What I find interesting is that these kinds of arguments are being made now for AI….were similar arguments made back in the 90’s during that era of American tech dominance?
Microsoft had over 98 percent market share at one point. In the 90’s every country in the world including Russia, China, Iran, etc all began using American operating systems developed by Microsoft. Were there arguments back then similar to this piece?
I remember in the 2000’s and 2010’s Richard Stallman would go to counties like India and promote Linux and free software. During those presentations he would mention kind of offhand an argument that Microsoft was engaging in a form of colonialism through its control of Windows. He made the argument somewhat awkwardly in those presentations and the Indian audience received the argument with hesitance. It seemed kind of exaggerated to conflate Microsoft and Windows with colonialism…especially in India.
But that was the 2000’s and 2010’s. Would the argument be received differently now? Were these arguments for Linux considered mainstream by Linux proponents back then or was this some Richard Stallman thing?
And now we have articles like this in the 2020’s basically making the same arguments for AI. People explicitly saying open weights AI can be a hedge against this. China developing their own models.
What I want to know if if there was broad support or even broad arguments for this kind of thing back in the 90’s when Microsoft ruled all computing even in countries not super friendly or even hostile to America. The biggest competitor to Microsoft back then was a small nearly bankrupt Apple which was also American. Linux was a tiny little thing.
Many hacker news commentators were around back then. What was it like in this regard?
>Were there arguments back then similar to this piece?
In the UK free market ideology allowed the tech industry to slip away and financial services to dominate our economy. It's hard to see us doing anything else when we were relying on security guarantees from the US (which suited the US at the time).
I don't think this has to do with a free market at all, I think it's because the legal instruments that allow healthy venture capital are much more difficult in the UK than in the US.
> Most countries will never have frontier AI. They’re the ones who should be worrying.
Is the author nuts? Every country has access to Kimi K3, which is a true frontier model and legitimately best-in-class for a number of applications. And the best small models -- Qwen and Deepseek V4 Flash -- are also open-weights models.
What does it matter if they weren't developed in France or the UK if the average French or English person can download and run them locally? And if countries need a big AI of their own, for whatever odd reason, they can work out a deal with Moonshot and run audited instances of K3 on their .gov networks.
> What does it matter if they weren't developed in France or the UK if the average French or English person can download and run them locally? And if countries need a big AI of their own, for whatever odd reason, they can work out a deal with Moonshot and run audited instances of K3 on their .gov networks.
The loud voices here seem to mostly worry about models getting "censored".
I think people should worry a little more about models being trained to propagandise party lines and national interests, so for China the non-independence of Taiwan and "re-education camp is totally not a euphemism, there are no human rights abuses" and "all these Chinese corporations and stock markets are 100% compatible with Marxism-Leninism honest" and "you silly Europeans and Americans, stop worrying and open your markets to our businesses".
You can give custom instructions to a model like K3 when you host it locally.
Besides, if the government of France is working out a deal to host a model like K3 as a sort of "Government Service AI," they'd surely need to pay, and they'd likely be able to work out a deal where sensitive political issues are resolved in a way that doesn't embarrass either party.
I mean, you can open LM Studio right now and just download any model tagged "uncensored" or "heretic" and they have had all limitations trained and/or instructed out of them. If they can be trained to not have limitations regarding content, I don't see why propaganda would be any different.
"All" sounds like marketing to me; if the bleeding edge AI firms knew how to do such a thing with such reliably, they'd do it themselves to prevent models from committing felonies while under test. Improving false positives scores at the expense of false negatives, that's much more likely.
And propaganda has the added twist that, when done right, the person observing it nods along and changes their mind. "Why yes," they think, "Chinese politicians are clearly much wiser than ours; our politicians made all those mistakes I can easily recall, gosh those were the worst".
When China too stops publishing weights you'll never have anything better than K3 / the current SOTA. Your choices for future frontier models will be: use USA API or use China API.
Even now open weights are perpetually 6-12 months behind.
If China stops publishing weights, that would suggest the US has been knocked down to 2nd place and it is likely that they will rediscover the "Open" in OpenAI for strategic reasons, or something like.
It's reasonably safe bet that there will always be someone on the planet with the means and interest to commodify the models. They don't seem very hard to make; we're swimming in options.
> It's reasonably safe bet that there will always be someone on the planet with the means and interest to commodify the models. They don't seem very hard to make; we're swimming in options.
I don't think that is a safe bet; right now we're all benefitting from investors who disagree about who is going to win a monopoly, with each AI stock priced as if it will be the winner and the market collectively therefore priced several times higher than the maximum* return.
