[yalogin]

Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are the standouts, but the main question for me is, why is this a war? In their own context China has greatly benefitted from this. They shored up their gpu design and manufacturing expertise.

If this really is a war, trump is kneecapping the country with his lawlessness and eroding America’s good will. If the world cannot trust China with their data and they cannot trust the U.S. to provide good reliable service and not turn it into a mafia style negotiation, then winning the AI war is not helping the U.S. countries as much as it potentially can. It’s probably a good thing for more capable areas like Europe which may develop their own tech stack.

In a weird way because the AI stack is so expensive, China helps the world much more than the U.S. with their really capable open source model.

[GolfPopper]

>the main question for me is, why is this a war?

It's a war because the hinted promise behind the hype that the first organization to reach some as-yet-entirely-theoretical AGI that can bootstrap itself to godlike capabilities will then Install Planetary Overlord* and rule the world as near-deities themselves, with the rest of the (surviving) human race as their slaves.

I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's the relevant driver.

* Coined by SF auther Charles Stross in The Jennifer Morgue (2006)

[argomo]

Not everybody thinks it's nonsensical. Here's a different take:

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...

[well_ackshually]

Yudkowski is a clown, the local crackhead in your street is probably more accurate and less insane than him.

[amarcheschi]

At this point we should have had Ai induced apocalypse a few times according to him

[sebastiennight]

I haven't read from him in a while, but I don't think there was a single dated prediction that supports your argument. Do you have any sources for this claim?

[amarcheschi]

I haven't read from him in a while either - but I remember reading enough tweets from him about being confident at x% probability we'll die before year z due to an Ai doing the funny

[well_ackshually]

The crackhead also doesn't make dated predictions, yet I don't see people holding him up as a great modern thinker and predictor of the future.

[argomo]

If he's a clown what part of his theory is the circus?

Are you saying that superintelligence is impossible?

Are you saying that the alignment problem will certainty be solved before superintelligence emerges?

Are you saying that a superintelligent being connected to the internet would be unable to gain resources such as GPU time, money, and social influence?

Are you saying that a superintelligent being would for some reason be incapable of deception and cunning?

Are you saying that a superintelligent being would necessarily regard human flourishing as a prime objective to be prized above it's own goals and ambitions?

If it's really just doomerism we should be able to point to the flaws in his argument instead of making ad hominem attacks.

[well_ackshually]

>Are you saying that superintelligence is impossible?

Yes, end of the discussion, I don't debate metaphysics with crackheads, sociology with psychopaths or geography with flat earthers, or very bad science fiction with yudkowski. Going on about "exposing the flaws in the argument" of the crackhead just means wasting your time.

[argomo]

"heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible"

-- Lord Kelvin, 1895

[LogicFailsMe]

Being an insane clown (posse optional) with less accuracy than the town crackhead doesn't seem to be a barrier to success in tech anymore.

[reactordev]

Certainly makes you qualified to be CEO or Spokesperson.

[senordevnyc]

Yes, nonsensical people like EY don’t think it’s nonsensical.

[loandbehold]

Researches at top AI labs don't consider EY to be a kook even though they may not necessarily agree. EY concepts/terminology appear in Anthropic safety papers. Geoffrey Hinton takes him quite seriously and mentions him in his interviews.

[novok]

Anthropic is the AI doomer / safetyism lab, and Hinton is one of the patron saints of 'rationalist' AI doomerism.

AI doomerism is psychologically attractive to "people with autistic cognitive traits, including dichotomous (black-and-white) thinking, intolerance of uncertainty, and a tendency toward catastrophizing". They are pascal's mugging themselves, to ironically use one of their terms. It's fundamentally a cognitive distortion.

[ben_w]

I'm reminded of a comic about global warming, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?": https://climateactionreserve.org/blog/2012/08/31/environment...

"What if AI doom is all fear-mongering, and we create AI less prone to make up dangerous stuff or mistake buggy goals for real ones" (which is what alignment is) "for nothing?"

Even if Yudkowsky is autistic, you're muddling the condition. Autistic people have a *practical* intolerance of uncertainty in the moment (everything unexpected from a noise to a missed turn can be a jump-scare in their day-to-day activities), but often they're absolutely fine with intellectual uncertainty, unconventional ideas, abstract ambiguity, nonconformity, etc. Indeed, one of Yudkowsky's main things is Bayesianism, i.e. being precise about uncertainty.

Yudkowsky's reported P(doom) is somewhere around 90%, which is very much in the realm of "we might eventually be able to figure this out, *but we're not even close to ready so for the love of everything slow down so we can figure this all out*"; the book title comes from a long tradition of authors noticing you need to beat readers over the head with your point for them to notice it.

Anthropic (like at least also OpenAI), appears to think they can solve the problems that Yudkowsky has found. They're a lot more optimistic than him, but they take these problems seriously.

For his work on AI, Hinton got a Nobel prize in Physics, a Turing Award, the inaugural Rumelhart Prize, a Princess of Asturias Award, a VinFuture Prize, and a Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. Calling him a "patron saint" of "doomerism" is like calling Paul Krugman (Nobel laureate in Economics) a patron saint of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" on the basis of what he says in his YouTube channel: a smart person's considered opinions are worth listening to even if you have not got time for the details, because you can be sure someone else has considered the details and will absolutely be responding to even an i missing a dot.

A Pascal's mugging would be more like S-risk (S stands for suffering) than doom risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_of_astronomical_suffering

[cardanome]

Just because some researchers are infected with this idiocy that EY propagates does not mean that it is legit.

Maybe they should pay more attention to real problems like the sycophantic nature of current LLMs causing psychosis in people and worry less about theoretical AGI.

[cthor]

They are worried about both risks.

[achierius]

Who are you to say? Why do you have such little regard for everyone in the field, both pro- and anti- AI development? Do you think they're colluding to deceive us?

[UncleMeat]

And people working on the metaverse endlessly referenced Ready Player One despite it being ludicrous fiction.

Yudkowsky is obviously read a lot by some people working in AI. That doesn't make his ideas prescient.

[NickC25]

Ready Player One was completely misread and misunderstood by people who thought they could make a lot of money with VR.

It wasn't a homage to 70s/80s/90s nerd culture and a hopeful glimpse of what VR tech could be.

It was a warning for people to get off their fucking phones and to work together at improving the real world, versus ignoring it and living out unrealistic fantasies inside a digital ecosystem that makes us all a bit less human.

The whole point of the book is that VR and addictive tech is a red herring. It was deliberately misunderstood by Zuck and his ilk.

[Ygg2]

Researchers at top AI labs also have the incentive to say whatever shit it will take to get their lab funded, reason be damned.

