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by jmyeet 4 days ago
The US government exists to defend capital interests. It's why we can't buy BYD cars. It's why we can't import any cars unless they're 25 years old. It's why a Tiktok sale was forced. It's why the US is seeking to block states from banning prediction markets. It's why the federal government is seeking to block states from blocking data center projects.

As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI. It is an issue of national security. It's why the US essentially blocks US tech companies to maintain sovereignty.

I'm reminded of the browser wars of the 1990s that led to the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Microsoft used the "commoditize your complement" strategy [1] against Netscape. The US has blocked the export of not only EUV lithography but high-end chips to China. China doesn't want to be dependent on US platforms or policy.

So China is going to make sure there are open source models available and the US government is going to try and stop them to protect US tech companies.

[1]: https://gwern.net/complement

12 comments

The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).

The reason why some Capital Interests don’t want to ban DeepSeek is so companies that utilize AI have more options, and running your own DeepSeek cluster acts as an independent cost comparison for enterprise inference contracts.

The raising AI valuation is giving more weight to those that want to blacklist DeepSeek. The AI Safety narrative is strong. I see a path where any institution with enough compute might be watched in a similar was chem labs are observed by the DEA.

if you look at share of industry profits, currently most of AI profits are captured by NVIDIA and cloud providers

banning deepseek/open weight models will allow Ant/OAI jack up prices and extract more profits for themselves

keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers

> keeping open weights models available will keep current industry profit distribution where majority is captured by nvidia and cloud providers

With the Chinese manufacturing capacity, how long do you think this will remain true for? You can't spin up a fab in a year, that's true, but you can in five years, at which point all the protectionism in the world isn't going to help.

DeepSeek et al has contributed tremendously, not only by sharing open weights models, but also genuinely improving the SOTA in inference and training, especially given their compute-constrained situation.

if China starts making cheap GPUs for the entire globe, I will say THANK YOU and will continue my work on AI.

The collaborative nature of open-source (free software) is the ultimate good that benefits entire humanity. I value that more than any other benefit of protecting any company.

How much I care about Nvidia or OpenAI market cap? absolutely zero

How much I care about the poor, but smart and creative people on Earth being able to contribute to the state of the art of AI development? 100% more.

> The reason why some Capital Interests want to blacklist DeepSeek in the US is so that you are forced to buy Claude/GPT/Gemini, which will feed revenue into an industry that requires revenue (or it’s a big problem).

It sounds right, but I see zero evidence of this. I think you underestimate how many people in the current administration are True Believers. This does not, to me, seem like anything to do with Big Capital, but rather "America over China".

and it would be great to have an independent auditor have access to all the training material and good search tools, so that take down requests can be made by copyright owners
Seems like interests of US government and US capital (monopolize and corner markets, jack up prices, extract economic rent in perpetuity) run strictly against interests of the broader US consumers and overall global population
> It's why a Tiktok sale was forced.

I think that has more to do with controlling narratives that the USG doesn't like.

Ever see a tiktok about may 35?
I don't use TikTok, but a cursory search shows that there's a #tiananmensquare tag that has a few thousand videos, including many about the protests and Tank Man. So while I haven't seen a TikTok about it, someone has.
I don't (could be wrong) think other American's seeing content on American TikTok is relevant to China's censorship of what Chinese people see in China
I don't think that's what the person I was replying to was saying, though.
Why should that mean that Americans should prefer that TikTok restrict narratives unfavoraroble to American oligarchs?
What do you think the Chinese would use Tiktok for if Taiwan heated up again?
Versus the next obvious trap after Iran that dear leader stumbles into?

The China fearmongering doesn't really work in this case, our own government wants the ability to lie to and manipulate us about everything continuously.

Relevance?
I'm happy that China is doing that. US cannot be trusted anymore.

Not saying that China can be trusted either, but I think having more actors is better for all of us.

Those data centers that "states" want to block: the CCP was directly tied to funding the protests and movements to weaken the U.S. technologically. Kevin O'Leary exposed it, in collaboration with the White House.
Or maybe people want to be able to sleep?

How the fuck did the AI bubble industry manage to take one of the cleanest industries and make it dirty again?

That's precisely the CCP brainwashing: the data centers in question were actually VERY clean, and would give the communities a ton of jobs.

This happens all the time for people with agendas: pollution fear mongering for projects that are actually super clean and useful.

Seen it happen in real life, many times.

Why are there audio recordings of them being very loud?
Noise complaints are for <10% of data centers. In the case of Loudoun, they did a good job building it to be under the county's 55 dB threshold. They followed the the standards, and still they're trying to diminish noise out of respect for residents.

