14 ms·

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

• vdineshk 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  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.
  • NitpickLawyer 5mo ago
    Claude is already on Vertex - https://docs.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/partner-models/claude https://docs.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/p...
    • giancarlostoro 5mo 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.
      • NitpickLawyer 5mo ago
        > Is Vertex hosting it themselves on their own hardware? Yes, you can even choose regions, for EU they serve it from Belgium. With all the encrypted at rest stuff and other guarantees that vertex provides. > Important: Accessing Claude models through Vertex AI meets the FedRAMP High requirements, and operates within the Google Cloud FedRAMP High authorization boundary.
    • mark_l_watson 5mo ago
      yes, and Claude is available on Google AntiGravity with some paid accounts.
  • SubiculumCode 5mo 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.
  • nl 5mo ago
    Claude is available on Azure and GCP already. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-anthropics-claude-models-in-microsoft-foundry-bringing-frontier-intelligence-to-azure/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-anthropic... https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/models/partner-models/claude 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-platform-on-aws 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.
• boxed 5mo ago
  Hopefully it's a race worth winning and not a race to global disaster.
  • nba456_ 5mo 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.
    • tsunamifury 5mo ago
      This is a false dilemma created by the model companies to try to convince us we must invest or else.
    • embedding-shape 5mo 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%.
    • boxed 5mo ago
      No it doesn't. It just means you'll be eaten and turned into paperclips first.
• axblount 5mo ago
  "Methinks the lady doth protest too much"
• ConceitedCode 5mo 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.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • titzer 5mo 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-shape 5mo 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 5mo 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.
      • AngryData 5mo ago
        That also assumes the monopolized market is profitable enough to pay for the dumping, but right now we are still questioning if LLMs have such high value on the market. Yeah its great for programming, but is the majority of the population benefitted enough to all start paying for access lke many investors expect? Someone might have looked at the low cost and massive lifting capacity of hydrogen balloons in the past and seen a lot of potential profit but if investors had dumped money to monopolize the hydrogen balloon market they would have lost their ass.
    • 5mo ago
• greesil 5mo ago
  The whole country? Really?
• thepasch 5mo 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.
  • akrylov 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    • giancarlostoro 5mo ago
      > US deep state Strange reading that on HN and realizing I'm not on Facebook
      • andriy_koval 5mo ago
        Its hard not to see that "deep state": group of elite politicians and super-rich, seize more and more power in American society.
        • adjejmxbdjdn 5mo ago
          Whatever you think about elite politicians and the super-rich, they’re not the “deep state”. The whole idea of the deep state is that it’s part of the state, ie government, so not private citizens, and they’re “deep” ie hidden below the layers of government. Thats the exact opposite of politicians and the ultra rich.
          • Avicebron 5mo ago
            Lol I'm pretty sure the "deep state" just means, "manipulating the levers of power from a place without accountablity/oversight" which covers both these shadowy hidden layers of govt you describe and the shadowy wealthy elites funding and lobbying for whatever. It can be both.
• pj_mukh 5mo 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.
  • akrylov 5mo ago
    It's a myth. IBM, Xerox, HP, DEC was innovating long before H1B's.
    • pj_mukh 5mo 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.
      • akrylov 5mo ago
        Jobs, Wozniak, Gates - it's a myth that you need poor migrants pulling themselves by their bootstraps to innovate. Sometimes a nazi scientist like Wernher von Braun is what it takes.
• mikece 5mo ago
  I feel like the title of this post should have "for now" appended.
  • epolanski 5mo ago
    +1 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.
    • doph 5mo 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).
    • rhubarbtree 5mo 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.
  • ericmay 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
    It is good for China.
• diego_moita 5mo 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-race/ https://time.com/7382151/china-dominates-the-physical-ai-rac...
• krzyk 5mo 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 5mo ago
    > Does any of the US companies earn money on LLMs? Inference? Yes. Infrastructure build and training? Not yet.
• lorecore 5mo 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.
  • SubiculumCode 5mo 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.
    • lorecore 5mo 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.
      • 46493168 5mo ago
        What is it about China that makes you trust them more?