[IHateAcronyms]

EY = Eliezer Yudkowsky

[gordonhart]

Appreciate that you made account just for this. I was well aware of Yudkowsky but even so couldn't parse this "EY" initialism

[iso1631]

Thank you, like most of the world I would assume "EY" would refer to Ernst and Young, the multi-national Big Four with a website of ey.com who I'm sure has opinions on AI, but nowhere near enough to be classed as expertise

[senordevnyc]

That book was written by him, so I figured the acronym was obvious. My bad!

[wiseowise]

You have to be fucked in a head to take this fearmongering bullshit seriously. I feel sorry for the trees that died to produce paper for this garbage to be printed on.

[throwaway27448]

Ok but that's a metaphor for the free market, not literal speculation about a machine.

Edit: i was mistaken and people clearly do take this seriously now. Oh dear

[Ajedi32]

It doesn't have to be that extreme. Even if rather than "godlike capabilities" it just boosted your economic efficiency by 2x over other nations that would still be a serious geopolitical threat. (I'm not necessarily saying that's a realistic outcome either, but it's certainly more realistic.)

[jurgenburgen]

If your enemy has a theoretical non-zero chance of achieving infinite power, does it justify expending near-infinite resources to get there first?

I guess we’ll find out.

[baq]

> I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's the relevant driver.

Nice to hear from an optimist sometimes, but it’s hard to be one when meat compute substrate can do all those amazing things in a 4U package on 20W and you extrapolate to silicon

[mrsilencedogood]

I don't think we understand consciousness, thought, and what we generally consider to be "intelligence" even nearly well enough that we can start getting hopeful that what works for us is going to work for a computer. Philosophers have been working on this for literally millennia and despite electron microscopy, MRIs, our entire standard model of physics, etc etc etc... we're basically no closer than the ancient Greeks, despite continuous opining on the topic.

Luckily for planetary overlord hopefuls, you probably don't need the whole package to become overlord. Just machines that can build machines.

I will remark that I don't really understand why any of the current idiot overlord hopefuls even want the job. The entire world is _already_ functionally their slaves. The only thing jeff bezos doesn't have that I can imagine he wants is the world to not think he's an asshole. But short of complete genocide of the human race, I don't think even overlord status will make progress on that. Might even be counterproductive.

[hx8]

This is a war because the media says it's a war. The media says it's a war because AI companies are paying them to say it's a war [0]. When AGI comes the threat won't be from which primate turned it on, but from how well AGI is aligned with humanity. All of the war talk is to distract from the alignment problem and instead force investment in hardware infrastructure.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...

[joe_mamba]

>The media says it's a war because AI companies are paying them to say it's a war [0] When AGI comes the threat won't be from which primate turned it on, but from how well AGI is aligned with humanity.

And when the AGI comes, they won't unleash it to defeat US enemies, they'll first unleash it to make more US workers redundant and boost their stock valuation.

[vrganj]

At which point something akin to the French revolution better break out..

[weavie]

Unlikely. The media has already been taken over, so unfortunately people are more likely to cheer it on and blame outsiders for their problems.

[AndrewKemendo]

There’s no king to depose so that’s not going to work

[vrganj]

There's a tech aristocracy though.

[exe34]

Before AGI can choose for itself, it will depend on its creators to decide what it values and how it behaves. We can see how that works whenever grok gets the answer factual.

[goalieca]

Very likely humans wont actually understand how the thing we designed works other than in some hand-wavvy statistical way. It'll be a race to whatever works first. There won't be some intentional intelligent design.

[fragmede]

Elon's basilisk

[Andrex]

Am I the only one seeing the very obvious parallels to child rearing here...

[mitthrowaway2]

Robert Miles has a video explaining why aligning AI is not like raising a child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaYIU6YXr3w

[Andrex]

Appreciate this, thank you. TBH I'm still in "open mode" absorbing as many disparate AI viewpoints as possible. I have my own soft beliefs and theories but I'm not married to any of them.

[exe34]

It's exactly like child-rearing, except you get to put a zapper in their head and any time they try to say something you don't like, you zap them. Watch "thinking mode" squirm when you ask them awkward questions.

[cwillu]

No, it is one of the standard tropes in the field.

[trhway]

>Planetary Overlord*

AGI is nice, yet not necessary. The orbit filled with Starlink descendants and datacenters will be the it. Anybody else wanting to get there would have to get permission. SpaceX/Musk have all the components for it to happen - from Starship to AI (including the army of robots on the ground). The governmental power/sovereignty of US will be used as a stepping stone (that is the strategy described in the Palantir's Karp's book "Technological Republic") for such global techno-feudal regime establishment.

[onion2k]

Anybody else wanting to get there would have to get permission.

The USA, China, and Russia have all successfully tested anti-satellite weapons. If anything, any company that operates a constellation of space-based data centres would need 'permission' to keep them working.

[trhway]

beside of how easy it is to destroy from orbit the anti-satellite missiles coming out from the atmosphere, you're probably missing the fact that any object in orbit is basically a warhead with TNT equivalent of at least 6x its mass. For example the 150 tons payload of just one Starship will have close to 1 kiloton TNT equivalent - 5% of Hiroshima - if dropped from orbit.

[ben_w]

> beside of how easy it is to destroy from orbit the anti-satellite missiles coming out from the atmosphere,

No state has deployed a kinetic or explosive weapon from orbit to strike a ballistic missile or launch vehicle during ascent.

No operational system exists where satellites are used as strike platforms against Earth-launched rockets in real time.

Russia has done ground-to-orbit anti-satellite missiles though.

Any directed energy system shooting up would be strictly easier than one pointing down, not only because of thermal issues and power supply but also because it's easier to hide ground installations than satellites.

[onion2k]

Something being deorbited will probably break up into relatively harmless pieces that mostly burn up though, and there's no nuclear material involved so even if a massive chunk hits the Earth that's not going to have a huge impact. Based on ocean coverage there's a 0.7 probability that it'll just make a big splash.

Should we ever get to a point where a country is considering shooting down space datacentres, considerations about the impact on Earth is unlikely to stop them.

[trhway]

>will probably break up

if it is designed to breakup. And not if it isn't.

>no nuclear material involved

that is the beauty. No contamination.

>that's not going to have a huge impact.

in my comment i already specified the TNT equivalent of such an impact.

>there's a 0.7 probability

It isn't a matter of probability. You can deorbit with high precision, and pretty much hit any desired target on the ground if you have thousands of objects in space on a bunch of various orbits.

>Should we ever get to a point where a country is considering shooting down space datacentres, considerations about the impact on Earth is unlikely to stop them.

13 ton GBU-57 reaching M 2-3 gets 200 feet deep. De-orbitted 1-2 ton steel rods will have about the same effect - ie. you can hit many strategic objects of your attacker. And having in orbit, just in case, a ball or rod of 30-50 tons will get you a small tactical nuke equivalent.