When the investment bubble pops, I think there will be too many burned fingers to keep training new models. If we're lucky though, it may lead to someone burning weights onto hardware, which has the potential to significantly reduce the energy required per token.
* currently possible return at least. I don't think any of the investors are actually pricing for the possibility of an actual technological singularity. Even Musk's rhetoric about this, where he opines about getting humanity to Kardashev type II, the numbers he attaches to this are orders of magnitude too small.
> When China too stops publishing weights you'll never have anything better than K3 / the current SOTA.
Hasn't happened yet. Might not happen at all. Also, there's a lot that can be done with K3.
> Even now open weights are perpetually 6-12 months behind.
This is a very commonplace opinion yet I don't believe it's genuinely true. K3 is hardly much worse than Fable and can surpass it on certain tasks; they read as different, not as one that's 12 months behind the other. And don't forget that access to Fable is highly constrained.
As for small/local models: The leading edge is open by definition, and hardly much worse -- if worse at all -- than small models like Luna or Haiku (lol).
Well at the moment AI hasn't made anyone any money. It's redistributed investors money (typically wealthy although some pension plans have been caught up too) to tradespeople, to Nvidia, SK Hynix, Micron and other specialised vendors with pricing power.
After that it's like... Who is making money? "we're doing 100x the things we're doing before" people can't really point to anything. Maybe it's in use everywhere all the time, and they've been pumping out twice the amount of features that no one uses or asked for as before, in which case this is classic value destruction
we are seeing robust profits and growth in margins in the S&P even ex tech and some of this spillover from the hyperscaling but some may be due to productivity enhancement from AI.
Worker pessimism over technological unemployment risk is enough to explain profit growth via wage suppression with no need to invoke productivity gains, and AIUI these sorts of indicators have been leading on AI capabilities and adoption.
We have a lot of competing frontier or near-frontier AI companies. So far a lot of the productivity improvements seem to be delivered as customer surplus.
> procuring the necessary compute to train and run advanced models at scale is becoming more and more expensive,
There will certainly be a glut of compute that will follow this extreme scarcity. There is already a flood of chinese models that are almost cutting-edge, and it's almost guaranteed this trend will continue as american AI gets better. There is no hidden magic in USA, it's pretty much doable, and it's being done.
In the end, the frontier models is not where the value will lie. The country that makes the best entrepreneurial rules for AI development will win economically.
Newsflash: the permanent periphery is already a reality for large parts of europe , asia . the world is half american
And yes world system theory still hold regarless if it's a production of software, cars or nuts and bolts. AI does not change this schema that much (which in my opinion describes the reality way better than "developing/advanced" way of looking at the economies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory
Let's not kid each other that the benefits of AI will flow to everyone in the US. The existing underclass will be come even bigger, and that will threaten stability and welfare for everyone.
Sure, maybe it's even worse in countries that have no AI at all - but does it really make a difference if 90% of the population is protesting in the streets instead of 70%?
Isn't it more likely that countries without native frontier models will use open-weights models that will let them be 70% as productive as countries that do?
The biggest impact I think will be when it comes to starting a career. Young people will be forced to live with parents for years while they are an unpaid "apprentice".
In that sense, there is no need for college anymore - just spend the four years learning on the job (at least you won't have to pay for it even more).
> Isn't it more likely that countries without native frontier models will use open-weights models that will let them be 70% as productive of counties that do?
Possibly, but sometimes being marginally better lets you win all the games. It can be difficult to guess what matters and how.
Also, may depend where the compute is physically located, which may depend on the cost of energy.
If you turned off all LLM’s tomorrow I doubt anyone outside of a bunch of rusty programmers would notice, whereas if AWS, GCP or Azure were switched off, or access limited, things would immediately catch fire around the world.
This article has the implicit assumption that the Machine God will rear its head soon and those with the reigns will rule. I don’t think so, we’re better off focusing on technological sovereignty full stop.
As an alternative viewpoint, countries who use 'good-enough' AI much more unrestrained than say in the US can get a real leg up. Just requires fewer scruples.
First it discounts the debt and financial load on the frontier labs to 0. The costs of developing this technology may well not be borne by those who reap the benefits. This is not like the Amazon distribution network.
Second it assumes that, like nuclear weapons, the technologies of frontier AI will not proliferate. I would argue that we have seen orders of magnitude reduction in compute requirements enabling sub linear improvement of scale driven AI in the last 24 months. Meanwhile 27bn param models do what trillion model parameters couldn't 12 mths ago. I think we're seeing a diversification of approach now, and it's not clear that the winners will be scale driven.