        • mghackerlady 5mo ago
          not living there, for one. I don't care if they know where I live since realistically they can't do much of anything to me. If I were in china, I probably wouldn't trust them as much as I trust the US. If I were in Switzerland, I wouldn't trust the swiss government and might get my services from america or china.
• hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 5mo ago
  so much winning https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
• tsunamifury 5mo 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.
  • akrylov 5mo 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.
    • SubiculumCode 5mo 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.
      • Galanwe 5mo ago
        What does it mean "dominated"? How would your life change if your country became the second wealthiest instead of the first? This is a ranking and competition no other country in the world gives ... about.
        • SubiculumCode 5mo ago
          What would the world be like if China led? Whatever Xi wanted it to be like. I do not want a non-democratic, dictatorial power leading the world. You might think that most of the world does not care, and maybe they don't right now. But this is, I suspect, due to the relative benevolence of historical U.S. policy of international law and order. New boss same as the old boss is a motto that is only as informative as the extent to which the new boss acts like the old boss. Why would the world care? Take Trump's threats against Greenland...actions that run completely contrary to our historical policies and treatment of our Western allies. They were alarmed, because when the leader of the most powerful military in the world makes a threat, you have to treat it seriously. Despite Trump's hubris, such an invasion did not occur because Americans, Congress, made it very clear that Trump would be impeached if he invaded our NATO ally. Let's say China is ascendant. It is now the dominant military and economic power in the world. China is under Xi's complete dictatorial rule. Xi decides that invading Greenland is a good idea. Stopping that internally would not involve democratic processes, it would need to involve a coup. Let's make it even more stark. If Germany had won WWII and had become the ascendant world power, would it make a difference to most countries? ABSOLUTELY YES. If there is going to be a dominant world power, the character of that nation matters. Are there other nations with the character and institutions that could do as well or better than the U.S. has done? Sure. I can think of several nations. But let us not pretend that all nations are equally bad/good for the world.
• testfrequency 5mo ago
  How about the obesity and fall of democracy race?
• hansmayer 5mo 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.
  • SubiculumCode 5mo ago
    Not if they cannot get the GPUs.
    • mekdoonggi 5mo 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.
      • SubiculumCode 5mo ago
        Opinions are easy.
• yalogin 5mo 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 5mo 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.
    • akrylov 5mo 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.
      • fsckboy 5mo ago
        >AI data centers will be protected like embassies. so AI data centers will be protected by relying on hostile or unstable governments to live up to diplomatic agreements, and every so often one will be ransacked like in Teheran 1979? https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R2651.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R2651.html
    • card_zero 5mo ago
• Igrom 5mo 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_WS69df29e6c6d00ca5f9a0a6b1.html https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202604/15/content_WS69df29e6... https://fortune.com/2026/05/03/chinese-court-layoffs-workers-ai-replacement-labor-market/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/03/chinese-court-layoffs-workers... https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-moves-regulate-digital-humans-bans-addictive-services-children-2026-04-03/ 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.
  • yalogin 5mo ago
    Very good call. I shied away from calling it a terrible article but it is
    • SubiculumCode 5mo ago
      There certainly are better articles on this topic that have come out recently.
  • puelocesar 5mo ago
    Can I block a user to avoid seeing his posts? I noticed front page would be much nicer without guys like OP
    • Baljhin 5mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43282379
• embedding-shape 5mo 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_sand 5mo ago
    They are trapped in the copium den
• usui 5mo 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?
  • comrade1234 5mo ago
    Amazing. Someone on the internet using 'begs the question' correctly...
    • mrhottakes 5mo ago
      Glad I'm not the only one that noticed this.
  • treis 5mo ago
    AI has definitely improved the industrial capacity of the US
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • robotpepi 5mo 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.
    • mrhottakes 5mo ago
      Such as?
    • hackable_sand 5mo ago
      What capacity? How?
• DeathArrow 5mo ago
  GLM, Kimi, MiMo, Minimax, Deepseek, Qwen would like to have a word. :)
  • Galanwe 5mo 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.