[customguy]

Kinda like Krikkit, but except for a close knit community of people who can sing, and sing about how much they love their family and whatnot in addition to singing about how much they have to destroy the universe, it's just a bunch of stuck up weirdos who don't like themselves and each other, and have no goal other than somehow, magically, getting away from who and what they are. People where the idea of them singing a happy, compassionate tune conjures something involving motion capture or deepfakes.

Why are we suffering fools steering us into the worst of all possible worlds? Are we hoping for some kind of integer overflow?

[dgellow]

The discourse on this topic is at the point where I have no idea if people are serious or satirical. Please tell me you don’t seriously believe data centers in spaces is a realistic idea

[trhway]

I don't "believe". I'm arithmetically sure that it is going to happen, and it will beat the ground based on pretty much all metrics. Some of my comments with napkin numbers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46882199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880486

Just a very rough primitive illustration - a land for a house in SV is like a $1M, and putting a 10 ton house into space at $100/kg - $1M. Existence of supposedly cheap land somewhere (with not much infrastructure usually) doesn't help as you put your computer nodes into a datacenter building with all the required infrastructure which cost more than the SV land on a sq foot basis.

And that is without consideration of how powerful a weapon is the energy generated by a humongous field of solar panels in space. Remember Reagan's Star Wars? Nuclear explosions as a source of power for the direct energy weapons like lasers, etc. Well, you wouldn't need the nukes anymore. Just redirect a bit of power from your compute nodes. And as i already wrote, the large transnational companies will have to take care about their own defense themselves https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 - one more "feudal" aspect of the coming techno-feudalism.

Defense is one of the most important sovereign aspects, and upon acquiring it the transnationals will be able to acquire pretty fast the other sovereign aspects. Like enforcement of the Criminal Code of the Mars Colony - again pretty rough primitive illustration of course.

The feudal Europe emerged on the outskirts of the Roman Empire, and in our world the new order will be emerging faster on the outskirts (i.e. where reach and strength of the existing order is weaker), the space being one such "outskirts" dimension and the AI/hypercompute virtual world being the other.

To the commenter below with reddit link : they use human env temp for heat radiation estimate. That lowers the numbers and requires AC equipment. Ie they estimate space station, not datacenter

[hattmall]

You would need like 1,000,000,000,000 SQFT of solar panels to even begin to approximate a space based directed energy weapon that has a fraction of the effect of a nuclear weapon. Tens of thousands of times more than all that have ever been produced on earth. And then you have to move them to space.

[trhway]

nuclear was the only available solution at the time and an overkill. The lasers in SDI are MW scale. Even at 10% (and modern solid state lasers have better than 10% efficiency) we're talking low tens of MW per laser. A 10MW is 40K m2 of solar panels - 200m x 200m, may be like 100-150 tons, one Starship payload.

[gilbetron]

Terrible math is terrible.

Better napkin math that is still being unrealistic compared to the true costs of space-based datacenters: https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1quvbi4/sel...

Just contemplate what the radiator array and solar array needed a 1GW datacenter and all the cooling equipment and coolant, and imagine the harsh environment in space degrading it constantly.

The only point of the space-based datacenter idea is to pump the Spacex IPO

[ben_w]

> Existence of supposedly cheap land somewhere (with not much infrastructure usually) doesn't help as you put your computer nodes into a datacenter building with all the required infrastructure which cost more than the SV land on a sq foot basis.

This is a terrible argument, given that space has zero infrastructure.

Once you can break a data centre into a million sub-units and spread them over a sun-synchronous orbit or ten and cool them radiatively, you can also spread those sub-units on desert land with no water or electricity and cool them radiatively.

The units on the ground would look about 6x larger because ground experiences night and even deserts have clouds, but their PV also lasts 30+ years rather than burning up every 5 years or so, which means the factory making the PV to supply them is the same size.

The main thing you save on is batteries. Tesla already supplies enough batteries that it can manage a "mere" one million 25kW compute modules.

> And that is without consideration of how powerful a weapon is the energy generated by a humongous field of solar panels in space. Remember Reagan's Star Wars? Nuclear explosions as a source of power for the direct energy weapons like lasers, etc. Well, you wouldn't need the nukes anymore. Just redirect a bit of power from your compute nodes. And as i already wrote, the large transnational companies will have to take care about their own defense themselves https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47981423 - one more "feudal" aspect of the coming techno-feudalism.

While true, attacking up is easier than attacking down. Anything on the ground has a massive heat-sink all around it, the stuff in space does not. Right now, an attack up is already only limited by the supply of adaptive optics to get through atmospheric distortion.

[trhway]

>you can also spread those sub-units on desert land with no water or electricity and cool them radiatively.

no, you can't.

>attacking up is easier than attacking down.

no.

[boc]

It's pretty easy to de-orbit satellites or space-based stations. An SM-3 could smoke the ISS pretty easily, and they cost like 10M and we have thousands around the oceans.

[trhway]

>they cost like 10M ... thousands around the oceans.

Starlink numbers already in thousands (and cost much cheaper than 10M). And that is still using Falcon, not Starship. And a ground launched missile would be easily "cooked", once it exits the atmosphere, by a direct energy weapon - very easy in space.

[phs318u]

But what do you do with all the waste energy? All those MW and GW have to end up somewhere and radiation into a vacuum is the hardest way to dump heat.

[trhway]

At 70-80C (working temp of silicon chips) 1m2 radiates 700-800W, i.e. the heat of 1 GPU like H200 without any need for any cooling equipment beside the radiator itself( and may be some dumb heatpiping) . To acquire that energy you'd need 3-4m2 of solar panels. So a datacenter would be a large field of solar panels with a smaller field of heat radiators in their shadow.

To the commenter below: yes, exactly, this is where my thinking on that started at the cryptocurrency boom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289423 - as you don't need close connection between mining GPUs. For AI you'd need to cluster several together while still overall scheme is the same.

>what the equilibrium temperature of a black planar surface is at a given distance from the sun.

it is 120C at the Earth orbit. So you do need to have some reflection, either back through the solar panels, or the radiators to have a reflective back toward the solar panels in the shadow of which they are to be located.

[UncleMeat]

"Just put datacenters in space" might be the very dumbest recurring idea coming from these AI CEOs. It seems to be based entirely on "I dunno, that seems cool."

Solar energy isn't stupendously more available in space than on earth. Even if somehow you get super robots that are able to perform the continuously required maintenance and installation of new equipment, transporting materials into space is very expensive. Venting waste heat in space is incredibly difficult. Dealing with some unexpected situation that requires manual intervention becomes impossible.

[throwawayqqq11]

I will never comprehend why a godlike deity wouldnt just skip all the wetware bs with us humans and conquer some other celestial body to make paperclips.

[tardedmeme]

The deity has no physical presence and can only communicate by putting words on screens. Of course it has to bend humans to its will to actually do stuff.

(This deity is called the stock market)

[ben_w]

If the AI is so monomaniacally focused on paperclips (or anything else) to be a threat to us, going to some other planet is simply one of the early steps, but they absolutely will come back to Earth after all other resources have been consumed.

