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If the Trump administration decides to annoint Altman and Amodei in defiance of market forces it will rapidly discover that it no longer has the sovereign bond

If the Trump administration decides to annoint Altman and Amodei in defiance of market forces it will rapidly discover that it no longer has the sovereign bond auction pricing power to prop them up. This isn't 1998: the Treasury has taken five major body blows in the last 25 years, the world's energy markets, maritime insurance regimes, electronic payments rails, and moral authority in places like the UN Security Council are effectively bifurcated. Oil and money and data and people just flow around the United States now. Canada's sovereign debt yields tank harder when the market is spooked, that's the North American flight to quality. The administration could probably put some serious friction on open weight model use in the Fortune 500 for a little while, but the opposition never got such a gift right before a squeaker midterm. And outside of major enterprises with puckered ass compliance departments? Not a chance. It's popular around here to forget Uber and AirBnB and yes, OpenAI and Anthropic all got their start flagrantly breaking the law and grew lawyers and lobbyists faster than anyone could enforce it. And this time everyone from the DNC to the EFF would be holding hands wearing "Save The Models" t-shirts. Not even NVIDIA is remotely pretending they're anything but all in on GLM 5.2, they had an NVFP4 quant up by the time most people read the blog post. And the Trump Administration isn't exactly enamored of Comrade Amodei at the moment, being as they're appealing the lawsuit Anthropic brought against the Pentagon during a shooting war. Forcing the American proprietary AI megalab financing event was our fiscal Ukraine Special Military Operation, the market is calling the bluff and neither the capital markets nor the Federal Reserve has the dry powder to absorb this one. The Treasury auctions will flat not clear in an orderly way. We can't raise 2-4 trillion dollars on a dime in 2026 and if CoreWeave turns out, as many suspect, to be Patient Zero? It would be that big a hole. We play by the same rules as everyone else now. I hope we regard it as being worth it, but I fear we will not.

solenoid0937 3mo ago
It is in OpenAI, Anthropic, and the US Gov's best interest to slow China down and ban Chinese models. Literally none of what you wrote prevents them from doing so. Once China starts to get scary, Commerce will export control GPUs and declare Chinese models "foreign munitions." Any nation doing business with the US will not be allowed to use these models either, and that will be the end of that. It is just not in the US's interests to fund China in the race to AGI.
- reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
  The assertion that it's in the United States Government's best interests ban Chinese open weight models is a very strong opinion that is not a consensus even at the fringe of Thiel-adjacent psycho thought: Alex Karp is on record about open weight models being necessary, the fucking "we bombed a bunch of kids with Claude doing rubber stamp target selection" guy. He thinks "trust OpenAI and Anthropic" is a radical position. Peter Hegseth, another really pro-America being powerful guy, he's dealing with a lawsuit because he doesn't want Anthropic in his military, he calls it a supply chain risk (he's right). There is no evidence of any kind that a complex attack vector can be trained into model weights and survive all the crazy slicing and dicing that happens between published weights and running model. These things get quantized and run on mathematically imprecise kernels and sampled and LoRA-tuned and Dolphin/Orca de-tuned. Go look at what the ComfyUI community comes up with, those guys know more about WAN 2.2 than the people who trained it. Because those models run for real on a desktop, so there's mad innovation at light speed. There is no one who wants a capriciously expensive black box run by extremely creepy people, not once the capability crosses over (in about November). But don't take my word for it, you just had a chance at one AI IPO, and I'm sure you'll get another, so if you like how that goes, you don't need to convince me!
  - solenoid0937 3mo ago
    I run local models every day. We are in a race to superintelligence. The first country to AGI will be the first to superintelligence, and the first to superintelligence will have de facto control over the world and the future of humanity. They will also be able to prevent others from reaching superintelligence. Of course it's in the US's best interest to slow down China. You aren't zooming out and looking at the big picture, you're taking models as slightly useful tool, not what they will soon turn into.
    - alightsoul 3mo ago
      while china goes country to country organizing fairs through their embassies to get new business partners, the us sees the world as a zero sum game.
adrian_b 3mo ago
NVIDIA appears to play on several parallel paths that may compete with each other. On one hand it appears to cooperate with OpenAI and Anthropic, as big customers. On the other hand NVIDIA cooperates with Palantir, providing the HW for its "Sovereign AI OS" (a turnkey system including HW and SW for local inference and post-training/fine tuning) which uses the slogan "The future of AI is on-prem" (i.e. not as a customer of OpenAI or Anthropic, but using an open-weights LLM, e.g. a fine-tuned NVIDIA Nemotron or a Chinese LLM). Presumably with the goal of promoting their competing solution, Alex Karp (Palantir CEO) has delivered a few weeks ago a very harsh criticism of Anthropic and OpenAI (who allegedly inflate the token consumption and they might also steal the data of their customers, which must be sent to them). So NVIDIA both cooperates and competes with OpenAI and Anthropic.

