systems.

satvikpendem4• 2 months ago

Not training on data is a con for me not a pro. The reason Claude is so good is RL training from users' chat histories and use cases. The era of pure public data training is over, as everyone has access to this data yet only a few are frontier models.

TacticalCoder• 2 months ago

Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral ...

Mistral? I think their "revenues" is something like 1/150th what OpenAI and Anthropic are making.

flyinglizard• 2 months ago

… and it’s substantially due to foreign born researchers and engineers. US will win as long as smart and driven people will want to move over.

seydor• 2 months ago

That's like saying that Louis Vuitton is monetizing shoes the best. Sure, but it's not winning shoes

jrm4• 2 months ago

Hahaha, but no.

It's like people forget the entire point, perhaps even definition of technology is "doing more with less."

The "brute force" of power and cycles is almost certainly the least important thing, perhaps even a hinderance.

1273• 2 months ago

Strange. I'm switching from Codex and Claude to Pi with Qwen3.6 27B local and Deepseek V4 Flash which is dirt cheap but powerful.

schaefer• 2 months ago

and you're not alone (I run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B at home too).

But just for the sake of discussion, let me ask: Who is the service provider you're using to run Deepseek V4? Do you have any way of knowing whether that compute is happening in the US or abroad?

Kuyawa2• 2 months ago

I've built five apps in the last month using DeepSeek, spending less than $1 in total. I am totally in love with DeepSeek and my wife knows it :)

satvikpendem4• 2 months ago

What sorts of apps are those? I tried testing various models with a test app as a benchmark, a local first app with CRDTs, and many, even frontier models, struggle heavily.

Rover222• 2 months ago

Well we're certainly losing in terms of public sentiment. There's a real anti-technology mindset that has taken hold. Basically the equivalent of people protesting the electrification of the country early last century.

Chinese culture is quick to embrace the benefits.

inetknght• 2 months ago

"Where it matters most": accuracy and repeatability?

Sorry, nobody's winning that AI race.

riazrizvi3• 2 months ago

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.

hungryhobbit• 2 months ago

This is both true and insightful, but the "its us capitalists vs. communists" framing obscures some very important details.

For one, "Communism" is presented as a single monolith, but it's not: it's socialism PLUS despotism. The despotism part is really important! China/Russia/etc. fail because they try and control things top-down, instead of letting the market decide.

However, you can have socialism without despotism! Tons of European countries are far more socialist, but no less democratic than America (many are more democratic).

So yes, America vs. Russia/China and Capitalist vs. Communist are relevant frames ... but don't let them obscure the fact that you can have a successful, democratic country .. without doing what America does (and giving all control to corporations).

watwut7• 2 months ago

China has pretty much market economy and is not socialist at all. These economic changes happened years ago. Russia has no communism either.

China is despotic in its treatment of political dissent and human rights, but not in economy.

riazrizvi3• 2 months ago

They're not independent. They are the systematic consequences of a naive intelligentsia pressing their ideals that are not grounded in precedent. They are susceptible to manipulative despotic takeover. The pattern keeps repeating. Across geographies large and small.

SwellJoe2• 2 months ago

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.

akrylov9• 2 months ago

> 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.

riazrizvi3• 2 months ago

"Yet like Musk the ouster wounded his ego". So the journalist believes that reacting to rejection with emotions like a biological person makes him like Musk. Err okay.

LurkandComment• 2 months ago

The current commercialization isn't economically sustainable.

phkahler• 2 months ago

> The current commercialization isn't economically sustainable.

And if it were, and the result were like Elon and Scam Altman say it would destroy the economy. Not sure any country wants to lead the race to self destruction.

parliament32• 2 months ago

Many people use the wrong scorecard.

Correct. "Revenue" is the wrong scorecard when they're selling 20$ bills for 15$. I too can make a bajillion dollars in revenue with that strategy.