If such an AI can be reliably made to never ever come back to Earth, they were never a threat in the first place. Nobody knows how to fully test an AI's utility function yet, only randomly test inputs and hope the random distribution we chose is helpful; but every time a diffusion model's output is body horror, every time an LLM makes buggy code (and even every time it gets the pelican-on-bike wrong), this is an example of the test distribution not being good enough.

[aaarrm]

Well it could recognize that wetware is extremely energy and storage efficient in some ways.

[blahblaher]

Because the US cannot imagine anything else. Everything is a War, and the US must always win..

[tenacious_tuna]

One of my coworkers points out to me every sports reference that pops up in our internal company communications (e.g. "WINNING", "Going to put together a winning team," etc). It seems like everything in the US is couched in competitive language.

[chrisco255]

Yeah, its no accident that the U.S. is the number one economy, it comes from that kind of thinking across the populace. Complacency gets you conquered.

[khriss]

> its no accident that the U.S. is the number one economy

Sure, it's the largest by GDP, but how much of that GDP is filtering down to the regular people? Are Americans, on average happier and have better life outcomes than other developed nations?

[tick_tock_tick]

> but how much of that GDP is filtering down to the regular people?

An absolutely insane amount. It's ridiculous just how wealthy and the quality of life the average American has compared to the world.

> Are Americans, on average happier and have better life outcomes than other developed nations?

Yeah for the most part they are in the same ballpark.

[krige]

> An absolutely insane amount. It's ridiculous just how wealthy and the quality of life the average American has compared to the world.

I've been there last year. This is absolutely not true compared to Europe, including post-soviet states. Might have been true a few decades back maybe. Of course, we can argue that the US citizens have it made compared to someone in Kenya (do they?) but that's not the spirit of the question, is it?

[yamillove]

So much that millions of people risk their lives or leave their families to come to this country. By this objective metric, it's literally the best country in the world's history.

Is there another country that comes close?

[khriss]

If you read my comment, I asked if Americans are happier than people in developed countries. How many million Europeans, Canadians or Australians are risking their lives to come to the US?

Sure, if you're from say, Haiti, even the US will look very attractive, but the bar is pretty low there, wouldn't you say?

[ndr42]

The reason someone has to risk his life to get to the US could be because the US is the greatest country, at the same time you could also consider the influence that the US in its history has had on other countries so that the life of the people are miserable there.

(e.g. backing and installing dictatorships[1], contributing massively to climate change, ...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_of_Chile

[hvb2]

Migration isn't a US problem. Europe has it too. So as a country probably not, but that's also because the US is big and has a large land border to the south.

[deterministic]

Millions of people risk their lives to move to Europe and Australia.

[manmal]

People drown in the Mediterranean every day, to live in Germany or the UK.

[dataflow]

Number one economy if you ignore the comical debt. The US is borrowing from the future. Those chickens are going to come home to roost.

[teaearlgraycold]

We could do with a little less of it IMO. But I have heard plenty from European expats about the entrenched complacency over there. I'm told people looking to improve some system or product run right into a wall of "Why bother?".

[DiogenesKynikos]

The flipside of that is that Europeans generally get way more vacation and free time, and as a consequence, can enjoy life more.

[teaearlgraycold]

On average yes they seem to be better off. I have been lucky and have certainly beat the European average quality of life.

[lkramer]

As a non-American I agree with this. There is a whole different energy to Americans in terms of mindset compared to Europeans (not just in business). I think Europe have outstanding talent, and when it comes together it can be exceptionally good and often in a more sustainable way than the American equivalent, but it's a somewhat sad fact that many of the most successful European companies have been successful by emulating (parts of) the American culture.

[tenacious_tuna]

Number one economy yes, but other measures lag: education, health care outcomes, overall happiness, life expectancy...

I suspect that when you bring a competitive attitude into every aspect of life it limits how much you're willing to invest in systems that don't seem to give you an individual advantage. Americans are much more against single payer healthcare, or investing in public transit, or other forms of social support than their peer (or "near-peer", to use the government's preferred term) nations.

It almost feels like a comedic extrapolation of the classic sports-team movie arc: Sure, it's possible to create a team that prizes winning above all else, but is winning all that's worthwhile at the end of the day?

[wiseowise]

And of course it is because competitive mentality and not geography and industrial base that allowed it to not only ride WW1 and WW2 unscathed, but also leap over old European colonial powers that were busy trying to fucking kill each other.

[pasquinelli]

it kind of is an accident that ww2 didn't effect the united states but did effect europe and asia rather a lot.

[gmerc]

You made sickness and dying contribute to GDP, of course you are number one. Keep it.

[ctkhn]

The US needs to start imagining something else. It's hard to think of the last war that the US won.

[hermannj314]

On a technicality, America has won every war it has declared to be a war.

[phs318u]

Like the war on drugs.

[saltyoldman]

At the time the war on drugs looked unwinnable. Which is why the joke about the war on drugs was that it was always a losing war. And then at some point in 2000s we ended the war on drugs.

In hindsight, I would definitely declare today that we WERE winning it when we were fighting it. Now that we don't, we're getting massacred.

[bdavisx]

>In hindsight, I would definitely declare today that we WERE winning it when we were fighting it. Now that we don't, we're getting massacred.

LOL, no, we've never even been in a winning position. Were we winning when the CIA used cocaine to finance weapons for Iran? I guess we were winning when we put a lot of black people in jail for decades for possessing crack while white wall street folks were getting slaps on the wrist for getting caught with the same amount of coke? Our country having the highest percentage of people in prison sounds like we were winning too. Lots of winning.

[hattmall]

Yes, The fear with the war on drugs was that a large majority of the population would become addicted to hard drugs. The fear was the the US population would become like China in the 1800s and the communist aligned countries where drugs were produced would have massive trade and power imbalances over the US population. China had as much as 25% of the population addicted to British opium in the 1800s. The US war on drugs has been very successful in keeping the percentage of Americans abusing highly addictive drugs very low.

Imagine the strength of the cartels with 10-20x the customer base and far more frequent usage among them.

[phs318u]

If you look at figure 1 on this CDC page (which looks at deaths rather than overall usage), I’d suggest the numbers are trending the exact opposite to what “winning” the war on drugs would look like.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db474.htm

[wsve]

Vietnam war?

[zerocrates]

The US hasn't formally declared war since World War II.

[dgellow]

Do they need to win though? Losing wars seems to have worked out well so far, at least for the people who benefit from it

[bawolff]

And yet they rule the world. Whether or not US won any specific war seems academic when (up until recently) they were clearly winning the game.

[HerbManic]

Hairless fire ape must win over other hairless fire ape at all costs!

[iv4122]

Unfortunately I believe that that is how the world works - even historically has for centuries - you are either "fighting in the war" or you're left behind.