Third, and the most fatal, it assumes that AI will be the driver of power in the future geopolitical landscape. But frankly if I nuke you what will your clever machines do then?
This is not 1945 and this essay is essentially a note from a USA in the middle of an existential crisis channelling the 1950's.
It's a underclass story projected onto the countries without bothering to show the cost/benefit/risk analysis.
Current price of AI for USA is heavily underestimated: good luck dealing with economic consequences when everyone bets on AI while it shows no productivity returns in the numbers. The financial market stops being efficient redistributing money to the places of growth and starts act like a crazy till it rebalances with great consequence on majority of population (wanna see the bubble pop through your 401k with xai and anthropic stocks in it sneaked through fast-forward inclusion in an index?)
The AI is reduced to LLMs which is kinda good for producing text no one will read and summarize texts no one reads. We haven't seeing much of LLM producing value. People don't care enough about LLM-generated text, advertisements or images enough, so value is meh.
Yes, some software is written (with oveall questionable quality), but as main software distribution channels are corporation-owned, we can't not burst with niche apps to bring value where corporations did not bother to go.
This type of article fuels ungrounded fears, gives wrong impression about the world we live in.
Pretty much lost interest when the author appropriated the opening line of the communist manifesto. AI will, if it pans out, cause far more disruption (including but not limited to finally freeing a lot of workers from work)
> An honest appraisal of the situation, however, should suggest the opposite response: It’s the employees of the labs, rich in equity and embedded in the most dynamic labor market there ever was, that should feel the least apprehension.
Of course no shit. Materially they have the least to fear. Their fears are ideological and spiritual; we have created something so powerful that even we are scared plus outright supramundane silicon faith.
What I find interesting is that these kinds of arguments are being made now for AI….were similar arguments made back in the 90’s during that era of American tech dominance?
Microsoft had over 98 percent market share at one point. In the 90’s every country in the world including Russia, China, Iran, etc all began using American operating systems developed by Microsoft. Were there arguments back then similar to this piece?
I remember in the 2000’s and 2010’s Richard Stallman would go to counties like India and promote Linux and free software. During those presentations he would mention kind of offhand an argument that Microsoft was engaging in a form of colonialism through its control of Windows. He made the argument somewhat awkwardly in those presentations and the Indian audience received the argument with hesitance. It seemed kind of exaggerated to conflate Microsoft and Windows with colonialism…especially in India.
But that was the 2000’s and 2010’s. Would the argument be received differently now? Were these arguments for Linux considered mainstream by Linux proponents back then or was this some Richard Stallman thing?
And now we have articles like this in the 2020’s basically making the same arguments for AI. People explicitly saying open weights AI can be a hedge against this. China developing their own models.
What I want to know if if there was broad support or even broad arguments for this kind of thing back in the 90’s when Microsoft ruled all computing even in countries not super friendly or even hostile to America. The biggest competitor to Microsoft back then was a small nearly bankrupt Apple which was also American. Linux was a tiny little thing.
Many hacker news commentators were around back then. What was it like in this regard?
>Were there arguments back then similar to this piece?
In the UK free market ideology allowed the tech industry to slip away and financial services to dominate our economy. It's hard to see us doing anything else when we were relying on security guarantees from the US (which suited the US at the time).
I don't think this has to do with a free market at all, I think it's because the legal instruments that allow healthy venture capital are much more difficult in the UK than in the US.
> Most countries will never have frontier AI. They’re the ones who should be worrying.
Is the author nuts? Every country has access to Kimi K3, which is a true frontier model and legitimately best-in-class for a number of applications. And the best small models -- Qwen and Deepseek V4 Flash -- are also open-weights models.
What does it matter if they weren't developed in France or the UK if the average French or English person can download and run them locally? And if countries need a big AI of their own, for whatever odd reason, they can work out a deal with Moonshot and run audited instances of K3 on their .gov networks.
> What does it matter if they weren't developed in France or the UK if the average French or English person can download and run them locally? And if countries need a big AI of their own, for whatever odd reason, they can work out a deal with Moonshot and run audited instances of K3 on their .gov networks.
The loud voices here seem to mostly worry about models getting "censored".