Prince William/Greak Oak data center from Amazon had protests since 2022 over buzzing/whirring. Amazon said it was installing acoustic shrouds, and idk any further updates.

The one case that I'd acknowledge really needs fixing is Microsoft's Mount Pleasant.

Chinese have a wider outlook on it.

Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity, which is why they are basically the only ones left publishing research in the open. That's probably part of their socialist nature.

But also a financial one. They believe that models are commodities, that you can swap one for the other and that the only thing that matters are the applications built upon them.

So they want to make sure that the world, and their own companies, are not limited in their business and application by a protected US commodity.

They will keep releasing in the open no matter what for quite some time.

It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.

But it's increasingly clear that since the last decade protectionism and nationalism is taking the place of globalization, even though globalization has been a terrific success in lifting billions out of poverty and making the US thrive.

> It's quite impressive how the latest years I have found more and more to empathize with China than many of the western counterparts.

I'm not sure that this is because China is suddenly a great place or political system so much as a reflection of many western nations speed running to autocracy in the name of manliness.

Moving towards China because of concerns of autocracy is a hilarious concept.
And yet here we are.
Yeah, for me it's the latter. Until recent years, it was at least possible to defend the US as having some good principles, despite how imperfectly defended or promoted they may have been. That in turn could make it worth defending. Now, it's just blatantly turned into everything it always stood against.
> But also a financial one

china's advantage is manufacturing capacity. giving away the model is a loss leader for the hardware business. they have a big gap on chip manufacturing. the only way to close that is by developing more efficient software. an open ecosystem is the best way to accelerate innovation of software development. since they are behind the US on model capabilities they aren't really losing anything by making the models open weights and being open about the performance enhancements techniques. but the open weights models are not necessarily what are running on the platforms or what they have internally. deepseek released v4 on their platform about a month before the open weights release, which I would guess was done to expose it to adversarial testing, so they could fine tune the removal of capabilities from the open weights model. (but i may very well be wrong)

Also, the open-weight local models are proving that the commodity can be delivered for most applications at a far lower price than frontier is charging.
I think you’re assigning magnanimity to a competitor that is lagging behind and has every, state backed incentive to capture the market the only way they can. By making the models dirt cheap to access. If the roles were reversed you wouldn’t see open source versions of Chinese models. Much like you don’t see them open sourcing their blade battery design.
An excellent example of Poe’s law. I can’t imagine what kind of Western person would hold such a cognitively dissonant view of globalism, for example.
What do you mean?
Well yeah humanity in the sense of everyone except maybe Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols, ... I mean open models are really cool, but I have a hard time believing China is doing it purely for the greater good. The commoditizing your complement story sounds much more plausible.
realisticaly, the united states has no right or moral authority when it comes to human rights or rule of law given the last few years. given that, the admonishment of china's human rights violations against uighurs run hollow and hypocritical.

just happy to have more models that I could eventually play with if hardware ever becomes cheaper.

>> Politically they believe AI belongs to humanity

It’s really BS. Comunist China Party is mostly interested in control above all. Forget humanity, human rights, what is good or what is bad or even financials. The most important thing to them is to keep the people on a short leash. Of course once they feel they have that under control they think about the “humanity” stuff as well but that’s just extra.

Which part of releasing ai research in the open or open weight models reflect that exactly?
It's trained to reflect CCP propaganda positions? What does it tell you about Tiananmen Square, Taiwanese sovereignty, the South China Sea or Israel?
1. Nobody gives a damn about that. Frontier models are for work, not asking pointless stuff you can find on wikipedia.

2. The models themselves are not trained for anything, it's a prompt-level filter when you use chinese models as providers. I've just asked Kimi 2.6 and it answered without issues.

3. US models sugarcoat a lot topics about Israel. So don't be naive thinking there's no propaganda or sugarcoating in other providers. But again, nobody cares about this use case.

The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.

Before anyone starts talking about the free market, there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.

Unilateral surrender in a core aspect of statecraft, which involves maintaining our industrial power and skilled labor force, is absolutely insane. I hope my government never gets convinced by market fundamentalist idiots to do such a thing, any more than it already has, to our great detriment.

The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.

> there is no free market here whatsoever. The fact that BYD's cost structure is what it is is the direct result of Chinese industrial policy.

Aside from countless other ways before and after this, the US government handed over tens of billions of dollars in cash to GM and Chrysler in 2008 and 2009.

Not quite -- those were loans that were largely repaid, quite different from the subsidies CCP uses for its industrial base.