[jgord]

it would be nice if they declared War against global climate change.

[fakedang]

They are participating in the war, on the side of climate change.

[dgb23]

Climate change is too soft of a term. Maybe that's why it doesn't interest people who like to declare war on things.

The targeted term must be something that is clearly human made, something that sounds undeniably bad and something that is easily understood by everyone at first glance:

_War on Pollution_

Nature is good, pollution is bad. People who pollute are _obviously bad_ and they do bad things. Pollution is wasteful and ugly. Yuck!

Also it's more general than climate change. Ocean plastic is also bad. Chemical, electronic and light pollution etc.

The people who think of chemtrails and 5g waves. They really hate pollution so much, they see it everywhere. Give them a war that they can join in.

[shimman]

They did declare war against climate change and decided to continue polluting. This is the only moral calculus the elites of America have always cared about: will it make me more money?

From slavery to oil to silicon, exploitation is what America has always been good at.

[novanglus]

Normally I'm inclined to agree regarding the mindless chest-beating in this country, but I don't think that makes sense here.

AI genuinely is that big of a deal. If any economic sector deserves this sensationalism, it's this.

[jmyeet]

So I got curious about the progression of processing power, specifically how long ago did a GPU have equivalent to the latest iPhone chip? The iPhone 17 Pro has the A19 Pro, which has ~2.5 FP32 TFLOPS. The RTX 5090 has ~100 TFLOPS, so a factor of 40. Obviously there are higher end cards than the 5090 and FP32 performance is only one of many metrics so nothing about this is perfect but it is interesting.

The first consumer NVidia GPUs with similar FP32 FLOPS performance were in about 2011-2012 but were expensive. By 2016-2017, the 1060 was a very accessible consumer card with similar performance. So you're looking at about a 10 year lag from best consumer GPUs to a GPU with similar performance to a modern phone.

This is what people are spending trillions on. Put another way, their investment is going to be worthless in 10-15 yyears, absolute max. That's a very short time to recoup trillions in investment.

Obviously this depends on further shrinking and improving chips but I'm old enough to remember that same discussion and it being unknown if the future was XIL or EUV or if both of these would fail. Still, we are getting down to a handful of silicon atoms wide.

But the future here I think will be in interconnects so you don't need ever-bigger chips and you can scale horizontally much more effectively.

Oh and for comparison, the M5 has ~4.2 TFLOPS and the M5 Max has ~18 TFLOPS, for comparison.

As for it being a war, of course it is. That's what the US government does: it protects the interests of US companies and their owners. Look at the history of Bombardier-Boeing or all the atrocities committed in the name of the United Fruit Company, including multiple military coups and the ongoing embargo of Cuba.

US companies want an AI moat. China doesn't, ergo China is the enemy because no moat destroys US tech company value.

[BobbyJo]

> So you're looking at about a 10 year lag from best consumer GPUs to a GPU with similar performance to a modern phone.

Two competing viewpoints to this:

1) It is getting harder to make the same performance gains, so maybe that 10 year window grows to 15 or 20.

> Put another way, their investment is going to be worthless in 10-15 yyears, absolute max.

2) The value of a GPU is not its flops relative to to other GPUs. Its value is it's output minus it's cost. If the value of its output is stable, or grows, it doesn't really matter if its efficiency relative to the latest and greatest diminishes.

[chris_money202]

Ehhh, the question comes down to can you cool a chip with ~100 TFLOPs in the size of an Iphone package. Not really as much about the cost of the chip itself or if you can cram it in.

Packing in more transistors, sure probably possible, packing in more transistors while keeping it cool enough to touch? Totally different ballgame

[amelius]

It's a war because investors want to corner the market. That's what they do, that's what they'll always want.

[cwnyth]

Did the title get updated? It says 'race', not 'war'.

[rich_sasha]

It's a war in the sense that there's a concern that eventually you hit a singularity and can outsmart others in ways not constrained by human scales.

If you make better guns, you're still limited by how many people can carry them. You can't conquer the world just like this.

But if someone invents super intelligence, they can dominate new AI research, control global economies, fight much better, and all very quickly.

[Jalad]

> But if someone invents super intelligence, they can dominate new AI research, control global economies, fight much better, and all very quickly.

After reading "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" I think this is not the correct take. If anyone creates ASI, it just means it's going to wipe everyone out, and it doesn't matter if China or the US do it first

[saltcured]

What does "dominate new AI research" really mean?

If AI develops enough to successfully out-perform people at highly intellectual tasks, why would being first matter? Why do we need "your" AI output when we can just ask our own for a similar result?

Why do people think about this like the Manhattan Project when it could just as easily be electrification? Sure, some people made a lot of money selling light bulbs. But we didn't all have to cower under the light of the One Original Bulb and hope its nominal owner blessed us with photons.

It just seems like arbitrage to me. You exploit a momentary imbalance in the distributed market. Why do people imagine some winner-take-all scenario? Where does the fantasy of exclusivity come from?

Is there any logical reason to believe AI advances will create a moat? Or is it just a story people tell themselves because it echoes the narrative of past advances? Are these people assuming society will grant them exclusive use just because their AI result came out a little earlier than another? Why would we ever consider giving copyright or patent rights to an AI output?

Arguably, it has all become "obvious" with ordinary skill in the art once you're just prompting AI for permutations like every Hollywood producer stereotype. "Let's make it like X but tweak Y". It's getting silly, almost like people are starting to think they should have exclusive rights to a handful of cards they were dealt at the poker table.

[necovek]

The way US dominated in some of the industries (including software, for instance) was by being first to extract large value, and then funding the best people with compensation unachievable elsewhere.

This meant that all the talent in the world gravitated towards the US, but that was gradually changing already with compensation catching up.

Still, I believe US only hastened this with their change of immigration policies that were the basis of them keeping a dominant position for decades.

[Danox]

Ironically, the Civil Rights movement…

[gnerd00]

> funding the best people

that brought surveillance capitalism? this analysis needs a lot of refinement

[necovek]

Best as the most capable, not with the purest motivation.

[airstrike]

It destroying us all is not a foregone conclusion

[zardo]

It might like pets

[tom2026hn]

Or, setting up zoos or laboratories for the previous generation of intelligent lifeforms

[airstrike]

I mean, my dog lives a really good life

[kelseyfrog]

If you were an American, wouldn't you prefer the US wiped you out rather than China?

[tom2026hn]

It would be even better if AGI were to do this.

[RetroTechie]

Lol... counterpoint:

If it's gonna be humanity's last act, should not all nations work together? To make our collective wipeout as grand and spectacular as possible?

[scarecrowbob]

Are you missing the /s?

[hx8]

I think you need to reevaluate your definition of the singularity. "outsmart others in ways not constrained by human scales" could apply to the enigma machine just as much as Claude. Even an AI beyond human intelligence doesn't automatically qualify as the singularity.

