Comment by ArtTimeInvestor 2 days ago
It looks like the USA is bringing all technology in-house that is needed to build AI.
TSMC has a factory in the USA now, ASML too. OpenAI, Google, xAI and Nvidia are natively in the USA.
While no other country is even close to build AI on their own.
Is the USA going to "own" the world by becoming the keeper of AI? Or is there an alternative future that has a probability > 0?
First, its not just about LLMs. Its not an LLM that replaced human drivers in Waymo cars.
Second, how could AI not be the deciding geopolitical factor of the future? You expect progress to stop and AI not to achieve and surpass human intelligence?
>First, its not just about LLMs. Its not an LLM that replaced human drivers in Waymo cars.
As far as I know, Waymo is still not even remotely able to operate in any kind of difficult environment, even though insane amounts of money have been poured into it. You are vastly overstating its capabilities.
Is it cool tech? Sure. Is it safely going to replace all drivers? Doubt, very much so.
Secondly, this only works if progress in AI does not stagnate. And, again, you have no grounds to actually make that claim. It's all built on the fanciful imagination that we're close to AGI. I disagree heavily and think, it's much further away than people profiting financially from the hype tend to claim.
Vastly overstating its capabilities? SF is ~crawling~ with them 24/7 and I've yet to meet someone who's had a bad experience in one of them. They operate more than well enough to replace rideshare drivers, and they have been.
> You expect progress to stop and AI not to achieve and surpass human intelligence?
A word generator is not intelligence. There’s no “thinking” involved here.
To surpass human intelligence, you’d first need to actually develop intelligence, and llms will not be it.
I get that LLMs are just doing a probabilistic prediction etc. Its all Hutter Prize stuff.
But how are animals with nerve-centres or brains different? What do we think us humans do differently so we are not just very big probabilistic prediction systems?
A completely different tack: if we develop the technology to engineer animal-style nerves and form them into big lumps called 'brains', in what way is that not artificial and intelligence? And if we can do that, what is to stop that manufactured brain from not being twice or ten times larger than a humans?
> how could AI not be the deciding geopolitical factor of the future?
Easily. Natural resources, human talent, land and supply chains all are and will be more important factors than AI
> You expect progress to stop
no
> and AI not to achieve and surpass human intelligence
yes
It's an economic benefit. It's not a panacea but it does make some tasks much cheaper.
On the other hand if the economic benefit isn't shared across the whole of society it will become a destabilising factor and hence reduce the overall economic benefit it might have otherwise borne.
They seem popular enough that they could be leveraged to influence opinion and twist perception, as has been done with social media.
Or, as is already being done, use them to influence opinion and twist perception within tools and services that people already use, such as social media.
So has Kendrick Lamar’s’ hit song, but no one is suggesting that it has geopolitical implications.
I think ground-zero for that line of thought is with Leopold Aschenbrenner[0]. Who I believe now runs an AI focused hedge fund.
The same stack is required for other AI stuff like diffusion models as well.
Intelligence is everything. These things are intelligent- already superhuman in speed and a few limited domains, soon they're going to exceed humans in almost every respect. The advantage they give to the country that owns them is nuclear-weapons like.
"The advantage they give to the country that owns them is nuclear-weapons like."
I think the idea that the United States "owns" Grok 3 would be news to Musk and the idea it "owns" ChatGPT would be news to Altman.
I don't understand this attitude and I am not sure where it comes from- either from generic skepticism, or from some sort of psychological refusal.(*) It's just obvious to me that you're completely wrong and you'll have a hard wake up, eventually.
* "I know how this works and it's just numbers all the way down" is not an argument of any validity, just to be clear- everything eventually is just physics, blind mechanics.
My non-tech company already uses LLMs where we used to contract software people (for 2 years now - no unresolveable issues). I myself also used LLMs to write an app which is used by people on the production floor now (I'm not a programmer and definitely don't know kotlin).
Maybe LLMs can't work on huge code bases yet, but for writing bespoke software for individuals who need a computer to do xyz but can't speak the language, it already is working wonders.
Being dismissive of LLMs while sitting above their current scope of capabilities gives strong Microsoft 2007 vibes; "The iPhone is a laughable device that presents no threat to windows mobile".
LLMs aren't the only kind of AI.
Having hardware and software suppliers all together makes it more likely even if you assume (like I do) that we're at least one paradigm shift away from the right architecture, despite how impressively general Transformers have been.
But software is easy to exfiltrate, so I think anyone with hardware alone can catch up extremely fast.
It looks like neural network based software is to surpass humans in intelligence in every task in the forseeable future.
If one country moves along this direction faster than the others, no country will stand a chance to compete with them militarily or economically.
How so? First of all, assuming ASI is developed, as it stands now, it will be owned by a private corporation, not a nation state.
ASI also will not be magic. Like what exactly would it be doing that enables the country to subject the others? Develop new weapons? We already have the capability to destroy earth. Actually come to think of it, if ASI is an existential threat to other nations, maybe the rational action would be to nuke whichever country develops it first. To safe the world.
You see what I am saying? There is such a thing as the real world with real constraints.
> no country will stand a chance to compete with them militarily or economically.
It really depends on how they go about it. It can easily instead end up with lots of people without work, no social security and disillusioned with the country. Instead of being economically great, the country may end up fighting uprisings and sabotage.
What do your colleagues do?
I see people getting replaced by AI left and right.
Translators, illustrators, voice over artists, data researchers, photographers, models, writers, personal assistants, drivers, programmers ...
US has been reshoring hardware for a while, but that didn’t stop DeepSeek and certainly won’t prevent presently allied powers from building AIs.
A big lesson seems to be that one can rapidly close the gap, with much less compute, once paths have been blazed by others. There’s a first-mover disadvantage.
DeepSeek has built their software on Nvidia hardware which needs ASML and TSMC hardware to be built.
Even China has not yet managed to even remotely catch up with this hardware stack. Even though the trail has been blazed by ASML, TSMC and Nvidia.
> Is the USA going to "own" the world by becoming the keeper of AI?
China has a realistic prospect of developing an independent stack.
It'll be very difficult, especially at the level of developing good enough semiconductor fabs with EUV. However, they're not starting from scratch in terms of a domestic semiconductor industry. And their software development / AI research capabilities are already near par with the US.
But they do have a whole of nation approach to this, and are willing to do whatever it takes.
I would expect it will be the market leader yes. But is there a market large enough to support the investment? That is debatable. If there isn’t then they will be in a deficit that is likely to do serious damage to the economy and investor confidence.
Currently there is no hard ROI on LLMs for example other than force bundling and using it to leverage soft outcomes (layoffs) and generating trash. User interest and revenue drops off fairly quickly. And there are regulations coming in elsewhere.
It’s really not looking good.
You implicitly assume, LLMs are actually important enough to make a difference on the geopolitical level.
So far, I haven't seen any indication that this is the case. And I'd say, hyped up speculations by people financially incentivized to hype AI should be taken with an entire mine full of salt.