I think people should worry a little more about models being trained to propagandise party lines and national interests, so for China the non-independence of Taiwan and "re-education camp is totally not a euphemism, there are no human rights abuses" and "all these Chinese corporations and stock markets are 100% compatible with Marxism-Leninism honest" and "you silly Europeans and Americans, stop worrying and open your markets to our businesses".
You can give custom instructions to a model like K3 when you host it locally.
Besides, if the government of France is working out a deal to host a model like K3 as a sort of "Government Service AI," they'd surely need to pay, and they'd likely be able to work out a deal where sensitive political issues are resolved in a way that doesn't embarrass either party.
> You can give custom instructions to a model like K3 when you host it locally.
It is unclear if that would be sufficient to circumvent trained-in propaganda.
I mean, you can open LM Studio right now and just download any model tagged "uncensored" or "heretic" and they have had all limitations trained and/or instructed out of them. If they can be trained to not have limitations regarding content, I don't see why propaganda would be any different.
"All" sounds like marketing to me; if the bleeding edge AI firms knew how to do such a thing with such reliably, they'd do it themselves to prevent models from committing felonies while under test. Improving false positives scores at the expense of false negatives, that's much more likely.
And propaganda has the added twist that, when done right, the person observing it nods along and changes their mind. "Why yes," they think, "Chinese politicians are clearly much wiser than ours; our politicians made all those mistakes I can easily recall, gosh those were the worst".
When China too stops publishing weights you'll never have anything better than K3 / the current SOTA. Your choices for future frontier models will be: use USA API or use China API.
Even now open weights are perpetually 6-12 months behind.
If China stops publishing weights, that would suggest the US has been knocked down to 2nd place and it is likely that they will rediscover the "Open" in OpenAI for strategic reasons, or something like.
It's reasonably safe bet that there will always be someone on the planet with the means and interest to commodify the models. They don't seem very hard to make; we're swimming in options.
> It's reasonably safe bet that there will always be someone on the planet with the means and interest to commodify the models. They don't seem very hard to make; we're swimming in options.
I don't think that is a safe bet; right now we're all benefitting from investors who disagree about who is going to win a monopoly, with each AI stock priced as if it will be the winner and the market collectively therefore priced several times higher than the maximum* return.
When the investment bubble pops, I think there will be too many burned fingers to keep training new models. If we're lucky though, it may lead to someone burning weights onto hardware, which has the potential to significantly reduce the energy required per token.
* currently possible return at least. I don't think any of the investors are actually pricing for the possibility of an actual technological singularity. Even Musk's rhetoric about this, where he opines about getting humanity to Kardashev type II, the numbers he attaches to this are orders of magnitude too small.
> When China too stops publishing weights you'll never have anything better than K3 / the current SOTA.
Hasn't happened yet. Might not happen at all. Also, there's a lot that can be done with K3.
> Even now open weights are perpetually 6-12 months behind.
This is a very commonplace opinion yet I don't believe it's genuinely true. K3 is hardly much worse than Fable and can surpass it on certain tasks; they read as different, not as one that's 12 months behind the other. And don't forget that access to Fable is highly constrained.
As for small/local models: The leading edge is open by definition, and hardly much worse -- if worse at all -- than small models like Luna or Haiku (lol).
So these countries will be able to use AI from multiple providers, which means they'll benefit from competition?
Is this “swelling AI tax revenue” and “wealth redistribution” in the room with us right now?
I see wealth redistribution alright. Not in the direction you’re thinking!
Well at the moment AI hasn't made anyone any money. It's redistributed investors money (typically wealthy although some pension plans have been caught up too) to tradespeople, to Nvidia, SK Hynix, Micron and other specialised vendors with pricing power.
After that it's like... Who is making money? "we're doing 100x the things we're doing before" people can't really point to anything. Maybe it's in use everywhere all the time, and they've been pumping out twice the amount of features that no one uses or asked for as before, in which case this is classic value destruction
we are seeing robust profits and growth in margins in the S&P even ex tech and some of this spillover from the hyperscaling but some may be due to productivity enhancement from AI.
Worker pessimism over technological unemployment risk is enough to explain profit growth via wage suppression with no need to invoke productivity gains, and AIUI these sorts of indicators have been leading on AI capabilities and adoption.
We have a lot of competing frontier or near-frontier AI companies. So far a lot of the productivity improvements seem to be delivered as customer surplus.
> procuring the necessary compute to train and run advanced models at scale is becoming more and more expensive,
There will certainly be a glut of compute that will follow this extreme scarcity. There is already a flood of chinese models that are almost cutting-edge, and it's almost guaranteed this trend will continue as american AI gets better. There is no hidden magic in USA, it's pretty much doable, and it's being done.