ProPublica has a nice tracker that shows the loans: https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

You can also see how subsidies compare between China and OECD in this recent doc. In autos, China subsidizes to the tune of 2-3% of revenue vs. <0.5% for North America. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/magic-database-indus...

Great story. A couple of billion dollars 18 years ago is not an industrial policy.
The US is primarily powered by oil and natural gas, has massive domestic capacity, and locked in supply all over the Americas. China has a completely different energy mix and they move from a position of competitive disadvantage on ICE cars to competitive advantage on electric. Rapid electrification for China is all win, but for the US and our partners in the oil business, it would mean stranding trillions in capital investments that still have decades to run, so it just isn't going to happen.
Why do people say this? You can get a Shanghai-made Tesla Model 3 with CATL batteries in the US yet somehow, if a Chinese car, made with Chinese components in Chinese factories were to enter the market, the would spell doom for the entire US auto industry.
You just explained it. You can get a Chinese made car in China.

That's kind of the point. They are smart enough to protect and support their domestic industries. We also have to do that, it's necessary for sovereignty.

This is absolutely true. Remember that automakers greatly contributed to war efforts in the past. It is an indispensable domestic industry, just as much as energy.

Then there is the issue that BYD cars are presumably connected to servers in China and most probably backdoored. They are too much of a security risk. I would absolutely not drive such a car, without permanently disabling the onboard cellular modem.

Perhaps the U.S should change its industrial policy as well so that it can be competitive on the global market? To me it’s been clear that the car manufacturers both in the US and Europe were just milking their customers every year with a facelift as a reason to sell the same old car. I am glad that a 3rd player is in the market to challenge the “heritage” tax.

Don’t worry about the free market. China will definitely agree to free market terms after it captures the market like the U.S did and Britain before it. Then enforce strict free market rules and strict IP rules.

> The reason we can't buy BYD cars is because if we allowed it without restrictions, it would utterly and completely destroy the United States auto industry. That's terrible public policy, and we should not allow it.

Yeah, that was the argument against Japanese car makers, too.

A shitty system needs destroying sometimes. Competition from Toyota/Honda was critical in making US auto makers up their game.

It is terrible public policy to fall decades behind making expensive shitty versions of what the rest of the world has.

It's not like I don't understand the argument on the other side of this. I've heard it my entire life. It's been dominant since the late 1970s and 1980s.

It's just that it's wrong.

We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but our country has become fucked, overwhelmed by financialization, scams, monopoly rents and extraction, and all of the wealth accumulating to a handful of people, while we've become less resilient and, at this point, almost certainly have lost our place as the most dominant economy and industrial power in the world.

> We need a competent industrial policy and support for skilled labor and policies that encourage domestic production.

Yes!

But "tariff/ban BYD" is not that.

Of course it is part of an industrial policy. It is, however, not nearly sufficient, and if it's the only thing we do, it will become increasingly untenable and eventually fail.

But it's an essential first step to prevent our audio industry from just being summarily destroyed. Other steps are also needed to encourage domestic manufacturing and homegrown successes.

Also, I'm not sure why this is even controversial. Why do you think there's BMW and Hyundai plants in the American South? Tariffs are already heavily employed by us and every other industrialized country.

Since 2018 ~400 chinese EV producers were allowed to stop operations. An industry that exists because of subsidies and preferential loans as well as state induced trade barriers is not sustainable.

From 2020 onwards, the Chinese government began phasing out its EV subsidy program. This policy shift came just as the country entered a price war, led by aggressive pricing from giants like BYD and Tesla. The combination of reduced state support and brutal price competition proved fatal for many underfunded startups.

https://evboosters.com/ev-charging-news/400-chinese-ev-compa...

IMO the problem is that we've been given the excuse of market fundamentalism for the past several decades on the way down, as most everyone lost their middle class jobs, wages stagnated, etc. Now we're supposed to accept some last ditch attempt at protectionism based on directly blocking choices for consumers, when the US manufacturers aren't even really competing? It just seems like open hypocrisy. At this point the reasonable protectionist policy would be based around subsidizing American industry so that they become competitive options, not merely trying to keep the better foreign options out.
Every single load of bullshit shuffled into our faces has been presented as a benefit to consumers.

Google gives away their search and Gmail for free, don't you know? So it can't possibly be a monopoly.

And so on. It's just propaganda. It's bullshit. That's not the way that you determine whether firms have excess market power, and this fraud (called "the consumer welfare standard") was the deliberate choice of right-wing policymakers who were bent on dismantling antitrust policies and succeeded.

More: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-secret-plot-to-unleas...

