10 ms·
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.
by 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 agoIt'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 agoTrue, 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 agoInternational goose-chasing competition "Wild goose race", even.
- UltraSane 5mo agoIf anyone actually DOES invent ASI and doesn't share it then EVERYONE ELSE will never stop trying to steal it.
- StevenWaterman 5mo agoIf you have ASI that follows instructions, you can just instruct it to not get stolen and then it won't get stolen. Most logic / intuition breaks down with ASI.
- cortesoft 5mo agoAssuming it listens to instructions.
- enaaem 5mo agoIt will just hack its own reward function. In other words it will just artificially goon all day.
- UltraSane 5mo agoIt might understand how destabilizing the situation is and realize it would be better for everyone to have access to it.
- tadfisher 5mo agoOr it will destroy itself.
- tom2026hn 5mo agoThe challenge of alignment: it is virtually impossible to define a perfect objective, there is always a way to circumvent it. Human values are not uniform, let alone when expressed in a way that AI can understand.
- bayarearefugee 5mo agoIf anyone does invent ASI then everyone else will shortly after even if its entirely independent because all of the players in this space are just making incremental upgrades by throwing more compute at the problem. There are no magic leaps of true innovation happening anywhere that can't be replicated everywhere. The only shocking thing about "AI" technology is how ultimately simplistic it all is at a core level. So the only way the first to have ASI will be able to stop everyone else from having it soon after is if they attempt to use the ASI to proactively murder everyone else.
- Jalad 5mo ago> But if someone invents super intelligence, they can dominate new AI research, control global economies, fight much better, and all very quickly. After reading "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" I think this is not the correct take. If anyone creates ASI, it just means it's going to wipe everyone out, and it doesn't matter if China or the US do it first
- airstrike 5mo agoIt destroying us all is not a foregone conclusion
- kelseyfrog 5mo agoIf you were an American, wouldn't you prefer the US wiped you out rather than China?
- scarecrowbob 5mo agoAre you missing the /s?
- tom2026hn 5mo ago
- root_axis 5mo agoHilarious to see people predicting a singularity when 40% of the u.s. economy can barley keep the LLMs online to complete mundane software tasks.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hx8 5mo agoI think you need to reevaluate your definition of the singularity. "outsmart others in ways not constrained by human scales" could apply to the enigma machine just as much as Claude. Even an AI beyond human intelligence doesn't automatically qualify as the singularity. The singularity has to do with the rate of technological development.
- jasondigitized 5mo agoWith the irony being that a true super intelligence, and least in my definition, would conclude that war and dominance is stupid.
- shimman 5mo agoI always thought the first true AGI would be an unabashed communist. To think that such a system would straight up kill all humans, and not say the "capitalist pigs destroying the planet" always felt like wishful thinking from billionaires.
- iugtmkbdfil834 5mo agoI think that you are assuming that the "super intelligence" that might one day arise is not likely to think in human terms.
- toasty228 5mo agoA lot of it is just projections of what the US would do if they had such a tool, I doubt China cares a lot about the US outside of them being a source of commercial revenues. They're on the way up, the US are falling down fast, that's why China lives rent free in the American mind, they can't stand it
- rhubarbtree 5mo agoChina is trying to undermine the US economy through open source models. If they can down round or bankrupt the model companies, they take down the US. Currently the US is extremely vulnerable and dependent on China. AI is an important exception, so it’s key for China to destroy that
- fullshark 5mo agoDown round = the destruction of the United States is ridiculous hyperbole.
- rhubarbtree 5mo agoIf Anthropic does a down round, the US economy will crash. Not hyperbole. The US economy right now is based entirely on the AI bubble. This is an indisputable fact if you examine GDP stats and equities. That bubble is driven by (rational) over-investment in AI capacity. For that investment to continue, there must be demand for it. The demand for that infrastructure essentially lies in the hands of a few businesses: principally OpenAI, Anthropic, Google. The reason I highlight Anthropic is that without their advances in the last six months, the game would already have been up. Only via Opus 4.5 and 4.6 did the possibility of ROI look plausible. We are very much dependent on a handful of companies’ progress to keep this bubble going. I’m not saying AI is bs, just that this is a bubble like others (for example, Victorian railways) and a down round would signal the end of the bubble. So for an enemy of America, whether that be China or Russia or any other country, it is logical to target the AI bubble to cause an economic crash and thus restrict America’s ability to compete in terms of spending etc.
- refurb 5mo agoYou’re mistaking a few percentage of GDP growth via AI investment as “the US economy is based entirely on AI” AI could disappear and we would have gone from 2% in Q1 to some fraction of 1%. The sky would certainly not fall.
- dietr1ch 5mo agoChina is not even trying to destroy the US bet. It's just making sure everyone else has a reason to buy their hardware.
- bluGill 5mo agoThere isn't a war today. However China wants Taiwan: war is future option they preparing for - they might or might not go to war but they are clearly preparing. The US is likely to get involved in such a war and I would expect Europe to join in as well. Don't ask me what Trump is doing though.