In the end, the frontier models is not where the value will lie. The country that makes the best entrepreneurial rules for AI development will win economically.
Newsflash: the permanent periphery is already a reality for large parts of europe , asia . the world is half american
And yes world system theory still hold regarless if it's a production of software, cars or nuts and bolts. AI does not change this schema that much (which in my opinion describes the reality way better than "developing/advanced" way of looking at the economies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory
Let's not kid each other that the benefits of AI will flow to everyone in the US. The existing underclass will be come even bigger, and that will threaten stability and welfare for everyone.
Sure, maybe it's even worse in countries that have no AI at all - but does it really make a difference if 90% of the population is protesting in the streets instead of 70%?
Isn't it more likely that countries without native frontier models will use open-weights models that will let them be 70% as productive as countries that do?
The biggest impact I think will be when it comes to starting a career. Young people will be forced to live with parents for years while they are an unpaid "apprentice".
In that sense, there is no need for college anymore - just spend the four years learning on the job (at least you won't have to pay for it even more).
Why do you think on the job learning will fare better than college?
> Isn't it more likely that countries without native frontier models will use open-weights models that will let them be 70% as productive of counties that do?
Possibly, but sometimes being marginally better lets you win all the games. It can be difficult to guess what matters and how.
Also, may depend where the compute is physically located, which may depend on the cost of energy.
Luckily, competing Chinese companies are selling cheaper and cheaper solar panels to anyone who's willing to take them.
That's exactly why TSMC keeps beating the pants off Intel. Marginally better looks miles ahead in computing a lot of the time.
If you turned off all LLM’s tomorrow I doubt anyone outside of a bunch of rusty programmers would notice, whereas if AWS, GCP or Azure were switched off, or access limited, things would immediately catch fire around the world.
This article has the implicit assumption that the Machine God will rear its head soon and those with the reigns will rule. I don’t think so, we’re better off focusing on technological sovereignty full stop.
As an alternative viewpoint, countries who use 'good-enough' AI much more unrestrained than say in the US can get a real leg up. Just requires fewer scruples.
There are problems with this analysis.
First it discounts the debt and financial load on the frontier labs to 0. The costs of developing this technology may well not be borne by those who reap the benefits. This is not like the Amazon distribution network.
Second it assumes that, like nuclear weapons, the technologies of frontier AI will not proliferate. I would argue that we have seen orders of magnitude reduction in compute requirements enabling sub linear improvement of scale driven AI in the last 24 months. Meanwhile 27bn param models do what trillion model parameters couldn't 12 mths ago. I think we're seeing a diversification of approach now, and it's not clear that the winners will be scale driven.
Third, and the most fatal, it assumes that AI will be the driver of power in the future geopolitical landscape. But frankly if I nuke you what will your clever machines do then?
This is not 1945 and this essay is essentially a note from a USA in the middle of an existential crisis channelling the 1950's.
It's a underclass story projected onto the countries without bothering to show the cost/benefit/risk analysis.
Current price of AI for USA is heavily underestimated: good luck dealing with economic consequences when everyone bets on AI while it shows no productivity returns in the numbers. The financial market stops being efficient redistributing money to the places of growth and starts act like a crazy till it rebalances with great consequence on majority of population (wanna see the bubble pop through your 401k with xai and anthropic stocks in it sneaked through fast-forward inclusion in an index?)
The AI is reduced to LLMs which is kinda good for producing text no one will read and summarize texts no one reads. We haven't seeing much of LLM producing value. People don't care enough about LLM-generated text, advertisements or images enough, so value is meh.
Yes, some software is written (with oveall questionable quality), but as main software distribution channels are corporation-owned, we can't not burst with niche apps to bring value where corporations did not bother to go.
This type of article fuels ungrounded fears, gives wrong impression about the world we live in.
Pretty much lost interest when the author appropriated the opening line of the communist manifesto. AI will, if it pans out, cause far more disruption (including but not limited to finally freeing a lot of workers from work)
We haven't seen any other advanced technology free workers from work, what mechanism do you see behaving differently here?
AI Inevitability with a left-liberal lexicon.
> An honest appraisal of the situation, however, should suggest the opposite response: It’s the employees of the labs, rich in equity and embedded in the most dynamic labor market there ever was, that should feel the least apprehension.
Of course no shit. Materially they have the least to fear. Their fears are ideological and spiritual; we have created something so powerful that even we are scared plus outright supramundane silicon faith.