This doesn't imply the opposite though - something that is a detriment to consumers won't necessarily be a good thing.

I feel like you're conflating two things here. The "consumer welfare standard" was indeed a terrible scam, neutralized antitrust enforcement, and basically put us in the current situation where many "choices" we have consist of two megacorps that both suck. Just like the (IIRC) Bush-era FCC declaration that "competition" between DSL and Cable was good enough, and rolled back the CLEC/ILEC dynamic.. We're in full agreement there!

But the original point I was making was about things that actually did benefit consumers. Lower prices and more competition (from foreign companies) DO benefit consumers. The problem is that they harm the part of our economy whereby those consumers get incomes. So they're a race to the bottom.

And my point there is that it's a bit hollow to be racing to the bottom for thirty years, smashing one blue collar industry after another, and then when we finally get to cars it's like oh no, time for some protectionist policy. It might be great for the people still in that industry, but hypocritical to everyone else who saw their industry destroyed but are now prevented from having less expensive cars.

As I said, with things this far gone, the only thing that makes sense to me is directly subsidizing purchases from domestic industry (positive incentive), rather than continuing to prevent competition (negative incentive). The latter reeks of the same monopolistic captive-market consolidation we've seen from the destruction of antitrust in general.

automotive platforms are a key military asset it's not like the pokemon dildo industry, if you stop building jeeps your abolity to bully third parties is diminished
> automotive platforms are a key military asset

All the more reason not to save companies that can't compete in the global space. What good is a jeep that the Chinese laugh at?

You think people laughing is an important metric versus having an integrated industrial facility capable of producing vehicles in large quantities?

Maybe start at the beginning. Where do you think power comes from in the world? I'll give you a hint. It's not the ability to construct narratives.

> You think people laughing is an important metric…

I think if you're gonna argue "preserving the auto industry is a national security issue" you have to address the fact that an auto industry that relies on protectionism to avoid being competitive with the rest of the world will probably not be very effective at national security.

Otherwise, you wind up like Russia in Ukraine - people laugh at your failed efforts.

> an integrated industrial facility capable of producing vehicles in large quantities

Large quantities of vehicles don't do much good if those vehicles are shitty compared to the opposition's. Iraq's army under Hussein was one of the largest on the planet at one time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_73_Easting

"The nine M1A1 tanks of Eagle Troop destroyed 28 Iraqi tanks, 16 personnel carriers and 30 trucks in 23 minutes with no American losses."

"In doing that the scout platoon encountered another Iraqi tank position of thirteen T-72s. The lightly armored Bradleys, each equipped only with a 25-mm cannon and two TOW missiles, are intended for reconnaissance, not direct engagement with armored tanks. Despite a misfire, and having to reload the launchers in the face of the enemy, the two Bradleys destroyed 5 tanks before help arrived."

Donald Trump demonstrated very well the power of constructing narratives. It's served him more than the technological terrors he has at his disposal.
Pokémon dildo factory should retool easily into a track-and-destroy-jeeps drone factory
it is not anymore, because US doctrine has changed after losing war in Vietnam.

US can no longer sustain massive motorized and armored forces, because it implies heavy casualty rate.

The doctrine changed to shock&awe and lobbing standoff munitions from far away, which we all saw in Iran (and how it turned out).

US strictly protects boomers at Big Three and their regional dealerships and the entire supply chain that makes money off of financing, extended warranty, selling overpriced parts, overpriced heavy vehicles, etc

You can just copy the chinese playbook and allow entry if you are willing to hand over ip.
US note remotely capable of doing a China playbook which is: _OLD_ IP. In exchange for allocating cheap land, building cheap factories/infra, staffing with cheap technical labour etc etc... the IP sharer just sits back and collect checks. The Chinese playbook actually offers value US (and west in general) not capable of providing.
We're kind of doing it with the tsmc fabs, but yea, there are civilizational problems in the west which goes beyond cheap resources, talent, and labor.
it would destroy it, but then new more competent US automakers would pop up, similar to tesla.

US Big Three are simply full of incompetent boomers who want to maintain monopoly using tariffs, chicken tax, and banning of competitors that actively harm consumers.

Suddenly US government thinks that capitalism and free market is not desirable... huh

> then new more competent US automakers would pop up, similar to Tesla.

A company that literally is collapsing as we speak because it's more profitable to be in the business of stock inflation and financialization.

A coherent industrial policy would be addressing that as well. But if we don't do something to limit imports there won't be anything to save.

> The Chinese don't make these kinds of idiotic mistakes, which is how they have amassed the power, wealth, and influence that they have.

