[bg24]

I think in general rest of the world needs to take notice (not saying afraid), starting with the US. It cannot be taken for granted that China's frontier labs will be a few months behind. They might be at par or exceed.

The lessons from steel, solar and EV needs to be learned by all lawmakers. You have to respect and learn from how China Government puts the system in place for complete industry takeover and they have been very good at it. The problem with AI is that democracies will be inherently slow in adopting AI, unless something changes in the system.

At minimum, every democratic Government (US, Europe, India) need to build long-term AI vision and execute that no matter which party comes to power. Additionally, be ruthless about protecting domestic labs. It can only be possible if the intelligence pricing by domestic labs per productive task is in the similar range as open-weights models. Right now, it is not the case, even if the article gives the example of Sol vs K3.

Protecting domestic labs means not bailout, but fast track to cheapest energy, fast track approval for data centers, enforce some guardrails so customers get to use the open weights models only hosted in the country by US (or Europe) businesses. Without these protections, it might be a slow death.

[awakeasleep]

In the earlier days of the USA we did the same thing, with our government having an industrial policy that fed US industry and put us ahead of Great Britain.

It doesn't have anything to do with the form of government, it has to do with the aims of the government.

[Barrin92]

What is this panic and protectionism supposed to be good for? This is open source software, there is no "AI industry", there's virtually nobody employed in this. "Domestic AI" makes about as much sense as a domestic Linux kernel. If the Chinese want to subsidize the world's water and energy use to supply the world with chatbots good luck to them. There's no need for guardrails or fast track data centers, they can plaster their entire country with data centers to churn out slop, I'm glad we don't

[bg24]

I think it is deeper than that. "LLM => peak of productivity" takes way less time and effort than "Linux kernel => any productive work". Compare Dec 2025 vs July 2026 models in terms of capabilities.

Nobody can predict 5 year out. However, the country that can be ultra efficient by making their governance, health, manufacturing, military, etc AI-native will be far ahead in the game.

[Barrin92]

There's no evidence that these things make anyone more productive, in fact the opposite, empirical research suggests users are less efficient while thinking they're more efficient. You're invoking "AI" the same way the blockchain people did before they all finally died out. "You need to put the government on the blockchain bro, you're gonna lose out to the future bro", turns out you don't

But that's not really even relevant to the debate. Insofar as software has made the world more efficient, it doesn't matter where it's written. That's the point of open source software, there's no tacit knowledge. When a country loses its nuclear engineering capacity that's dangerous because it takes a long time to rebuild. The only reason the Chinese are already competitive on LLMs but haven't managed to make a state-of-the-art jet engine is because the latter, unlike software, is difficult to copy and you don't need to worry about something you can copy.

[hnfong]

Only those who intended to use the new technology as a tool to achieve dominance and control are freaking out.

And it's the only viable tool the US has left. It's reasonable they are freaking out.

[eeiei]

Ok…