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> Isn't it more likely that countries without native frontier models will use open-weights models that will let them be 70% as productive of counties that do?
by ben_w 2mo ago
> Isn't it more likely that countries without native frontier models will use open-weights models that will let them be 70% as productive of counties that do?
Possibly, but sometimes being marginally better lets you win all the games. It can be difficult to guess what matters and how.
Also, may depend where the compute is physically located, which may depend on the cost of energy.
- Schiendelman 2mo agoThat's exactly why TSMC keeps beating the pants off Intel. Marginally better looks miles ahead in computing a lot of the time.
- eru 2mo agoLuckily, competing Chinese companies are selling cheaper and cheaper solar panels to anyone who's willing to take them.
- ben_w 2mo agoFor now. Globalisation's great right up until your manufacturing base decides they don't like you, or you them. Reshoring is expensive for all the reasons offshoring was ever tempting in the first place, so we'll have to wait and see how this plays out.
- eru 2mo agoIf China stops selling you solar panels tomorrow, you still have all the solar panels they sold you until now. And why do you see reshoring as the only alternative? Seems like a false dilemma. There's more than two places on the globe.
- ben_w 2mo ago> If China stops selling you solar panels tomorrow, you still have all the solar panels they sold you until now. Which is great, unless demand for electricity goes up loads. (Edit: Which I expect to occur if for example AI is transformative enough to warrant fears of people without it becoming an economic backwater). > And why do you see reshoring as the only alternative? Seems like a false dilemma. There's more than two places on the globe. "Here" and "not here" is a complete set. I could also phrase it as "autarky or trade".
- eru 2mo ago> "Here" and "not here" is a complete set. > Globalisation's great right up until your manufacturing base decides they don't like you, or you them. Your manufacturing base might be in China. You might be in Bulgaria. And when China doesn't like you, you ask someone else.
- ben_w 2mo agoRight now for too many critical components there often isn't an alternative to China, and even when it exists it can be at too small a scale. This is basically why China won the trade was vs. Trump's tariffs. People are also increasingly uncertain how the next geopolitical Great Game will play out, so even if for each economic input there was a good alternative to China today, in the same way that the post-WW2 world had to pick sides between USA and USSR, we wouldn't know which source was safe vs. which was about to get itself integrated into China so deeply that their nation follows and enforced all sanctions China creates.
- eru 2mo agoI'm not sure the post-WW2 had to pick sides. There were plenty of non-aligned states, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement for one example, but there were plenty of others. Picking sides (and swapping sides) was often useful to get patronage and to play the sides against each other, but it wasn't necessary.