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It looks like the USA is bringing all technology in-house that is needed to build AI. TSMC has a factory in the USA now, ASML too. OpenAI, Google, xAI and Nvid

It looks like the USA is bringing all technology in-house that is needed to build AI. TSMC has a factory in the USA now, ASML too. OpenAI, Google, xAI and Nvidia are natively in the USA. While no other country is even close to build AI on their own. Is the USA going to "own" the world by becoming the keeper of AI? Or is there an alternative future that has a probability > 0?

OccamsMirror 2y ago
Are LLMs really going to own the world?
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
  It looks like neural network based software is to surpass humans in intelligence in every task in the forseeable future. If one country moves along this direction faster than the others, no country will stand a chance to compete with them militarily or economically.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    > no country will stand a chance to compete with them militarily or economically. It really depends on how they go about it. It can easily instead end up with lots of people without work, no social security and disillusioned with the country. Instead of being economically great, the country may end up fighting uprisings and sabotage.
  - hagbarth 2y ago
    How so? First of all, assuming ASI is developed, as it stands now, it will be owned by a private corporation, not a nation state. ASI also will not be magic. Like what exactly would it be doing that enables the country to subject the others? Develop new weapons? We already have the capability to destroy earth. Actually come to think of it, if ASI is an existential threat to other nations, maybe the rational action would be to nuke whichever country develops it first. To safe the world. You see what I am saying? There is such a thing as the real world with real constraints.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - rocmcd 2y ago
    If this is true, then shouldn't we expect an economic "bump" from NN/LLMs/AI as they are today? I have not noticed companies or colleagues 10x'ing (hell, or even 1.5x'ing) their productivity from these tools. What am I missing?
    - ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
      What do your colleagues do? I see people getting replaced by AI left and right. Translators, illustrators, voice over artists, data researchers, photographers, models, writers, personal assistants, drivers, programmers ...
    - mh- 2y ago
      There's an implicit assumption here that if a colleague did figure out how to (e.g.) 10x their output with new tools, the employer would capture all (e.g.) 10x of that increased productivity.
- ben_w 2y ago
  LLMs aren't the only kind of AI. Having hardware and software suppliers all together makes it more likely even if you assume (like I do) that we're at least one paradigm shift away from the right architecture, despite how impressively general Transformers have been. But software is easy to exfiltrate, so I think anyone with hardware alone can catch up extremely fast.
- throw310822 2y ago
  Intelligence is everything. These things are intelligent- already superhuman in speed and a few limited domains, soon they're going to exceed humans in almost every respect. The advantage they give to the country that owns them is nuclear-weapons like.
  - habinero 2y ago
    This is just flat out not true. They're not intelligent and not capable of becoming so. They aren't reliable, by design. They're a wildly overhyped solution in search of a problem.
    - throw310822 2y ago
      I don't understand this attitude and I am not sure where it comes from- either from generic skepticism, or from some sort of psychological refusal.(*) It's just obvious to me that you're completely wrong and you'll have a hard wake up, eventually. * "I know how this works and it's just numbers all the way down" is not an argument of any validity, just to be clear- everything eventually is just physics, blind mechanics.
      - Amekedl 2y ago
        Check out operations research. The amount of “work” done there is staggering and yet adoption appears abysmal, using such solutions with success only happens as part of a really “well oiled” machine. And what about the simple difficulty going from 99% to 99.9%. What percentage are we even talking about today? We don’t know, but very rich people think it is cool and blindly keep investing more billions.
      - habinero 2y ago
        You're entirely free to go on and on about how amazing the emperor's clothes are. Nobody can stop you. :) It's fine to chase hype for hobbyist or starter projects, but part of being an engineer is understanding how things actually work and what their limitations are. It's not a virtue to deify a statistics model and make it your entire personality.
lompad 2y ago
You implicitly assume, LLMs are actually important enough to make a difference on the geopolitical level. So far, I haven't seen any indication that this is the case. And I'd say, hyped up speculations by people financially incentivized to hype AI should be taken with an entire mine full of salt.
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
  First, its not just about LLMs. Its not an LLM that replaced human drivers in Waymo cars. Second, how could AI not be the deciding geopolitical factor of the future? You expect progress to stop and AI not to achieve and surpass human intelligence?
  - Eikon 2y ago
    > You expect progress to stop and AI not to achieve and surpass human intelligence? A word generator is not intelligence. There’s no “thinking” involved here. To surpass human intelligence, you’d first need to actually develop intelligence, and llms will not be it.
    - willvarfar 2y ago
      I get that LLMs are just doing a probabilistic prediction etc. Its all Hutter Prize stuff. But how are animals with nerve-centres or brains different? What do we think us humans do differently so we are not just very big probabilistic prediction systems? A completely different tack: if we develop the technology to engineer animal-style nerves and form them into big lumps called 'brains', in what way is that not artificial and intelligence? And if we can do that, what is to stop that manufactured brain from not being twice or ten times larger than a humans?
      - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
        Human (and other animal) brains probably are probabilistic, but we don't understand their structure or mechanism in fine enough detail to replicate them, or simulate them. People think LLMs are intelligent because intelligence is latent within the text they digest, process and regurgitate. Their performance reflects this trick.
cgcrob 2y ago
I would expect it will be the market leader yes. But is there a market large enough to support the investment? That is debatable. If there isn’t then they will be in a deficit that is likely to do serious damage to the economy and investor confidence. Currently there is no hard ROI on LLMs for example other than force bundling and using it to leverage soft outcomes (layoffs) and generating trash. User interest and revenue drops off fairly quickly. And there are regulations coming in elsewhere. It’s really not looking good.
losteric 2y ago
US has been reshoring hardware for a while, but that didn’t stop DeepSeek and certainly won’t prevent presently allied powers from building AIs. A big lesson seems to be that one can rapidly close the gap, with much less compute, once paths have been blazed by others. There’s a first-mover disadvantage.
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
  DeepSeek has built their software on Nvidia hardware which needs ASML and TSMC hardware to be built. Even China has not yet managed to even remotely catch up with this hardware stack. Even though the trail has been blazed by ASML, TSMC and Nvidia.
  - ZiiS 2y ago
    PRC considers Taiwan hence TSMC to be part of China. Whilst it is easy to disagree with this politically; if push came to shove, it would be much harder to disagree practically.
    - quesera 2y ago
      The common belief appears to be that PRC can successfully assimilate Taiwan, but not with an intact and operable semiconductor industry.
spacebanana7 2y ago
> Is the USA going to "own" the world by becoming the keeper of AI? China has a realistic prospect of developing an independent stack. It'll be very difficult, especially at the level of developing good enough semiconductor fabs with EUV. However, they're not starting from scratch in terms of a domestic semiconductor industry. And their software development / AI research capabilities are already near par with the US. But they do have a whole of nation approach to this, and are willing to do whatever it takes.
wallaBBB 2y ago
What factories are TSMC and ASML operating in US?
ZiiS 2y ago
Even if you believe that all those companies are exclusively working towards the USA's aims and ignore that the output of TSMC and ASML's US factories are not yet a rounding error on their production. Do you seriously doubt that espionage still works?