Show me a company not speed running the uber/doordash playbook and we can talk.

mordae• 2 months ago

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

jxf• 2 months ago

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.

forgotusername6• 2 months ago

We aren't allowed to use any unauthorized models even locally.

eskibars• 2 months ago

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

aspenmartin2• 2 months ago

You’re saying if we were allowed to use e.g. qwen more broadly the US wouldn’t be in the same strategic position? We have the best models…we own all the companies that make the best infra and the hyper scalers…I don’t think “oh we can use Qwen now?” Would exactly devastate the US

visarga2• 2 months ago

I don’t think “oh we can use Qwen now?” Would exactly devastate the US

You'd be surprised how useful it can be to fine tune it in enterprise.

zozbot2346• 2 months ago

Qwen's open models are quite small compared to Kimi, GLM and DeepSeek Pro, which are often described as near-SOTA.

pattt• 2 months ago

Do we have any solid evidence these models can outperform Western models in terms of quality? Or is it more: because they are forbidden, they can't get enough training data, visibility etc. to compete?

gpt52• 2 months ago

Scroll down to the leaderboard - https://arcprize.org/leaderboard

Spoiler alert - they are all towards the bottom of the leaderboard. People come up with a wide variety of excuses for why they are not used despite being offered for significantly lower cost, but the answer is simply because they don't perform well enough for now.

thinkingtoilet• 2 months ago

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.

mariopt2• 2 months ago

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.

packetlost2• 2 months ago

Nah, I model hop constantly as I work with serving GLM and Kimi models and they're not nearly as good as Opus 4.5+ and GPT 5.2+ and it's not particularly close. They're good by standards set a generation or two ago, but they're really not competitive with where the frontier models are at now.

anvuong2• 2 months ago

If you actually use them you'll see that they are far from frontier models. They are much more cost-effective for what they are, but frontier they are not.

MetaWhirledPeas• 2 months ago

They are winning because West is forbidden to use Chinese models for anything work-related.

Because the models hosted in China are not trusted. This is 100% a part of what makes up commercialization.

aucisson_masque2• 2 months ago

Deepseek is a fraction of the cost of western LLM and still just as good. I say it's also related.

lmm7• 2 months ago

Is anyone outside the US trusting anything hosted in today's US? If so, why?

dyauspitr• 2 months ago

Why? So that even more American IP can pass through Chinese servers? Or because their near frontier models are heavily government subsidized?

dfxm12• 2 months ago

By this article, "the US" is not winning. Sam, Dario, Elon, Zuck, etc. are.

It remains what benefit, if any, Americans will see from all this...

chromacity• 2 months ago

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 being played for clicks.

Is it just that the subject line alone is a springboard for casual discussion? If so, maybe that's fine, but then, it feels like we'd be better off cultivating these discussions as "ask HN" posts instead of boosting this kind of web content.

delis-thumbs-7e• 2 months ago

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.

scared_together• 2 months ago

Is it just that the subject line alone is a springboard for casual discussion?

I think this has been the case on many sites, for decades. Many people just want to read and write comments without engaging with the OP.

Have a look at this Reddit thread [0] about this Ars Technica article [1] - both are 15 years old.

I suppose in the 2010s this was an amusing detail of online discussion. In the 2020s it makes me feel a little uneasy - it suggests that the entire concept of people jumping from site to site, clicking links and understanding what they are writing about was flawed from the start. No wonder the internet became centralized and slopified.

And no, I didn’t read the OP, I found your comment to be more interesting to discuss. These days with AI articles flooding the internet it seems foolish to actually read articles before the comments.

Edit: although we have to contend with AI generated comments as well. I wonder how many of the comments on this page actually have original insights into the politico economics of AI.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/gz9k7/the_internet_is_...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot...

RobLach• 2 months ago

US AI models would not survive a free market re: this metric.

ripvanwinkle• 2 months ago

This para caught my eye

Frontier cyber models may push states and defense firms toward the opposite logic: security by obscurity, with closed software, closed tooling, closed firmware, and closed chips. If a model cannot train on the code and architecture of a target stack, it will usually have less context and less speed. That does not make systems safe, but it does raise the value of proprietary stacks all the way down to hardware.

Is this really true. Are there any experts who can weigh in on this.