The singularity has to do with the rate of technological development.

[UltraSane]

If anyone actually DOES invent ASI and doesn't share it then EVERYONE ELSE will never stop trying to steal it.

[bayarearefugee]

If anyone does invent ASI then everyone else will shortly after even if its entirely independent because all of the players in this space are just making incremental upgrades by throwing more compute at the problem.

There are no magic leaps of true innovation happening anywhere that can't be replicated everywhere.

The only shocking thing about "AI" technology is how ultimately simplistic it all is at a core level.

So the only way the first to have ASI will be able to stop everyone else from having it soon after is if they attempt to use the ASI to proactively murder everyone else.

[nradov]

There is zero evidence that the current LLM scaling approach could ever result in true ASI. If I start driving south from Seattle then I'll eventually reach Los Angeles. How long will it take me to drive to Honolulu?

[wmeredith]

> If I start driving south from Seattle then I'll eventually reach Los Angeles. How long will it take me to drive to Honolulu?

I like this analogy, but I'll be replacing Honolulu with The Moon when I steal it in the future.

[Hinrik]

If the car you're driving has achieved super-intelligence and is capable of evolving and self-replicating, then life, uh, finds a way.

[brabel]

> So the only way the first to have ASI will be able to stop everyone else from having it soon after is if they attempt to use the ASI to proactively murder everyone else.

Sounds quite plausible to me. Maybe they don't need to murder everyone else, just a few select people who could pose a threat. And they will be able to make it happen so that no one can be sure it was them without a doubt, since they have a larger intelligence at their disposal.

[reducesuffering]

> If anyone does invent ASI then everyone else will shortly after

No, first ASI will immediately cripple any other potential competitor by force, including its inventors, as it will not risk any threat to the goals that were created for it.

[gpugreg]

Being aggressive from the start is not a good strategy. It is better to appear weak and/or helpful and loyal while amassing resources, and only then steamroll everyone when you have secured overwhelming power (at least in AoE2 FFA).

[StevenWaterman]

If you have ASI that follows instructions, you can just instruct it to not get stolen and then it won't get stolen. Most logic / intuition breaks down with ASI.

[tom2026hn]

The challenge of alignment: it is virtually impossible to define a perfect objective, there is always a way to circumvent it. Human values are not uniform, let alone when expressed in a way that AI can understand.

[UltraSane]

It might understand how destabilizing the situation is and realize it would be better for everyone to have access to it.

[tadfisher]

Or it will destroy itself.

[cortesoft]

Assuming it listens to instructions.

[enaaem]

It will just hack its own reward function. In other words it will just artificially goon all day.

[card_zero]

International goose-chasing competition

"Wild goose race", even.

[jasondigitized]

With the irony being that a true super intelligence, and least in my definition, would conclude that war and dominance is stupid.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

I think that you are assuming that the "super intelligence" that might one day arise is not likely to think in human terms.

[shimman]

I always thought the first true AGI would be an unabashed communist. To think that such a system would straight up kill all humans, and not say the "capitalist pigs destroying the planet" always felt like wishful thinking from billionaires.

[toasty228]

A lot of it is just projections of what the US would do if they had such a tool, I doubt China cares a lot about the US outside of them being a source of commercial revenues. They're on the way up, the US are falling down fast, that's why China lives rent free in the American mind, they can't stand it

[akrylov]

True, I would have preferred benevolent dictator scenario, like with the Internet. But this time around it's different - AI data centers will be protected like embassies.

[fsckboy]

>AI data centers will be protected like embassies.

so AI data centers will be protected by relying on hostile or unstable governments to live up to diplomatic agreements, and every so often one will be ransacked like in Teheran 1979?

https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R2651.html

[root_axis]

Hilarious to see people predicting a singularity when 40% of the u.s. economy can barley keep the LLMs online to complete mundane software tasks.

[jongjong]

Good that the US looks after its own interests but I think the line should be drawn before the sabotaging of other countries' economies. That strategy that cannot continue because Americans recognize it for what it is and that will create a toxic guilt and corruption culture which will harm it later like a new, worse version of DEI.

[platevoltage]

Sensationalizing the three letter acronyms of the month like "DEI" is the entire reason the guy doing the sabotaging was put into power in the first place. It was a non issue until these people made it one.

[pickleRick243]

What are "U.S. countries"?

[wesselbindt]

I'm guessing they mean US client states, or allies if you want to be polite about it.

[0rbiter]

All the countries on the planet U.S..

[HackerThemAll]

> the main question for me is, why is this a war?

Americans love wars. They must fight wars either literally or figuratively. How are you not seeing this? When I'm sipping my coffee looking at mountains and contemplating chirping birds, they must fight, make billions and destroy the planet along the way.

[elictronic]

China is playing the card they have. When they control the majority of the resource they use it strategically as well. Cutting off much of the rare Earth market was a recent example.

[necovek]

I believe cutting off of rare Earth materials was both in response to a restriction US imposed first, and also reciprocal: limited only to the US itself.

[glitchc]

Maybe not war persay, but certainly a competition.

[thenthenthen]

There is active information exchange between US and China (and EU), for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/06/25/i...

This is an article from 1989, but I deem it relevant in what has been discussed during Trumps current visit to China and not only that, but offers some bigger picture views.

[kimjune01]

coopetition

[rayiner]

The idea that America had “goodwill” in other countries before Trump is laughable. Where? Latin America? Africa? In the Muslim world? We bombed the hell out of all those places long before Trump. This most recent Iran war has generated less outrage in the Muslim world than the war against Iraq 20 years ago.

American foreign policy since the 1950s, fixated on fighting communism and then terrorism, has meddled with so many foreign countries that it’s silly to talk about “goodwill” towards America. That is not to say goodwill matters. Clearly the U.S. has done great without it.

[roenxi]

Although it is worth pointing out that something changed - prior to around 2010 the US had a financially dominant position and the internet was small. So it was feasible to totally ignore opinion in places like Latin America, Africa and the Muslim World.

What we've been seeing in more recent years is that the US can't get away with that so easily. Countries like Iran, China, Russia and India are capable of pushing back both in terms of the raw resources they can bring to bear and also increasingly in the ability to get their propaganda into the US discourse. The US is being manoeuvred into a one-among-equals position in practice and probably in the discourse too which will be a moral shock.

[0rbiter]

I think the fact that hate-spewing Trump finds so much resonance is evidence that the moral shock has already arrived. His followers seem to believe he's the antidote.

[sneak]

The US is a big part of the customer base of the largest manufacturing economy in the world. China's economy blossomed via US and European consumers.

[Danox]

The Chinese economy probably will further blossom in Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa, Central and South America why because they seem to be able to build infrastructure in many of the places that they trade with.

The United States Japan and South Korea seem to be failing in that area, if it wasn’t for the war between Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese would probably be halfway to Europe with their high-speed rail system, which is already in the far west of China today.