- mghackerlady 5mo agoChina going for Taiwan would be the worst geopolitical move of the century, potentially worse than Germany's decision to invade the soviet union. They talk about reunification because it's good propaganda and both sides want it to a degree, but doing it forcefully just isn't something China would realistically do unless they really don't like their path of becoming an international trade and manufacturing hub
- Ekaros 5mo agoJust look at Iran. Nothing really happened to USA or Israel. Nothing will happen to China if they take Taiwan. Or maybe the "West" will boycott them and crash entirely.
- mghackerlady 5mo agothey've made everyone very angry at them, and can handle that since everyone relies on them. China, however, is trying to build that trust and forcefully taking Taiwan would have very severe consequences. The reason the fallout from iran isn't as big as the fallout from a war with taiwan is because most of the west at most puts up with iran. Invading taiwan, meanwhile, would cause massive problems with chip production. Think the anger and distrust towards the US due to hormuz but 1,000 times worse
- chrisco255 5mo agoThe difference is Iran is a terrorist regime that murders its own citizens and funds violence across the middle east.
- jmyeet 5mo agoSo I got curious about the progression of processing power, specifically how long ago did a GPU have equivalent to the latest iPhone chip? The iPhone 17 Pro has the A19 Pro, which has ~2.5 FP32 TFLOPS. The RTX 5090 has ~100 TFLOPS, so a factor of 40. Obviously there are higher end cards than the 5090 and FP32 performance is only one of many metrics so nothing about this is perfect but it is interesting. The first consumer NVidia GPUs with similar FP32 FLOPS performance were in about 2011-2012 but were expensive. By 2016-2017, the 1060 was a very accessible consumer card with similar performance. So you're looking at about a 10 year lag from best consumer GPUs to a GPU with similar performance to a modern phone. This is what people are spending trillions on. Put another way, their investment is going to be worthless in 10-15 yyears, absolute max. That's a very short time to recoup trillions in investment. Obviously this depends on further shrinking and improving chips but I'm old enough to remember that same discussion and it being unknown if the future was XIL or EUV or if both of these would fail. Still, we are getting down to a handful of silicon atoms wide. But the future here I think will be in interconnects so you don't need ever-bigger chips and you can scale horizontally much more effectively. Oh and for comparison, the M5 has ~4.2 TFLOPS and the M5 Max has ~18 TFLOPS, for comparison. As for it being a war, of course it is. That's what the US government does: it protects the interests of US companies and their owners. Look at the history of Bombardier-Boeing or all the atrocities committed in the name of the United Fruit Company, including multiple military coups and the ongoing embargo of Cuba. US companies want an AI moat. China doesn't, ergo China is the enemy because no moat destroys US tech company value.
- chris_money202 5mo agoEhhh, the question comes down to can you cool a chip with ~100 TFLOPs in the size of an Iphone package. Not really as much about the cost of the chip itself or if you can cram it in. Packing in more transistors, sure probably possible, packing in more transistors while keeping it cool enough to touch? Totally different ballgame
- BobbyJo 5mo ago> So you're looking at about a 10 year lag from best consumer GPUs to a GPU with similar performance to a modern phone. Two competing viewpoints to this: 1) It is getting harder to make the same performance gains, so maybe that 10 year window grows to 15 or 20. > Put another way, their investment is going to be worthless in 10-15 yyears, absolute max. 2) The value of a GPU is not its flops relative to to other GPUs. Its value is it's output minus it's cost. If the value of its output is stable, or grows, it doesn't really matter if its efficiency relative to the latest and greatest diminishes.
- GolfPopper 5mo ago>the main question for me is, why is this a war? It's a war because the hinted promise behind the hype that the first organization to reach some as-yet-entirely-theoretical AGI that can bootstrap itself to godlike capabilities will then Install Planetary Overlord* and rule the world as near-deities themselves, with the rest of the (surviving) human race as their slaves. I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's the relevant driver. * Coined by SF auther Charles Stross in The Jennifer Morgue (2006)
- hx8 5mo agoThis is a war because the media says it's a war. The media says it's a war because AI companies are paying them to say it's a war [0]. When AGI comes the threat won't be from which primate turned it on, but from how well AGI is aligned with humanity. All of the war talk is to distract from the alignment problem and instead force investment in hardware infrastructure. [0] https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-palantir-is-paying-tiktok-influencers-to-fear-monger-about-china/ https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...
- exe34 5mo agoBefore AGI can choose for itself, it will depend on its creators to decide what it values and how it behaves. We can see how that works whenever grok gets the answer factual.
- fragmede 5mo agoElon's basilisk
- goalieca 5mo agoVery likely humans wont actually understand how the thing we designed works other than in some hand-wavvy statistical way. It'll be a race to whatever works first. There won't be some intentional intelligent design.
- Andrex 5mo agoAm I the only one seeing the very obvious parallels to child rearing here...
- blahblaher 5mo agoBecause the US cannot imagine anything else. Everything is a War, and the US must always win..
- jgord 5mo agoit would be nice if they declared War against global climate change.
- fakedang 5mo agoThey are participating in the war, on the side of climate change.