Should we interpret this to mean that in the new world Windows is more resistant to attacks than say Linux.

ipython• 2 months ago

I think there’s some credence to the concept that more context == faster iteration cycles. Source code can be one major source of context.

I think “security through obscurity is no security” concept was aimed toward people not relying on obscurity alone as a security mechanism. And largely that message succeeded. But now we are in a rapid acceleration of capabilities (on both sides) where any advantage to one side will result in outsized gains, at least in the short term.

gpugreg2• 2 months ago

Should we interpret this to mean that in the new world Windows is more resistant to attacks than say Linux.

LLMs can read assembly better than most, so probably not. But reality has never stopped people from trying to obfuscate.

vb-8448• 2 months ago

In general: less data = less "intelligence".

And basically all the security bugs I've read about were find looking on the source code.

But it doesn't mean windows is more secure, just image a scenario where someone is stealing windows source code and sell it to rogue actor, it will make it even less secure because no one (expect windows) would have had the chance to search for bugs in the source code.

ergocoder• 2 months ago

Even when other countries won, the teams would have reloated to US.

einpoklum2• 2 months ago

The US is running itself, and humanity, into the ground by massively increasing the amount of electricity it uses, instead of reducing electricity and fossil fuel usage. US residents have already started to feel the crunch in terms of water and power in some areas; and the entire world is experiencing the (admittedly less critical) shortages in RAM and SSDs.

And that's not to mention the warping of US economic life by the concentration of capital around this bizarre endeavor, with the circular multi-hundred-billion-dollar deals and such.

Unfortunately, the detrimental effects of global warming arrive gradually, and are spread out over the entire globe, so the "AI barons"/tech magnates will probably suffer the least, while island countries will be completely wiped out, whole regions will become too hot to sustainabily live in, tens of not hundreds of millions will have to migrate, biological diversity will suffer, etc. They will look back on these times in a 100 years and will think of us, or at least of US, as the people boarding the Titanic. Hopefully not as the people who board the Hindenburg.

amelius2• 2 months ago

Considering that you can easily swap out one AI for another and there is zero lock-in potential, does it really matter who is winning now?

trhway14• 2 months ago

couldn't you say the same about search?

elictronic2• 2 months ago

Government, industry, and general integration into the business software stacks are not easily swapped out.

Most businesses are adding limitations on using open models.

lmm7• 2 months ago

Government, industry, and general integration into the business software stacks are not easily swapped out.

My business's integration literally has a dropdown for which model you want to use. I think that's pretty standard.

KnuthIsGod• 2 months ago

If it is a war, then China is delighted.

The USA is very good at loosing very, very expensively....

delfinom• 2 months ago

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

Mass unemployment and an eventually collasping economy is winning?

munk-a• 2 months ago

Is the US actually winning the commercialization war? The US is definitely delivering more commercial products but if all of those products are deeply unprofitable and need to buy users with unrealistic discounts (or direct cash payments[1]) to keep their DAU's looking good then is that winning?

There's a significant amount of innovation happening, but if the market decides this AI thing is not worth funding then I think that'll dry up overnight.

1. https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-private-equity-venture...

phendrenad2• 2 months ago

I reject the premise that AI can be "won" at all. It's just another piece of software.

lemoncookiechip2• 2 months ago

This makes no sense when you zoom-out. None of these companies, be it Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, are profitable in the AI department, they're all bleeding money and using funds their parent company and/or investors, primarily investors gave them. The Chinese models are keeping up with them, while offering the models for free and able to run on consumer grade hardware, and more importantly they train them for cheap. AI models are an extremely volatile product that can be outdated in the matter of a few weeks. Meaning you have to keep dumping resources into developing better models which has no end-goal besides infinite scaling. Lets look at how users behave in the real world:"I don't use Gemini because it's worse than Claude at XYZ." That's it. Now Gemini has a worse model and people are going to Anthropic... what happens when Anthropics model is arguably worse than everyone else's? What does it matter if they can commercialize if their product is objectively worse?

I understand that America dominates in distribution, integration, enterprise contracts, ecosystems, infra... The article isn't wrong, it's just that that dominance is fragile and requires constant upgrading.

