All that money couldn’t pay for a better human suit?
Oh boy, when dedolarization comes, it’s going to hit the US like a wall of radioactive bricks.
The thing is the West and China are not really using AI in the same way so saying we are in a race with them is incorrect and using old Cold War tactics to scare the West into spending more money on this technology.
Example of the differences:
The US and China are taking very different paths in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence. In the US, innovation has largely focused on large language models (LLMs) and the virtual world, resulting in chatbots, image generators, and digital assistants like ChatGPT and Copilot. These tools have captured the imagination of both consumers and investors, but questions are now emerging about their real economic value. A recent MIT study, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, found that while more than 80% of organizations are experimenting with generative AI, only about 5% of pilots are delivering measurable value. Most remain stuck in early phases, hindered by fragile workflows, poor integration, and a lack of systemic readiness. Meanwhile, informal ‘shadow AI’ usage, that is employees using tools outside official channels, has exploded, thereby creating a mismatch between official adoption and actual productivity gains.
By contrast, China’s approach to AI is more grounded in real-world applications. As Chinese economist Andy Xie recently explained on Tegenlicht, AI development in China is focused on practical domains such as mining, electric vehicles, and industrial efficiency. Unlike the high-cost, high-hype American model, China’s AI strategy emphasizes low-cost, scalable technology that delivers tangible utility. This makes it particularly attractive to the Global South, where cost and accessibility often outweigh cutting-edge innovation. A striking example is DeepSeek, a Chinese open-source chatbot that was developed with limited funding and no ties to elite academic institutions. Despite this, it is 10× more energy-efficient than OpenAI’s models and is already being integrated into consumer products like cars.
https://freedomlab.com/posts/the-ai-narrative-divide-between-the-us-and-china
Paging Luigi…
Thats why NASDAQ recently updated rules to allow faster entry into index funds. SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI all will get into index funds and 401k’s in 15 days from their IPO now, which means their price collapse will use our retirement accounts as a cushion. Which is pretty on-par for these people.
Can’t wait for every index to have spacex and other ai companies so the retirement funds I can’t change the investments for without taking a massive tax hit can have their value diverted into the pockets of the richest men in the world.
This is not about China. This is about private equity being so desperate for money they want new laws that allow the shadow PE banking system access to government money. Tax payer money.
Be very careful around this topic. Reading headlines isn’t going to cut it and this is very dangerous territory.
The house of cards needs money urgently. Your money and they are done asking nicely.
Not just tax payer money, your money, your personal savings.
They’re going to burn it all and then oh too bad, it’s too big to bailout so fuck you American people! Keep working in servitude till you die at your post.
No shit it’s not about China. The China argument has whatever threat level is convenient at the moment, which is why we couldn’t possibly give any chips to China, until actually Nvidia kind of wants to send chips to china because they want that money too. If it was a real threat, the messaging would have any sort of fucking consistency.
I just want to see billions vs 20… one at a time like civilized people. each billionaire+ must defend their life/money by physically fighting every human on earth… one by one.
Fucking vultures!
Probably, yeah. I wouldn’t put it past them.
Release the files!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJeFrqBJF6E
Carlin was only 2 decades early
Yeah, he was right on the money. Too bad he was a night club comedian and not a senator with a strong ethical foundation and a chip on his shoulder.
AI is a fascist scam.
As an aside, these types love to see ML development as a money problem: the more you throw at it, the more results you get.
That’s not how it’s been working in practice, though.
More resource constrained companies have gotten thrifty or creative. They’re forced to be efficient and realistic, and to look at interesting papers to fold into their stuff.
At the other extreme, there’s mounting anecdotes that Meta, XAI, and maybe others are spending many man hours simply trying to scale across huge clusters, or even giving GPUs “busywork” to meet resource utilization contracts. That they’re using old architectures. They’re using orders of magnitude more resources to make just slightly better models than small, cheap ones. And even if that’s overblown, their leaders are making terrible decisions, with nutty machinations, and aren’t getting punished for it because they have too much money.
It’s also fueling literal sociopaths like Altman as they do their best to snuff out competition.
All this capital is poisoning the AI space in the US. And it’s going to the wrong places.
Regardless of how everyone feels about “AI,” I believe most of the US is going to fall behind because of this. Except maybe Google.
Counterpoint, America has essentially brute-forced its way into every major technical advancement it has made in the past 100 years.
Last game-breaking invention that didn’t adhere to this was probably out of the industrial revolution.
Atomic bomb? Throw some money at it.
Computers/Transistors? Throw some money at it.
Space race (and everything from it)? Throw some money at it.
Everything to ever come out of Bell Labs? Throw some money at it.
Honestly Bell is a unique case in industry monopolies. They put tons into R&D despite having practically 0 competition.
Point is, it’s worked well for us so far, and nobody seems to realize that the bulk of America’s success in the past 100 years was actually due to pure blind luck because the entire rest of the northern hemisphere was rebuilding from war. Why change now?
Remember when transistors were invented, and the rest of the world shrugged and said “we lost the race” and then never invented them and still plow fields by horse and candlelight?
Of course not.
Framing this as a race introduces the idea that if you don’t win you’re fucked. As if time stops. It’s a bad metaphor and it only serves to undermine rational thinking. It’s designed to convince people they need to sacrifice something. Datacenters spiked your electricity bill? That’s ok because we have to win.
The space race is pretty similar. Also worth pointing out that by every metric besides man foot+moon, the USSR won. First suborbital flight? Orbital? Satellite? Animal in space? Man in space? Moon flyby? Moon landing? USSR. Did the USA quit? Did it matter?
You can throw money at whatever you want. Framing it as a race is nonsense designed to convince people to work against thier own interests so someone else can get rich.
I think the “race” part of it is somewhat necessary as long as we have a world that revolves around a handful of economic powerhouse nation-states.
It’s a conditional requirement of capitalism. If we were unified in working towards the advancement of humanity as a whole, money be damned…sure, that’d be great. Got a little work to do before we’re there, though. In the meantime, we’re competing towards pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. And yeah, that will always mean that the individual loses out, because dollars gotta come from somewhere.
But as long as we have a capitalistic society, we are always going to be at odds with the competition, i.e. China, which means no cooperation.
Furthermore, they seem to be way better at not giving a fuck about stealing IP than we are…if we make something, they clone it and make it cheap, but that never, ever happens in reverse.
Partly because they are a bit better equipped at this point for obtaining raw materials (to put it lightly) and they have a much less expensive labor force (to put it lightly).
China is where it is very explicitly because it spent a lot of time not trying to win any race. They’re still not trying to win it.
It’s massively more cost effective to fast follow in the wake of whomever is breaking new ground. Orders of magnitude.
China has been strategically losing races. Over and over. They understand there is no value in getting there first if you can be there 6 months later cheaper.
The race is made up. It’s an excuse to fuck YOU. YOU.
That’s fair, but in all those cases I think money was flowing to the right engineers, and the resources they need.
That’s not what’s happening now.
Yes, to be competitive, keeping our people (checks notes) GREAT, we need to access the very money that they already don’t have enough of to live safely in later life.
China wins
