US and China have a completely different mindset and culture on innovation. Here is an old Bunnie Huang’s TED talk video explaining the differences. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S39fhrGjr4U
People seem to miss the point that it‘s probably more about information than anything else. They know this shit isn‘t productive. Deep down, they know they‘re selling crap. But it produces tons of data from users. Silicon valley knows this best. That‘s why they „protect AI companies“. They just want to harvest the data themselves.
There really is no better way to obtain data. And it’s not just data that’s fed into the AI, but also strategies, methods and processes: ideally, these are incorporated directly into the software.
It doesn’t matter what pedo Trump does, nothing can save OpenAI or Anthropic from their own “dogshit unit economics”.
Zitron is a pinnacle of you can be smart and foul mouthed. Part of the reason he succeeds at this is he actually knows where to properly put cusses in sentences and doesn’t overuse them (like me, for instance).
There was evidence part of the reason people gravitated to Trump was that his foul and odious way of speaking seemed more “honest” because of the vulgarity. As someone who worked in local television news for 10 years, I can say that I think that’s true because it was always so clear that our newscasters were putting on a show and often had very few feelings whatsoever about what they were reporting on, or worse, genuinely were dismissive and cold to people in real tragedy. People have responded to that over time by realizing that all that faux-professionalism just really comes off as covering your ass and/or just using buzzwords to sound like you know how anything works at all when you don’t. It doesn’t come off as sincere, knowledgeable or, most importantly passionate.
When we heard Bernie Sanders, AOC, or Mamdani speak, we can hear the passion they have in the way they speak. When we hear Centrist Dems like Chuck Schumer speak, we automatically hear the work of strategy to get people on their side, not that they really believe or care about what they’re doing. I don’t hear passion in Schumer’s voice for anything but Israel. Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, you can hear that passion that they have for citizens and protecting and lifting them up.
Trump is passionate about himself and his followers are passionate about him, too, I guess. It’s that their is spurred by delusion and unaddressed mental health issues.
Anyway, people need to speak more plainly and with more passion, Zitron is a prime example of doing it well. Other than Doctorow and maybe WIRED, I don’t know of any other really hard hitting evidence-based journalism on this stuff, and Doctorow is a little bit too up his own ass on coining fucking words. (In my humble opinion, Doctorow comes off as way too extremely online to connect his ideas with regular people, he’s just too much of a fucking nerd who can’t stop being a nerd long enough to jive with average people)
Your writing is a pleasure to read. Thanks for this.
Propublica.
Good luck expanding that to the rest of the world which is just discovering that, while not perfect, China’s open weights models are
a) good enough for 95% or all companies out there
b) a lot cheaper, also because they’re
c) self-hostable, meaning: they’ll always be available, unlike U.S. cloud AI which you’ll be cut off from whenever Diaper Donnie feels it’s time for yet another bribe.If American models didn’t cost 100 times more…
He can ban deez nuts
USA can’t block the world from using it. So good luck trump. China is winning.
Frankly, this kind of meddling just makes it more appealing to use Chinese models. Chinese models are often open-weight, meaning that they’re basically immune to foreign meddling - if China decides tomorrow to “cut you off” you just need to find some other provider that’s offering those models and buy access from them instead. Or if you’re a big enough organization, just rent or buy some hardware and run it yourself.
This sort of meddling shows that the US government is eager to weaponize access to AI, and if you’re dependent on American models there are no other places you can run them.
Also the open models are not falling back to a worse model. Not like fable or sol are currently behaving.
This! The irony is that every attempt to turn AI into a geopolitical choke point becomes free marketing for open weight models. People tend to trust tools they can actually control. If access can vanish with a policy memo, resilience suddenly matters more than benchmark bragging.
Exact same strategy they used for Chinese EVs… head in the sand while China steals their global marketshare. I still get a chuckle when Americans paint Chinese EVs as poor/lesser quality.
It still gives US producers a captive market for a while. It’s just protectionism and picking local champions, something that governments are never good at.