solenoid0937 3mo ago

It is in OpenAI, Anthropic, and the US Gov's best interest to slow China down and ban Chinese models. Literally none of what you wrote prevents them from doing so. Once China starts to get scary, Commerce will export control GPUs and declare Chinese models "foreign munitions." Any nation doing business with the US will not be allowed to use these models either, and that will be the end of that. It is just not in the US's interests to fund China in the race to AGI.

reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
The assertion that it's in the United States Government's best interests ban Chinese open weight models is a very strong opinion that is not a consensus even at the fringe of Thiel-adjacent psycho thought: Alex Karp is on record about open weight models being necessary, the fucking "we bombed a bunch of kids with Claude doing rubber stamp target selection" guy. He thinks "trust OpenAI and Anthropic" is a radical position. Peter Hegseth, another really pro-America being powerful guy, he's dealing with a lawsuit because he doesn't want Anthropic in his military, he calls it a supply chain risk (he's right). There is no evidence of any kind that a complex attack vector can be trained into model weights and survive all the crazy slicing and dicing that happens between published weights and running model. These things get quantized and run on mathematically imprecise kernels and sampled and LoRA-tuned and Dolphin/Orca de-tuned. Go look at what the ComfyUI community comes up with, those guys know more about WAN 2.2 than the people who trained it. Because those models run for real on a desktop, so there's mad innovation at light speed. There is no one who wants a capriciously expensive black box run by extremely creepy people, not once the capability crosses over (in about November). But don't take my word for it, you just had a chance at one AI IPO, and I'm sure you'll get another, so if you like how that goes, you don't need to convince me!
- solenoid0937 3mo ago
  I run local models every day. We are in a race to superintelligence. The first country to AGI will be the first to superintelligence, and the first to superintelligence will have de facto control over the world and the future of humanity. They will also be able to prevent others from reaching superintelligence. Of course it's in the US's best interest to slow down China. You aren't zooming out and looking at the big picture, you're taking models as slightly useful tool, not what they will soon turn into.
  - alightsoul 3mo ago
    while china goes country to country organizing fairs through their embassies to get new business partners, the us sees the world as a zero sum game.

adrian_b 3mo ago

NVIDIA appears to play on several parallel paths that may compete with each other. On one hand it appears to cooperate with OpenAI and Anthropic, as big customers. On the other hand NVIDIA cooperates with Palantir, providing the HW for its "Sovereign AI OS" (a turnkey system including HW and SW for local inference and post-training/fine tuning) which uses the slogan "The future of AI is on-prem" (i.e. not as a customer of OpenAI or Anthropic, but using an open-weights LLM, e.g. a fine-tuned NVIDIA Nemotron or a Chinese LLM). Presumably with the goal of promoting their competing solution, Alex Karp (Palantir CEO) has delivered a few weeks ago a very harsh criticism of Anthropic and OpenAI (who allegedly inflate the token consumption and they might also steal the data of their customers, which must be sent to them). So NVIDIA both cooperates and competes with OpenAI and Anthropic.