OccamsMirror 2y ago

Are LLMs really going to own the world?

ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
It looks like neural network based software is to surpass humans in intelligence in every task in the forseeable future. If one country moves along this direction faster than the others, no country will stand a chance to compete with them militarily or economically.
- viraptor 2y ago
  > no country will stand a chance to compete with them militarily or economically. It really depends on how they go about it. It can easily instead end up with lots of people without work, no social security and disillusioned with the country. Instead of being economically great, the country may end up fighting uprisings and sabotage.
- hagbarth 2y ago
  How so? First of all, assuming ASI is developed, as it stands now, it will be owned by a private corporation, not a nation state. ASI also will not be magic. Like what exactly would it be doing that enables the country to subject the others? Develop new weapons? We already have the capability to destroy earth. Actually come to think of it, if ASI is an existential threat to other nations, maybe the rational action would be to nuke whichever country develops it first. To safe the world. You see what I am saying? There is such a thing as the real world with real constraints.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- rocmcd 2y ago
  If this is true, then shouldn't we expect an economic "bump" from NN/LLMs/AI as they are today? I have not noticed companies or colleagues 10x'ing (hell, or even 1.5x'ing) their productivity from these tools. What am I missing?
  - ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
    What do your colleagues do? I see people getting replaced by AI left and right. Translators, illustrators, voice over artists, data researchers, photographers, models, writers, personal assistants, drivers, programmers ...
  - mh- 2y ago
    There's an implicit assumption here that if a colleague did figure out how to (e.g.) 10x their output with new tools, the employer would capture all (e.g.) 10x of that increased productivity.
ben_w 2y ago
LLMs aren't the only kind of AI. Having hardware and software suppliers all together makes it more likely even if you assume (like I do) that we're at least one paradigm shift away from the right architecture, despite how impressively general Transformers have been. But software is easy to exfiltrate, so I think anyone with hardware alone can catch up extremely fast.
throw310822 2y ago
Intelligence is everything. These things are intelligent- already superhuman in speed and a few limited domains, soon they're going to exceed humans in almost every respect. The advantage they give to the country that owns them is nuclear-weapons like.
- habinero 2y ago
  This is just flat out not true. They're not intelligent and not capable of becoming so. They aren't reliable, by design. They're a wildly overhyped solution in search of a problem.
  - throw310822 2y ago
    I don't understand this attitude and I am not sure where it comes from- either from generic skepticism, or from some sort of psychological refusal.(*) It's just obvious to me that you're completely wrong and you'll have a hard wake up, eventually. * "I know how this works and it's just numbers all the way down" is not an argument of any validity, just to be clear- everything eventually is just physics, blind mechanics.
    - Amekedl 2y ago
      Check out operations research. The amount of “work” done there is staggering and yet adoption appears abysmal, using such solutions with success only happens as part of a really “well oiled” machine. And what about the simple difficulty going from 99% to 99.9%. What percentage are we even talking about today? We don’t know, but very rich people think it is cool and blindly keep investing more billions.
    - habinero 2y ago
      You're entirely free to go on and on about how amazing the emperor's clothes are. Nobody can stop you. :) It's fine to chase hype for hobbyist or starter projects, but part of being an engineer is understanding how things actually work and what their limitations are. It's not a virtue to deify a statistics model and make it your entire personality.