    • abalashov 5mo ago
      How much would one have to invest in hardware to feasibly run a usefully large Kimi K2.6?
      • Galanwe 5mo ago
        Around $35-45k if willing to use it comfortably (fast to answer, large context) as coding agent.
      • zozbot234 5mo ago
        There's no set-in-stone answer to these kinds of questions, it all depends what "useful" performance means to you.
        • abalashov 5mo ago
          Yeah, I know. Was just throwing it out to see what folks would say based on their idea of useful.
• paoliniluis 5mo 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
  • akrylov 5mo ago
    No, Alibaba is excellent top-5 easily.
• bildung 5mo 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.
  • akrylov 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • mekdoonggi 5mo ago
    Almost as if concentrating all of the wealth and decision-making into the hands of a few billionaires is a bad idea...
    • abalashov 5mo ago
      They kept telling us Soviet central planning was inefficient and ineffective, while the lean rationality of the free market something something...
• d0gwut 5mo ago
  [dead]
• 0xbadcafebee 5mo 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.
  • CMay 5mo 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.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • watwut 5mo 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.
• tinfoilhatter 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• nodja 5mo 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.
  • JKCalhoun 5mo 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 5mo 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-surpass-google-digital-ad-revenue-first-time-report-says-2026-04-13/ https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/meta-poised-s...
      • JKCalhoun 5mo ago
        That kind of does make the point.
    • lotsofpulp 5mo 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.
• jauntywundrkind 5mo 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.
  • akrylov 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• comrade1234 5mo 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 5mo ago
  The word "winning" implies there is an upside.
• Jamesbeam 5mo 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-strategy-recent-developments-and-their-implications-foreign-companies/ 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.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• gizajob 5mo ago
  “It is not the same as profitable AI leadership” Where are these profits of which you speak?
• mugivarra69 5mo ago
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• jmyeet 5mo 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-dating-too-expensive https://parade.com/living/nearly-50-of-single-americans-not-... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJmHfmrRMUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJmHfmrRMUE [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrbq66XqtCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrbq66XqtCo
• perarneng 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• kelseyfrog 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • topheroo 5mo ago
    “A system where those with money can multiply is” sure sounds dystopian to me.
    • npinsker 5mo ago
      It's (beautifully) dry humor making fun of OP, whose post is rather dystopian already.
      • topheroo 5mo ago
        Oop you’re totally right! Bit close to home. :)
  • RobotToaster 5mo ago
    Betting your entire country's future on usury seems like a terrible idea to me, but what do I know.
• shevy-java 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• 1shooner 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Same can be said of healthcare.
• oytis 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• Havoc 5mo 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 5mo 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?
  • RealityVoid 5mo 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.
    • MostlyStable 5mo 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.
• postsplit_me 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• LucidLynx 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
      Current local models already compete.
      • ThunderSizzle 5mo ago
        A Qwen3.6-35B-A3B or whatever it's full name is, when on a 3090, can at the very least, with very little fine tuning, compete with Haiku and blows away GPT4.1 (aka, the cheap models). It might keep up with Sonnet 4.5 with some tinkering. But long story short: it seems to have better performance and similar quality for a payoff of a year or so compared to cloud models. In the same way you can self host faster/easier/cheaper than cloud hosting, if you are okay with the negatives. I'm returning my 3090 soon for a R9700 after some more basic benchmarking, since the higher RAM should improve my observations more.
• flyinglizard 5mo 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 5mo ago
  That's like saying that Louis Vuitton is monetizing shoes the best. Sure, but it's not winning shoes
• jrm4 5mo 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.
• 127 5mo 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 5mo 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?
  • Kuyawa 5mo 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 :)
    • satvikpendem 5mo 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.
      • Kuyawa 5mo ago
        https://mediconsulta.net https://mediconsulta.net an AI medical assistant https://decaboy.fit https://decaboy.fit for tracking progress at they gym https://megaparley.com https://megaparley.com sports betting platform A horse betting platform not published yet, still looking for an API odds provider A car mechanic AI assistant not published yet I've learned that the more detailed the initial prompt the better result I get. I can share any prompt if you want
        • satvikpendem 5mo ago
          Makes sense, looks like mostly CRUD? I actually was able to get the CRDT stuff working with the latest models, just had to set thinking to the maximum and also have it continually test itself in a loop via MCP without my intervention so after chugging along for an hour it seemed to have fixed everything itself.
