> I do think the suggestion is a stretch.
Ok - we just disagree there. It seems incredibly obvious to me.
> As for viewing things with an economic lens. I profess to having only a moderate grasp of economics, I do better with history and geopolitics- and I think this is another blind spot.
I do better with history and geopolitics as well, my point was just that no matter how "open" the so-called open models are, money is what matters and you have to be able to sell the model or associated infrastructure around it (in software terms but perhaps also hardware in the future) to keep your company going and to make money. There is no way around this.
> Americans largely view the world as “business as usual “, but you profoundly underestimate the animosity, concern, suspicion and outright fear other countries have now.
Sure, but on the other hand this exact comment has been parroted all over the Internet (which has little in common with what most people actually think) on select forums of slightly more intelligent than average people to the point where the extent to which Americans view business as usual is being underestimated we can also say that random people on the Internet trying to tell Americans they are so big mad at us is itself an overestimate of how people feel.
I'd also like to point out - which countries, exactly? And just how profoundly are they big mad at the US? If they are profoundly angry, concerned, suspicious, and fearful, and perhaps they are European, maybe we should immediately withdraw from NATO, withdraw military forces from Europe except where it benefits us directly, and we can remove sanctions on Russia because well Ukraine is in Europe and we want cheaper oil and gas here at home. After all, you can't simultaneously claim that there is all this distrust and then trust us to have armed soldiers in your countries.
There's a strong contradiction between rhetoric and action and it plays out very obviously at times like this. You see the same thing with big, grandiose statements from European leaders who want to talk tough and appear like they're "standing up" to Donald Trump, but behind closed doors it's always a different story.
> There is simply no way our entire infrastructure will be hooked up to an American “super intelligence” firm where the president calls every other Tuesday to extort a country. And failing to appreciate that leads to vastly more rosy ideas of the growth potential of OpenAI, Anthropic and others.
Yes but then you also can't be hooked up to, idk, Chinese "super intelligence" firms because they also can do that to you and have demonstrated that they will punish European countries for saying the wrong thing about their dear leader or whatever. You're also assuming that the United States will allow other countries to hook their infrastructure up to our AI infrastructure. It seems likely, but in terms of the latest, state of the art models and capabilities I'm not so sure that non-Americans will even be permitted to use those, at all.
If the promise of AI as being generally stated is true, it actually makes sense for Americans to have sole access to American AI technology so we can build and expand our businesses and maintain competitive advantages. China is also restricting models with fresh news as recently as last month on that front. Perhaps a likely scenario is that China and the United States simply come out on top and the rest of the world is left to suffer what it musts.
Another area that seems strange to me is the insistence (and honestly I think it's just a belief in how someone wants the world to be more than it likely will be) that American tech companies, run by some of the smartest people on the planet and investors, American ones who have been doing this for a long time and have access to incredibly deep capital and resources to evaluate companies are all somehow wrong about spending a trillion dollars or more (whatever the number is it's very large) on AI buildout. It just doesn't seem likely besides a typical boom/bust which is a healthy aspect of our economy. Somehow, they are all wrong and hey some Chinese companies released some open-weight models so I guess all of these people in America are totally wrong and everything will be free and open and run by China and somehow they won't build companies to make money they'll just work for free and release open-weight models and by the way Europe will never use American ones!
I'm just calling this to be all bullshit. Nobody is providing hard numbers and nobody seems to have an explanation as to why American companies can't if they want to just reverse engineer Chinese models if they were better. Let's say investors go out and lose their t-shirts on Anthropic and Open AI? Yea that sucks, so what? We'll just build more and better models. If China "gets ahead" we'll just do the same strategy to them that they seem to be doing to us.
Here's another question - why isn't Europe even in the topic of conversation about AI? Where are the companies? If the Chinese models are just cheap/easy to use or whatever why aren't we seeing a number of new AI startups? If you are going to accuse Americans of being unable to build and release open-weight models, what does that say about European companies?
This isn't a pro-American point of view, though I am pro-America (regardless of who is president). I just find the arguments put forth in this topic to be either of poor quality, or too strongly ideologically tainted.