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by adventured 1129 days ago
Along that line re Moore's Law, the biggest clear advantage the US has in regards to AI, is: Nvidia, AMD, Intel (and obviously particularly Nvidia up to this point, although AMD and Intel are producing some potent GPUs).

The reason the US was able to pull off a leap forward via OpenAI or LLaMa, is due to having Nvidia as basically a national treasure, but it's an integrated whole, the US has all the components necessary and the ecosystem that produces all the components (including talent, thought process, money, start-ups, pay scale (to lure talent)).

The Europeans have never lacked for the brains side of being able to do it, certainly. Until they fill out the rest of the ecosystem they won't be able to really compete in AI (they'll lag far behind, with lots of blaming and empty promises big government projects). And China is its own worst enemy these days, all we need is for Xi to remain in power indefinitely and he'll throttle their potential as a global competitor.

The US is close to locking up another round in the tech wars, riding on the same approach that has served it so well since WW2. Hopefully our do-something legislators are hands off long enough (ie don't snatch defeat from the jaws of victory).

3 comments

And data!! Don't forget that all the large accumulators of raw data available for commercially-supported research is in the US. A brutal combo of all 3: hardware data and competence available in one country. China has two of the 3, and until recently had free access to hardware, too. Europeans lack data and hardware.
Deepmind was literally founded in the UK and is headquartered in London.

Comercially supported research is (in my opinion) relatively OK in Europe, its just that the big US tech companies are so big they'll just buy you if you do something sufficiently interesting.

> including talent, thought process, money, start-ups, pay scale (to lure talent)

...and a culture of risk-taking and ambition to change the world.

Yeah I tried to cover that with the start-ups implication. The US has that in spades in regards to aggressively funding start-ups by the zillions when a new tech inflection hits (whether software, Web, mobile, cloud and now AI). The VCs always go overboard, which is ideal (billions in destroyed capital is meaningless compared to producing the next Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc).
Couldn't agree more!
But Nvidia’s GPUs are sold all over the world … how is that an advantage to the Americans?
Going forward the top AI chips will not be available in every country — particularly China.