But what is the point of that if you have to infinitely scale because the opposition is right behind you at all times ready to usurp you... You CANNOT scale infinitely, the VC money will run out at some point and then everyone will have to downscale everything to meet the real costs associated with SOTA models, they'll have to be able to use subscriptions, and other monetization to cover those insane costs, we just saw SORA shut down because it was bleeding money far too fast while the Chinese released video models that far surpassed it back to back to back...

EDIT: Hell, one of the most critical aspects is integration of the models into other products, and even on this end open-source is keeping up (and will eventually outpace when the VC money dries out) with these big companies.

whattheheckheck2• 2 months ago

If the Chinese models couldn't Distill from the larger models they'd be at gpt2 or 3 levels

lemoncookiechip2• 2 months ago

Even if that is true, it doesn't change the reality that they can compete. Also, if we start going that route, American models wouldn't have any quality data to train on if they respected copyright themselves. Their whole product was built on the work of others, on our work, our art.... without compensation, without acknowledgement.

Literally not a single one of these AI companies, regardless of where they are in the world has any right to complain about someone copying their work.

nl4• 2 months ago

To quote Elon Musk in court:

OpenAI’s counsel asked Musk whether xAI has ever “distilled” technology from OpenAI.
Musk: “Generally AI companies distill other AI companies.”
“Is that a yes?” Savitt asked.
Musk: “Partly.”

From https://www.interconnects.ai/p/the-distillation-panic which is worth reading in full.

nl4• 2 months ago

None of these companies, be it Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, are profitable in the AI department,

Citation needed.

All reporting is that they are profitable on the inference side and all the VC money is going to building more data centers to run more inference. (Note that the coding subscription models are probably only break even on average - the money is in the API)

The Chinese models are keeping up with them, while offering the models for free and able to run on consumer grade hardware, and more importantly they train them for cheap.

No one is running DeepSeek v4 (a 1.6T token model) on consumer hardware.

They aren't much cheaper to train the US models. Training is subsidized by the big Chinese tech companies. They are slightly cheaper because they are smaller (and weaker) models than the 5T and 10T models the US frontier labs are training, and the US labs are paying for a more diverse set of RL data (which shows up in diverse benchmark performance).

we just saw SORA shut down because it was bleeding money far too fast while the Chinese released video models that far surpassed it back to back to back...

Ironically this proves the point.

OpenAI didn't shutdown Sora, just the subscription version and weird social network thing. You can still access it via API.

The Chinese models are API models and probably just as profitable for them as the LLMs are for the US frontier labs.

[1] has prices for video models. There is a big range, but Google's Veo model and OpenAI's Sora are around the same price as the Chinese models.

[1] https://openrouter.ai/models?output_modalities=video

strange_quark• 2 months ago

What does profitable on inference mean? As far as I can tell, none of these companies have rigidly defined it, let alone it being a GAAP number. And yeah, if you subtract out all your R&D, payroll, sales, marketing, and other overhead, and get someone else to take on the debt or dig into their free cash flow to build the hugely expensive infrastructure on which you depend, it'd be pretty hard to not be "profitable". It's almost humorous how dumb of a metric "profitable on inference" is.

Ask yourself if AI was so profitable, why don't any of the big hyperscalers break out AI revenue in their earnings. OpenAI and Anthropic both project huge losses for the next couple years, it's not hard to find.

The real problem is, as the GP comment pointed out, that they can never stop training. As long as they're committed to building these behemoth models, the second they stop training, someone else will catch up and everybody will switch over because it's trivial to do so.

Art9681• 2 months ago

The US is winning the AI race in all matters.

drsalt• 2 months ago

it's an exhibition, not a competition

arthurofbabylon• 2 months ago

How does gobbledygook like this get traction on HN? What has happened on HN culturally to allow something like this to surface to the top?

nwhnwh2• 2 months ago

A lot of nonsense get traction on HN (and everywhere else).

The revolt of the masses is real.

boringg2• 2 months ago

Happening quickly too. Far too quickly.