I generally agree with most of what you said but not this. China's chief advantage is having a billion people. On average, they aren't that wealthy or powerful. And their leadership makes plenty of idiotic mistakes - look at their real estate market.

That's not the chief advantage, insofar as there is a difference between China, India, and Indonesia, which there is.

Their chief advantage has been a coherent, long-running national industrial policy and trade policy that encourages industry while keeping the financial sector from taking over the economy and ripping everybody off.

We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.

> We used to do that too from the late 1930's to the late 1970's, which is why we were the dominant industrial power in the world at that time as well.

I think there's another world event that happened in that time span that might better explain America's world-wide industrial dominance.

You're confusing cause and effect.
No, they're not.

Europe was devastated and bankrupt. Asia was devastated and bankrupt.

The US mainland was untouched. It had a massive leg up against the competition.

I wouldn't consider India. It's been plagued by protectionism and tariffs and won't achieve anything close to China any time soon. The only industry of value for its people which is software services is now crumbling with AI created in US and China. Edit: probably your point too and I misread
We're in late-stage capitalism here. The pitchforks are already out and spreading across the globe. Unless the big companies get broken up, this nation will split into either a police state or socialist state.
> It's why a Tiktok sale was forced

Well that and the overwhelming pro-palestine content on that platform. We certainly couldn't have that.

    > It's why we can't buy BYD cars
are you sure it has nothing to do with the fact that those cars are very heavy, potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels that can be rooted (or are already) at any time by their manufacturers in China?
Is the idea that we're just one OTA update from them turning into bombs? Considering the quality of software in the auto industry, I would be about as worried about any domestically assembled EV.
> potentially fire-making (battery firmware) computers on wheels

Is Tesla any different?

    > Is Tesla any different?
if you are adversary of the US and the possibility of a hot conflict with it exists, it is not.
What makes BYD different from, say, Volvo, which sells EVs freely in the US?

    Headquarters Gothenburg, Sweden

    Parent Geely Holding (78.7%)
and if you see the parent starting to replace Volvo engineers with Chinese nationals you will witness sudden change of heart by US officials; until then it really is just a financial fiction
How exactly does the fact that this goes through a subsidiary in Sweden change the things you mentioned?
> As soon as DeepSeek came out I realized what was going on: China was going to make sure that no US company was going to "own" AI.

Yea m8, I think you might've been a bit late to that realization.

China does not think llms are a matter of national security, they aren't as brain broken as the west.
That's 100% untrue lmao.
I'm sure they think of them as a matter of national security, because they think of everything as a matter of national security, but a few analysts I respect say that the mood there is not nearly as AGI-pilled, and I have no trouble believing that.
China is far more focused on robotics. Deepseek is largely bootstrapped by the hedge fund that developed it. They received a grant from the government of China, and recently an investment. Imagine thinking text autocomplete is a matter of national security.

China will flood the west with affordable robotics and watch the West eat itself alive. They know Western capital owners are so greedy they'll screw over their entire society to chase a buck and replace labor..

Of course its a matter of national security if there are military applications. The point of robotics is also weird because they've already widely adopted robotics within their own manufacturing and also America already replaced the majority of their labor by offshoring so I dont know how they would destroy american society by introducing robotics.
Show me, Chinese are not replacing their manufacturing with robots. You can't just say things off vibes alone because you think it sounds right. You're just making shit up off the top of your tongue. Show me where Chinese are replacing manufacturing labor with robots, please show me?
China literally has the most advanced dark factories in the world https://www.ien.com/redzone/blog/22948773/the-tech-enabling-...

Even in their lights on factories they use robotics enmasse, you think they're just selling the arms?

Also every single manufacturer in the world is constantly trying to automate their lines so nothing I'm saying is even controversial?

Text autocomplete can write code, carry out actions (tool calls) and launch cyber attacks. It very much is a matter of national security.
You're actually delusional if you think cyber capabilities of nation states have increased by the development of llms..
Peak of skill and capability, perhaps not, for now. But the ability to automate and discover relevant weaknesses at a greatly increased rate definitely counts as increasing the threat nation states can present.
I don't work for a nation state, but I work for a large financial that requires adversarial testing and it's absolutely increased the ability to operate and attack these environments. The floor is definitely easier to reach at a minimum. Vulns and 0days are far easier to exploit, time to exploitation from the release of vulns is nearing zero, largely aided by LLM reverse engineering -- why wouldn't this apply to nation state level adversaries?
Much of cyber capability is simply software (malware 0days). Latest LLMs assist with both
LLMs and current AI models are absolutely top priority for the Chinese government, they’re just funding robotics as well