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> Your statement was about what you think America can do, but not about what it has proven to do already.

Sorry that's nonsense. You can't simultaneously project a hypothetical Chinese capability that it hasn't proven it can do (develop the leading models) and then deny the ability of the US to do the same.

> China's clones already won.

Ok we'll just copy their stuff then who cares because apparently bleeding edge model development doesn't matter.

> Does it?

Yes - it proves that leading edge American AI companies can develop products sophisticated enough that they deliver true competitive advantages that have to be guarded. It's like, the thing is so valuable you can't even buy it. Have you ever tried to buy a Ferrari or Lamborghini or something? It's a bit like that.

> Some great consolation that would be, if you said the same thing for Enron, Theranos, Vision Pro, Meta Quest, Microsoft Groove, Google+, Juicero, Hololens... why, you could be convinced to buy any of history's most dogshit technology. Remember, an appeal to authority is just one third of effective rhetoric.

Well if you want to go that route, China will collapse because all communist governments in history except China (and I guess North Korea but that's arguable more of a monarchy of sorts) have failed. Guess that means China loses!

The broader point is you and others are simply saying things, while incredibly smart people with trillions of dollars at stake are doing things counter to your claims. Of course authority isn't a great argument, but considering you haven't provided any sort of economic model that says Google will completely fail at its AI ambitions because idk some Chinese companies released some open source models, leaves us with not a lot of options to go on. Might as well trust the folks with money at stake and who are doing the real work. Why would I trust your comment over Google's business decisions? Yea they could be wrong, it doesn't mean it isn't the right choice at the time.

It's similar to vaccine risk that sprung up during COVID-19. Folks thought they were making an informed decision by eschewing the vaccine in favor of some unknown and unknowable risk instead of the risk that's right there in front of them and known.

> In a so-called free market, that's the most heretical and counterintuitive solution that you can concoct.

But it happened so I'm not sure what to tell you. You yourself have demonstrated that. The free-market can still exists while also being regulated by the government. Evidence? Look around. Separately to claim that the US is losing because it is requiring AI companies to do some sort of thing would also have to apply to China who is doing the same.

> At that point, America might as well forfeit to save money that would have been wasted on "AGI" research graft.

Well, if you're right we should save money and make China spend all of their money building models and then we'll just copy their strategy.

I'm not sure why you and others seem to assume that China (or Iran or whomever) can take some action and that we can't also take some action in response. Let me guess, hypersonic missiles! Iran closed the Strait!? Chinese AI open source?! It's all the same version of a failed mental model. A similar one would be Americans or other westerns assuming that other countries can't do things or aren't smart enough or don't have the ability to build or engineering better things than we can. You're making that exact same mistake here.

1 comments

> You can't simultaneously project a hypothetical Chinese capability that it hasn't proven it can do (develop the leading models)

China does lead the frontier. If you're a cybersecurity researcher, a biologist or work in any other censored field, there's nothing that the American models can do for you. The frontier effectively begins where abliterated models can be distributed, and America releases none of them at-scale.

You can't just claim that cybersecurity and biology are non-factors in this race. There are objectively areas where Chinese AI is the only frontier; American regulation is entirely to blame.

> It's like, the thing is so valuable you can't even buy it.

We have a word for this in software actually, it's called "vaporware" in modern parlance. Good luck convincing people that Xenix and Duke Nukem Forever are too valuable for the public to own.

America's stance towards legitimate cybersecurity research is why American businesses like HuggingFace do their incident responses with GLM-5.2. If American AI is "so valuable" that people can't buy the frontier to fix legitimate problems, then China wins by default. It's already happening in several industry-leading American firms, they're not paying Anthropic or OpenAI to fix their real issues.

> Ok we'll just copy their stuff then who cares because apparently bleeding edge model development doesn't matter.

Yes, do this. OpenAI and Anthropic will inevitably turn to the US government for funding, which means that taxpayers will be financially supporting model training for weights that they won't own. If the purpose of AI research is to entrench the monopoly on power, then I would genuinely advocate for all taxpayer funds to be withheld from OpenAI and Anthropic since their products aren't contributing to the public good. There is literally no reason to copy China's state-driven investment strategy if we're not also going to copy the public ownership model. You might as well let China do the frontier research, and let America focus on hand-wringing over the consequences and writing censorship laws to prevent citizens from accessing uncensored Chinese models.

After all, it's where we're headed regardless of what China does. Anthropic, OpenAI and the current US administration have made that clear.

> Why would I trust your comment over Google's business decisions?

