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by JumpCrisscross 5 days ago
> bad for the US economy

Almost certainly not in the long term. If AI is a productivity enhancer, which I think we have evidence for, then the American economy’s heft (and continuing dynamism) get a tailwind. The minority of the new, leveraged economy getting hit will be a short-term painful adjustment, but it need not be anything more.
2 comments
everforward 5 days ago
The distills are almost certainly bad for the US economy.

AIs promise is undercutting knowledge work, which is our primary export. Manufacturing left ages ago.

In theory, if OpenAI/Anthropic win then the US still wins since they’re headquartered here.

If open or Chinese models succeed, it undercuts our knowledge work market and that money starts flowing out to inference providers instead of in to US companies and their employees.

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JumpCrisscross 5 days ago
> knowledge work, which is our primary export

We export more goods than services [1].

> Manufacturing left

America is the second-largest manufacturer in the world by a long shot.

> that money starts flowing out to inference providers

Where are most of these?

[1] https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_p...

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everforward 4 days ago
> We export more goods than services [1].

We do, we export almost twice the amount of goods. The margins on services are so much better that the majority of the profit from exports is from services. I can’t find a study that has traced export revenue to export profit, but the services sector floats around 50% margins and manufacturing is around 15%. That would ballpark goods export profit around $30B and services around $50B.

> America is the second-largest manufacturer in the world by a long shot.

America is the third most populous country in the world. Normalize by population and we’re pretty middling; America is 53rd in merchandise exports per capita (63rd in overall exports per capita). South Korea exports over double our manufacturing per capita.

> Where are most of these?

The most companies, or where the most tokens are going? If you mean “where are the most tokens going?” it’s probably not the US.

The best data I can think of is OpenRouters usage leaderboards, which probably don’t include enterprise customers, and that’s dire.

You don’t hit a US model until #7 and it’s Nemotron which Nvidia is serving for free. The first US model that actually charges is Opus 4.8 at #9 and it handles about a sixth the traffic of the top model (Mimo-V2.5).

There’s really not a ton keeping inference in the US on a moderate time horizon imo. Tencent has Hy3 up for free right now, all Chinese inference, and it’s doing double the tokens Nemotron and Opus 4.8 are doing combined. For free, via the API.

It might not be China, but their aggressive investments in power generation and green energy make it seem likely. They just need GPUs and they seem to be nearing the point where they can offer them based on the Hy3 inference.

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brazukadev 5 days ago
The longer the US AI strategy continues to be to bet on openai/anthropic the bigger it will be the US economy impact. The US bounced back from the dotcom crash and the 2008 crash, it does not mean it will bounce back after an AI crash.
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JumpCrisscross 5 days ago
> it does not mean it will bounce back after an AI crash

It almost certainly will. AI dominates growth. It doesn’t dominate the actual economy. Most spending and investment is entirely decoupled from it.

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wolttam 5 days ago
Well, one thing it will still have is a boat-load of compute.
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