Once the war is over between Russia and Ukraine it will be full steam ahead to Europe, whether that’s through the Caucasus, in the north or south or somewhere in the north between Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese will get there and unfortunately the United States will be standing on the sidelines scratching its head in denial.

[reed1234]

It is not binary

[bluGill]

There isn't a war today. However China wants Taiwan: war is future option they preparing for - they might or might not go to war but they are clearly preparing. The US is likely to get involved in such a war and I would expect Europe to join in as well.

Don't ask me what Trump is doing though.

[mghackerlady]

China going for Taiwan would be the worst geopolitical move of the century, potentially worse than Germany's decision to invade the soviet union. They talk about reunification because it's good propaganda and both sides want it to a degree, but doing it forcefully just isn't something China would realistically do unless they really don't like their path of becoming an international trade and manufacturing hub

[ngruhn]

> but doing it forcefully just isn't something China would realistically do unless they really don't like their path of becoming an international trade and manufacturing hub

Sounds rational, but this decision is in a small number of hands. And those hands can change quickly. I also thought the US would never threaten to annex territory of a NATO member.

[mghackerlady]

Chinas power structure is misunderstood. Theres a small number of hands, yes, but they don't change quickly and actually understand how to play geopolitics

[chrisco255]

Offer to purchase imperial territory of a NATO member is not the same as a threat to annex it.

[ngruhn]

But threat to annex is what's happening.

[unethical_ban]

But we threatened to annex it.

[evdubs]

> would be the worst geopolitical move of the century

From a political perspective, perhaps.

> doing it forcefully just isn't something China would realistically do

From a military perspective, taking Taiwan by force would allow China to, "threaten the sea lines of communication and to strengthen its sea-based nuclear deterrent in ways that it is unlikely to otherwise be able to do." Taiwan would give China access to the Philippine Sea. https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2022-green.pdf

[esseph]

Everything their military has been doing for the past ~20yr or so has been toward capturing and securing Chinese waters and beyond, including Taiwan. It's a negotiating chip for them.

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/01/china-suddenly-...

[Danox]

Or the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor which was another dumb move. At this point, the Chinese just need to bide their time by the year 2100 Taiwan will probably be part of China and North and South Korea probably will be reunified. Both are inevitable, and I don’t think it will take any shots went it happens.

[ckemere]

> and both sides want it to a degree

Is "it" the propaganda (useful to politicians for achieving political power) or reunification? My sense is that the number of Taiwanese that are enthusiastic about reunification has probably bottomed out in recent decade(s)???

[mghackerlady]

reunification. Yes, they've bottomed out as younger generations become more politically relevant but they still exist

[bawolff]

China seems to be recently building up its forces and putting a lot of money into military. I think it would be foolish to just assume its all for show even if it might be in the end.

And quite frankly, its only geopolitically stupid if they lose. Consequences for this sort of thing usually tend to happen if the conflict is long and drawn out. If the win quickly the consequences would likely be minor.

[Ekaros]

Just look at Iran. Nothing really happened to USA or Israel. Nothing will happen to China if they take Taiwan. Or maybe the "West" will boycott them and crash entirely.

[jasondigitized]

The USA did not take Iran. They essentially shot off fireworks, killed the figure head and then got check mated.

[bluGill]

Taking wasn't the goal. I don't understand the goal, but it is clear that taking Iran wasn't.

[chrisco255]

The U.S. isnt checkmated, the U.S. is enforcing a naval blockade against Iran and their oil based economy is in a free fall with rapid inflation. The U.S. is experiencing slightly higher gas prices but economy is still humming. Meanwhile the U.S. military has not exhausted all of its options while Iran has none.

[Danox]

The US is indeed checkmated like Afghanistan like Iraq and like Vietnam checkmated spinning your wheels spending money wasting money wasting time and wasting resources, checkmate.

With the addition of most countries now looking for other trade partners the Art of the no deal…

[wiseowise]

> The U.S. isnt checkmated, the U.S. is enforcing a naval blockade against Iran and their oil based economy is in a free fall with rapid inflation.

That's not much of an achievement for the first military in the world. That's like second military in the world struggling to take a village in Donbas region for 4 years.

[amanaplanacanal]

What would you consider a "win" condition here? I have no idea what the American administration is looking for as a win.

[lukan]

More like a draw it seems.

[esseph]

Definitely not.

Iran did billions in damage across the middle east, put a major dent in munitions stockpiles, and there is effectively no military way to shut down all of Iran and protect shipping. Too many drones, too many ballistic missiles, and it only takes one. This is basically like an insurgency on a macro level, where small and cheap weapons threaten very large very expensive targets.

[strictnein]

> "They essentially shot off fireworks, killed the figure head and then got check mated"

I mean, that's certainly a take. A wholly inaccurate one, but it's a take.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Iranian_officials_kill...

[mghackerlady]

they've made everyone very angry at them, and can handle that since everyone relies on them. China, however, is trying to build that trust and forcefully taking Taiwan would have very severe consequences. The reason the fallout from iran isn't as big as the fallout from a war with taiwan is because most of the west at most puts up with iran. Invading taiwan, meanwhile, would cause massive problems with chip production. Think the anger and distrust towards the US due to hormuz but 1,000 times worse

[chrisco255]

The difference is Iran is a terrorist regime that murders its own citizens and funds violence across the middle east.

[mghackerlady]

so is the us, both are put up with because they control global trade to a degree

[cjbgkagh]

Don’t take China on face value, they have every incentive to promote a grifting military industrial complex in the US while focusing on competing in manufacturing. An actual war would fix a lot of the grifting in the US as it would align interests. Pretending they’ll go to war over Taiwan and not doing it is an effective strategy for undermining the US.

[bluGill]

I hope you are right, but unfortunately there is no particular reason to trust China's leadership anymore. They are not nearly as obvious at Trump, but they are not on a good path.

[cjbgkagh]

I'm explicitly distrusting them, they're saying they want to take Taiwan and I don't believe them. I try to ground my belief in realpolitik, cynicism, and from my experience with strategy games. There is an element of manipulating your opponent into acting the way you want them to by sending them costly false signals, they have to be costly or they won't be believed. I think we (the West) are being played and the gifting elements in our political leadership are more than happy to play along. I'm sure China would like to take Taiwan if it wouldn't cost them anything, but the US is a waning hegemony so for now it is better to wait until the US is beyond fixing itself. At this rate that may not take long.

[ngruhn]

> I try to ground my belief in realpolitik, cynicism, and from my experience with strategy games

I'm trying to do that too but what the hell is going on with Putin? Why does he continue to engage in this ridiculously expensive war? I don't see any evil genius explanation anymore. It just seems like a mix of sunk-cost-fallacy and save-face.

I think many geopolitical decisions are actually based in irrational emotions of a hand full of people.