My comment doesn't contradict Google's business decisions. It's not an oxymoron to highlight a bad decision as part of a grander AI strategy; but so far you've failed to engage on the actual grounds of FAANG's strategies itself. You're just insisting that American businesses are right because they spend a lot of money, while failing to acknowledge that "spending lots of money" is how most financial crises start. Therefore, it seems appropriate that we acknowledge wasted investments if we want American businesses to stop digging a hole they can't get out of. The onus falls on you to argue that things like OpenCL should have died, or that the Neural Engine was the right choice for millions of iPhone owners.

The point I'm making in this regard isn't complex, you're just offended by the notion of these businesses making wrong decisions. Metal Compute Shaders is not an industry-leading inference solution. It just isn't, the free market already decided. Apple could have increased their addressable market during the datacenter boom if they supported an agnostic GPGPU compute layer like OpenCL in Apple Silicon; or, they could have freed the PCIe lanes on the rackmount Mac Pro to make it a legitimate CUDA host in a world spending trillions on ARM datacenter hardware. Instead they abandoned Khronos group, insisted on standardizing around Metal, and discontinued the Mac Pro.

Apple made some right decisions here. They also burned billions of dollars in R&D and abandoned a trillion-dollar market segment by discontinuing the Mac Pro. Despite being the most advanced ARM core designer in the world, Apple was enamored by B2C service profits and actively avoided any genuine competition that would pressure Nvidia or Apple themselves to invest in frontier research. As the richest American tech company, Apple completely failed to pivot their stack into AI inference even 10 years after CoreML was reluctantly introduced.

Compare this to how, for instance, Huawei works, and you'll see pretty quickly why ego-poisoned businesses like Apple are the antithesis of free market competition. Apple doesn't want to compete, they want to make money. They love ignoring genuinely innovative technology

> I'm not sure why you and others seem to assume that China [...] can take some action and that we can't also take some action in response

Well, China has a centrally planned economy for one. There are objectively things that their government can finance that the United States cannot reciprocally copy.

> China does lead the frontier. If you're a cybersecurity researcher, a biologist or work in any other censored field, there's nothing that the American models can do for you. The frontier effectively begins where abliterated models can be distributed, and America releases none of them at-scale.

Doesn’t sound like it to me. I have yet to find a credible source suggesting Chinese companies are ahead. But if they are we can just let them get ahead, distill their models, and release them open source.

> We have a word for this in software actually, it's called "vaporware"

Prove it. This is just an unsubstantiated claim.

> America's stance towards legitimate cybersecurity research is why American businesses like HuggingFace do their incident responses with GLM-5.2. If American AI is "so valuable" that people can't buy the frontier to fix legitimate problems, then China wins by default. It's already happening in several industry-leading American firms, they're not paying Anthropic or OpenAI to fix their real issues.

Why would you think that companies could only use either leading models or nothing? Companies can of course use lower end models (Chinese or American) for various use cases where it makes sense or is cost effective. That is not an indictment of the state of AI in America nor is it suggestive that China “wins”.

> You might as well let China do the frontier research, and let America focus on hand-wringing over the consequences and writing censorship laws to prevent citizens from accessing uncensored Chinese models.

But then China will be screwed and go bankrupt and all of those things because Americans can just copy and distill their models, do it cheaper, and give them away without censorship. Then China will ban them and we’ll just take the lead again. Every criticism you are leveraging against the United States applies to China too. And you know the censorship bothers them more given the Great Firewall.

> You're just insisting that American businesses are right because they spend a lot of money

No, I’m insisting that they are making a crazy big bet, and that bet seems to make sense to me, and absent convincing evidence from you or someone else my priors are going to go with the folks who have trillions at stake versus an internet commentator (which is also me) saying basically “nuh uh”.

> Compare this to how, for instance, Huawei works, and you'll see pretty quickly why ego-poisoned businesses like Apple are the antithesis of free market competition. Apple doesn't want to compete, they want to make money. They love ignoring genuinely innovative technology

And yet, I’ve got an iPhone, iPad, and a MacBook Pro. Apple is a $5 trillion company and captures the majority of smartphone products. You might be right in your idealism, but your wrong about what people care about. This is why I bought stock in Meta a long time ago. I hate that product and I’ll never use it and that’s precisely why I’m wrong as an investor if I did not invest. You don’t have to like the company to accept the reality of their strategy. Apple is ego-poisoned, Hauwei is the tech leader, whatever, most people disagree with you and that’s reflected every day at the cash register.

> There are objectively things that their government can finance that the United States cannot reciprocally copy.

Not quite true, we just have a higher bar. Also planned economies are all but a matter of objective fact less capable of economic performance when compared to market economies. China for example has financial issues right now, over-built, &c.