• Rover222 5mo 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 5mo ago
  "Where it matters most": accuracy and repeatability? Sorry, nobody's winning that AI race.
• riazrizvi 5mo 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 5mo 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).
    • watwut 5mo 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.
    • riazrizvi 5mo 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.
• SwellJoe 5mo 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.
  • promptunit 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  • akrylov 5mo 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.
• 1970-01-01 5mo ago
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• riazrizvi 5mo 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 5mo ago
  The current commercialization isn't economically sustainable.
  • phkahler 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  No, they are not. They are winning because West is forbidden to use Chinese models for anything work-related.
  • dyauspitr 5mo ago
    Why? So that even more American IP can pass through Chinese servers? Or because their near frontier models are heavily government subsidized?
  • jxf 5mo 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 5mo ago
      We aren't allowed to use any unauthorized models even locally.
    • eskibars 5mo 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
• promptunit 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• dfxm12 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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_in_far_worse_shape_than_i_thought/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/gz9k7/the_internet_is_... [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lots-of-risk-ambiguity/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot...
• RobLach 5mo ago
  US AI models would not survive a free market re: this metric.
• ripvanwinkle 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • gpugreg 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Even when other countries won, the teams would have reloated to US.
• einpoklum 5mo 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.
• amelius 5mo 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?
  • trhway 5mo ago
    couldn't you say the same about search?
  • elictronic 5mo 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.
    • lmm 5mo 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 5mo ago
  If it is a war, then China is delighted. The USA is very good at loosing very, very expensively....
• delfinom 5mo ago
  >The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization Mass unemployment and an eventually collasping economy is winning?
• munk-a 5mo 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-claude-enterprise https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-private-equity-venture...
• phendrenad2 5mo ago
  I reject the premise that AI can be "won" at all. It's just another piece of software.
• lemoncookiechip 5mo 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.
  • whattheheckheck 5mo ago
    If the Chinese models couldn't Distill from the larger models they'd be at gpt2 or 3 levels
    • lemoncookiechip 5mo 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.
• Art9681 5mo ago
  The US is winning the AI race in all matters.
• drsalt 5mo ago
  it's an exhibition, not a competition
• arthurofbabylon 5mo 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?
  • nwhnwh 5mo ago
    A lot of nonsense get traction on HN (and everywhere else). The revolt of the masses is real.
    • boringg 5mo ago
      Happening quickly too. Far too quickly.
      • nwhnwh 5mo ago
        It is a little bit old https://www.amazon.com/The-Revolt-of-the-Masses/dp/B0934PV371/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0 https://www.amazon.com/The-Revolt-of-the-Masses/dp/B0934PV37..., but yeah, I agree that it has been crazy lately.
        • boringg 5mo ago
          Yes the theory is old - but the last decade has really sped it up.
  • AlexCoventry 5mo ago
    https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
    • dnnddidiej 5mo ago
      How is this one a submarine? It is not even PR.
      • AlexCoventry 5mo ago
• xbmcuser 5mo ago
  Lol some of these western arm chair analysts actually need to visit China.
• belZaah 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• ashoeafoot 5mo ago
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• chanki 5mo ago
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• fithisux 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Whoever says this matters the most. Thats like Microsoft saying "Don't use Linux because selling an operating system is what matters"
• yanhangyhy 5mo 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 5mo ago
    That's because AI is predominantly a religion. No proof required for anything because non-believers are just mentally defect.
• aswegs8 5mo 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.
• xbmcuser 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Military AI adoption is the ultimate proof point, isn’t it?
• nate8bit 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• gmerc 5mo ago
  If it’s a race, what’s the goal line.
• ianhxu 5mo ago
  In a rapidly evolving field, the business environment in the United States may indeed have an advantage.
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