lompad 2y ago

You implicitly assume, LLMs are actually important enough to make a difference on the geopolitical level. So far, I haven't seen any indication that this is the case. And I'd say, hyped up speculations by people financially incentivized to hype AI should be taken with an entire mine full of salt.

ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
First, its not just about LLMs. Its not an LLM that replaced human drivers in Waymo cars. Second, how could AI not be the deciding geopolitical factor of the future? You expect progress to stop and AI not to achieve and surpass human intelligence?
- Eikon 2y ago
  > You expect progress to stop and AI not to achieve and surpass human intelligence? A word generator is not intelligence. There’s no “thinking” involved here. To surpass human intelligence, you’d first need to actually develop intelligence, and llms will not be it.
  - willvarfar 2y ago
    I get that LLMs are just doing a probabilistic prediction etc. Its all Hutter Prize stuff. But how are animals with nerve-centres or brains different? What do we think us humans do differently so we are not just very big probabilistic prediction systems? A completely different tack: if we develop the technology to engineer animal-style nerves and form them into big lumps called 'brains', in what way is that not artificial and intelligence? And if we can do that, what is to stop that manufactured brain from not being twice or ten times larger than a humans?
    - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
      Human (and other animal) brains probably are probabilistic, but we don't understand their structure or mechanism in fine enough detail to replicate them, or simulate them. People think LLMs are intelligent because intelligence is latent within the text they digest, process and regurgitate. Their performance reflects this trick.

cgcrob 2y ago

I would expect it will be the market leader yes. But is there a market large enough to support the investment? That is debatable. If there isn’t then they will be in a deficit that is likely to do serious damage to the economy and investor confidence. Currently there is no hard ROI on LLMs for example other than force bundling and using it to leverage soft outcomes (layoffs) and generating trash. User interest and revenue drops off fairly quickly. And there are regulations coming in elsewhere. It’s really not looking good.

losteric 2y ago

US has been reshoring hardware for a while, but that didn’t stop DeepSeek and certainly won’t prevent presently allied powers from building AIs. A big lesson seems to be that one can rapidly close the gap, with much less compute, once paths have been blazed by others. There’s a first-mover disadvantage.

ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
DeepSeek has built their software on Nvidia hardware which needs ASML and TSMC hardware to be built. Even China has not yet managed to even remotely catch up with this hardware stack. Even though the trail has been blazed by ASML, TSMC and Nvidia.
- ZiiS 2y ago
  PRC considers Taiwan hence TSMC to be part of China. Whilst it is easy to disagree with this politically; if push came to shove, it would be much harder to disagree practically.
  - quesera 2y ago
    The common belief appears to be that PRC can successfully assimilate Taiwan, but not with an intact and operable semiconductor industry.

spacebanana7 2y ago

> Is the USA going to "own" the world by becoming the keeper of AI? China has a realistic prospect of developing an independent stack. It'll be very difficult, especially at the level of developing good enough semiconductor fabs with EUV. However, they're not starting from scratch in terms of a domestic semiconductor industry. And their software development / AI research capabilities are already near par with the US. But they do have a whole of nation approach to this, and are willing to do whatever it takes.

wallaBBB 2y ago

What factories are TSMC and ASML operating in US?

ZiiS 2y ago

Even if you believe that all those companies are exclusively working towards the USA's aims and ignore that the output of TSMC and ASML's US factories are not yet a rounding error on their production. Do you seriously doubt that espionage still works?