AlexCoventry2• 2 months ago

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

dnnddidiej• 2 months ago

How is this one a submarine? It is not even PR.

magicalhippo• 2 months ago

The core premise might still be interesting to discuss, even though the submission itself is not very good.

Disclaimer: I didn't vote for this submission.

Illniyar• 2 months ago

Because a lot of people upvote based on the title and not the content? That's my assumption at least.

The title is pretty enticing, even if the content is slop trash.

newaccount670• 2 months ago

This is a website where anybody can trivially create multiple accounts in minutes. It has minimal protections against abuse. The strength of the community relies entirely on its obscurity and it's no longer obscure.

It died as a home for intellectuals the moment it became big enough to be a viable platform for political propaganda (many years ago).

xbmcuser2• 2 months ago

Lol some of these western arm chair analysts actually need to visit China.

belZaah• 2 months ago

There used to be such a thing as profit. A return on investment. If your exit strategy is to get sold to Google, focusing on revenue is a perfectly fine strategy. If you _are_ the Google, however, the money poured in should eventually be made back. We seem to have forgotten that. The current level of commercialization just means the US is burning investments faster, than anyone else. Eventually this might change and the bet might pay off. But every minute this goes on, the expected payoff must be larger to pay for the loss made this minute as well as interest for the previous minutes. I’m not entirely sure this is what “winning” looks like. Tic-toc.

avazhi• 2 months ago

How does commercialisation matter when China will pump however much money they need to into this? This is a national security issue for them, just as it is for the US.

Not even gonna bother clicking through this one, the title is that egregious. And by the way, you can be damn sure that if Anthropic or whichever other American frontier model model is the best of its day was on the cusp of going under, the US gov would either pump it full of government contracts or (less likely) nationalise it.

fithisux• 2 months ago

Theft without any consequences by copyright laws Surveillance pushed down our throats Labor Landscape destruction AI psychosis Private Companies controlling the AI pipeline Data centers destroying the environment.

That doesn't count as winning at all.

TabTwo• 2 months ago

Whoever says this matters the most.

Thats like Microsoft saying "Don't use Linux because selling an operating system is what matters"

yanhangyhy• 2 months ago

It sounds convincing because almost everything in the article is technically correct. But this mindset is problematic.

AI is not some divine creation. It is built by humans. History has repeatedly shown that China is able to catch up, and often surpass others in the end.

The article never really explains why AI is supposedly so unique that it guarantees the United States will inevitably win.

zombot• 2 months ago

That's because AI is predominantly a religion. No proof required for anything because non-believers are just mentally defect.

aswegs8• 2 months ago

Article with an interesting premise albeit kind of shallow? 500+ comments?? Color me excited!

Opening up comments to see top comments are 90% "NO U" without any substantial discussion - you disappoint me, HN.

xbmcuser2• 2 months ago

People because of the past 10-20 years of free money have seem to forgotten what commercialization actually means. Ie a profitable product until the the product or service is able to make at least its running costs back it cant be considered commercial product I am not even talking about capital cost which looking at how fast computer hardware gets obsolete the actual costs are so much that none of the ai services can be considered commercial.

titaniumrain• 2 months ago

Military AI adoption is the ultimate proof point, isn’t it?

nate8bit• 2 months ago

Why is this phrased so antagonistically? For clicks? This is like saying the US is winning the cloud race - it's not a race. The author is completely missing the forest from the trees - this benefits everybody. LLM's aren't going to wake up and be sentient - the race to real AGI is where is has been 10 years ago.

jweisbin• 2 months ago

Long before AI destroys humanity, humanity will have destroyed itself, by deploying AI with no attention to its consequences, thereby creating a world with no jobs, and no market to sell to.

fnoef• 2 months ago

The US is not winning anything. This is not a fucking war. The only thing that this “AI race” is winning is a speedrun to the destruction of any meaning humans had as well as the massive build of data center and absurd amount of water consumptions to cool them off.

If only people would stop thinking in terms of who is winning, jeez.

gmerc2• 2 months ago

If it’s a race, what’s the goal line.

ianhxu• 2 months ago

In a rapidly evolving field, the business environment in the United States may indeed have an advantage.

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

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