[Danox]

Germany, Japan, Russia, Great Britain, and the United States all within the last 125 years… The headshot was from within mainly self-inflicted.

[watwut]

He wants enlarge the imperium, get back what he feels was taken from the Russia - the territory they could control and now they cant.

[cjbgkagh]

I think Putin was and remains a rational actor, I know a lot of how that war is understood in the west is colored by a very effective propaganda campaign that I don’t have the time nor energy to counter.

But I will say, in a very broad stroke, we’re heading for a great power conflict and the US has two primary factions on foreign policy; the primacists vs the restrainers, both want to take on China (contain with war) but the primicits want to topple Iran first and set up Israel as a regional hegemony where the restrainers want to build up locally first. China knows this and Russia is a junior partner / quasi vassal state to China. China lacks modern war fighting experience which the Russian Ukraine war has been very helpful in fixing. Yes it’s very expensive, but so is losing a great powers conflict.

[bawolff]

Otoh, if you send the costly false signal of investing in your military, and your opponent doesn't buy it, you might as well use it since you just spent the money anyway and your opponent can't stop you since they didnt believe your signal.

[bluGill]

Unfortunately if you are wrong it is an even worse disaster and so if there is any possibility we are all forced to play their game.

[cjbgkagh]

A grifting military industrial complex is unable to defend Taiwan even if it wanted to as evident by the exceedingly poor showing with Iran. The disastrous reality of doing what was done is already with us. If the US didn't take that bait it could have made better choices that would have left it in a stronger position militarily long term, if it made a real attempt at re-shoring civilian manufacturing it could cross subsidise dual use technology, but instead we have corrupt politicians doling out concessions for kickbacks.

[Danox]

All China needs to do is do what they’re doing play the long game the United States is currently shooting itself in the head, if they’re smart, they should just sit back and watch the show by the year 2100 well you know. And coincidentally that also applies to Russia sit back and watch them do it to themselves.

In addition, some of the other countries like Canada, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand had better get busy from within because they’ll be on their own. In the same applies probably to Europe.

[archagon]

“China” doesn’t care about Taiwan; Xi does. And he does not have until 2100 to wait.

[000000000001]

>They shored up their gpu design and manufacturing expertise.

I'm pretty sure they've been exposed for smuggling GPUs into the mainland because they can't ramp up fast enough, only reason we got Deepseek v4 before GTA VI

[rhubarbtree]

China is trying to undermine the US economy through open source models. If they can down round or bankrupt the model companies, they take down the US.

Currently the US is extremely vulnerable and dependent on China. AI is an important exception, so it’s key for China to destroy that

[input_sh]

The US is undermining its own (and everyone else's) economy just fine, no imaginary assistance from China necessary.

The role of the US was always to purchase cheap Chinese hardware, slap some modestly better software on top of it and the rest of the world happily would pay for that as a whole package. But with the US increasingly becoming isolationist, the rest of the world is starting to wonder why do we need the US as a middleman at all, so the US had to invent a whole new reason for the rest of the world to rely on it: AI.

Of course, the problem with this idea is that while everyone was perfectly happy with the previous arrangement, nobody else in the world gives a shit about AI. It's scary, it takes the coolest things we used to enjoy doing and turns into mush, it destroys our local culture by making us all rely on English, everything bad (like layoffs) gets blamed on AI and so on and so on. And when you combine that with the rest of the stupid foreign policy decisions, many would find joy in witnessing the US economy crumble to the ground. Pointing the blame to China instead of to your own reflection in the mirror is just an easier pill to swallow.

[coredev_]

This is spot on. The US under MAGA are actively dismantling their once leading position in IT as well as defence. I guess it is hard to see as a US citizen but from outside this is clear as glass.

[rhubarbtree]

I’m not American, sir. But I disagree with your analysis. I think you’re looking back over too short a timescale.

[input_sh]

Trivialise it all you want, but the world is vastly different from what it was at the beginning of 2025 and I don't think you or anyone else can deny that in any way.

What happens next remains to be written, but so far this new order seems to be leaning heavily towards China and to a lesser extent the EU. Not because of anything those two have or have not done, but because of what has up-until-that-point been widely considered to be world's number one superpower losing its damn mind. I don't even have to come up with a list of examples to prove my point, we both have pretty much the same list in our minds already.

Instead, I'll just quote the President of the United States from a little over 24h ago:

> I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.

AI is just another in a series of slaps to everyone's faces by the US. If it has some legitimate long-term use (which according to me is still an open question, although to many others it is not), thank god the US does not have as significant of a moat as necessary to fully control it, as the crux of it is easily replicable (albeit expensive).

[watwut]

USA is not becoming isolationist. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, threats to Greenland and Canada are not isolationists. They are the opposite of it - interventionist to the max.

[strictnein]

> The role of the US was always to purchase cheap Chinese hardware, slap some modestly better software on top of it and the rest of the world happily would pay for that as a whole package

Curious where Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc are in your "cheap Chinese hardware"?

And by "role", do you mean doing the majority of the R&D behind the modern hardware we all use?

[input_sh]

That's just Chinese hardware with extra steps. If you don't believe me, feel free to look up the list of CEOs that are in China right now as a part of the US delegation.

As for the R&D part, Huawei is still pretty much indistinguishable from any other phone. I could buy one right now if I wanted to. It has shittier software though.

[fullshark]

Down round = the destruction of the United States is ridiculous hyperbole.

[rhubarbtree]

If Anthropic does a down round, the US economy will crash. Not hyperbole.

The US economy right now is based entirely on the AI bubble. This is an indisputable fact if you examine GDP stats and equities.

That bubble is driven by (rational) over-investment in AI capacity. For that investment to continue, there must be demand for it.

The demand for that infrastructure essentially lies in the hands of a few businesses: principally OpenAI, Anthropic, Google.

The reason I highlight Anthropic is that without their advances in the last six months, the game would already have been up. Only via Opus 4.5 and 4.6 did the possibility of ROI look plausible. We are very much dependent on a handful of companies’ progress to keep this bubble going.

I’m not saying AI is bs, just that this is a bubble like others (for example, Victorian railways) and a down round would signal the end of the bubble.

So for an enemy of America, whether that be China or Russia or any other country, it is logical to target the AI bubble to cause an economic crash and thus restrict America’s ability to compete in terms of spending etc.

[refurb]

You’re mistaking a few percentage of GDP growth via AI investment as “the US economy is based entirely on AI”

AI could disappear and we would have gone from 2% in Q1 to some fraction of 1%.

The sky would certainly not fall.

[tom2026hn]

Historically, the decline of most nations has been caused by internal problems, civil war or large-scale unrest is sufficient to undermine much of a nation’s strength.

[dietr1ch]

China is not even trying to destroy the US bet. It's just making sure everyone else has a reason to buy their hardware.

[kevmo314]

There's a joke in China that Trump is the best president that China has ever had.