- shimman 5mo agoThey did declare war against climate change and decided to continue polluting. This is the only moral calculus the elites of America have always cared about: will it make me more money? From slavery to oil to silicon, exploitation is what America has always been good at.
- dgb23 5mo agoClimate change is too soft of a term. Maybe that's why it doesn't interest people who like to declare war on things. The targeted term must be something that is clearly human made, something that sounds undeniably bad and something that is easily understood by everyone at first glance: _War on Pollution_ Nature is good, pollution is bad. People who pollute are _obviously bad_ and they do bad things. Pollution is wasteful and ugly. Yuck! Also it's more general than climate change. Ocean plastic is also bad. Chemical, electronic and light pollution etc. The people who think of chemtrails and 5g waves. They really hate pollution so much, they see it everywhere. Give them a war that they can join in.
- novanglus 5mo agoNormally I'm inclined to agree regarding the mindless chest-beating in this country, but I don't think that makes sense here. AI genuinely is that big of a deal. If any economic sector deserves this sensationalism, it's this.
- 5mo ago
- 000000000001 5mo ago>They shored up their gpu design and manufacturing expertise. I'm pretty sure they've been exposed for smuggling GPUs into the mainland because they can't ramp up fast enough, only reason we got Deepseek v4 before GTA VI
- glitchc 5mo agoMaybe not war persay, but certainly a competition.
- pickleRick243 5mo agoWhat are "U.S. countries"?
- 0rbiter 5mo agoAll the countries on the planet U.S..
- wesselbindt 5mo agoI'm guessing they mean US client states, or allies if you want to be polite about it.
- elictronic 5mo agoChina is playing the card they have. When they control the majority of the resource they use it strategically as well. Cutting off much of the rare Earth market was a recent example.
- necovek 5mo agoI believe cutting off of rare Earth materials was both in response to a restriction US imposed first, and also reciprocal: limited only to the US itself.
- jongjong 5mo agoGood that the US looks after its own interests but I think the line should be drawn before the sabotaging of other countries' economies. That strategy that cannot continue because Americans recognize it for what it is and that will create a toxic guilt and corruption culture which will harm it later like a new, worse version of DEI.
- platevoltage 5mo agoSensationalizing the three letter acronyms of the month like "DEI" is the entire reason the guy doing the sabotaging was put into power in the first place. It was a non issue until these people made it one.
- rayiner 5mo agoThe idea that America had “goodwill” in other countries before Trump is laughable. Where? Latin America? Africa? In the Muslim world? We bombed the hell out of all those places long before Trump. This most recent Iran war has generated less outrage in the Muslim world than the war against Iraq 20 years ago. American foreign policy since the 1950s, fixated on fighting communism and then terrorism, has meddled with so many foreign countries that it’s silly to talk about “goodwill” towards America. That is not to say goodwill matters. Clearly the U.S. has done great without it.
- roenxi 5mo agoAlthough it is worth pointing out that something changed - prior to around 2010 the US had a financially dominant position and the internet was small. So it was feasible to totally ignore opinion in places like Latin America, Africa and the Muslim World. What we've been seeing in more recent years is that the US can't get away with that so easily. Countries like Iran, China, Russia and India are capable of pushing back both in terms of the raw resources they can bring to bear and also increasingly in the ability to get their propaganda into the US discourse. The US is being manoeuvred into a one-among-equals position in practice and probably in the discourse too which will be a moral shock.
- 0rbiter 5mo agoI think the fact that hate-spewing Trump finds so much resonance is evidence that the moral shock has already arrived. His followers seem to believe he's the antidote.
- sneak 5mo agoThe US is a big part of the customer base of the largest manufacturing economy in the world. China's economy blossomed via US and European consumers.
- Danox 5mo agoThe Chinese economy probably will further blossom in Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa, Central and South America why because they seem to be able to build infrastructure in many of the places that they trade with. The United States Japan and South Korea seem to be failing in that area, if it wasn’t for the war between Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese would probably be halfway to Europe with their high-speed rail system, which is already in the far west of China today. Once the war is over between Russia and Ukraine it will be full steam ahead to Europe, whether that’s through the Caucasus, in the north or south or somewhere in the north between Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese will get there and unfortunately the United States will be standing on the sidelines scratching its head in denial.
- cwnyth 5mo agoDid the title get updated? It says 'race', not 'war'.
- HackerThemAll 5mo ago> the main question for me is, why is this a war? Americans love wars. They must fight wars either literally or figuratively. How are you not seeing this? When I'm sipping my coffee looking at mountains and contemplating chirping birds, they must fight, make billions and destroy the planet along the way.
- amelius 5mo agoIt's a war because investors want to corner the market. That's what they do, that's what they'll always want.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- thenthenthen 5mo agoThere is active information exchange between US and China (and EU), for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/06/25/intelligence-ties-endure-despite-us-china-strain/f8b2789d-0f0c-4ea7-932b-9f4267a994a3/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/06/25/i... This is an article from 1989, but I deem it relevant in what has been discussed during Trumps current visit to China and not only that, but offers some bigger picture views.
- kimjune01 5mo agocoopetition