I don't want any one particular country, or organization, to "win" AI. I want AI capabilities to remain diffuse and spread out, so that everybody has access to approximately equal levels of AI. If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
oceansky 1 days ago [-]
That's the last thing big tech companies want. Maybe Meta being the odd exception with Llama.
rienbdj 1 days ago [-]
Meta wants the models to be cheap and available because their strength is the context data and platform control.
mamcx 21 hours ago [-]
The TOTAL opposite!
Getting free labour, lipstick of "freedom", and enable to put millions invested in what open source never can do: Scaling, infra, win big contracts, etc.
Open Source NEVER win the market game.
It only give consolation to few that can run things locally.
insane_dreamer 21 hours ago [-]
Apple, at least at present.
awestroke 1 days ago [-]
Meta is not in the AI game any more
tim333 20 hours ago [-]
LLM Arena has them at #3 on the overview, behind Anthropic and Google, ahead of Grok and OpenAI.
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
Didn't they just announce they were going to be surveilling all their employees screens and keystrokes for AI training? Is that just for the love of the game rather than as part of a product?
oceansky 24 hours ago [-]
That's probably just for internal metrics, automating dev work and facilitate stack ranking. Not to release a product necessarily.
oceansky 1 days ago [-]
Just saw Zuckerberg post from July 2025 saying they are going to be "careful" with what they release.
trvz 1 days ago [-]
1) In the AI world, that's a very long time ago
2) That still equates to "Meta is not in the AI game any more" in meta-corporate speak
oceansky 1 days ago [-]
Yes, point two is what I meant.
elcritch 1 days ago [-]
Right, in particular my belief long term is that there must be functional open source AI + Robotics that common people can own and operate.
Otherwise big corporations and/or governments will own everything and most folks will be serfs. However if you can buy a few robots and go run a homestead then there can be a counterbalance of people not beholden to the system.
A telling sign of techno-feudalism will be AI becoming heavily regulated and even illegal for common people to make or own. You know because “public safety”.
sjs382 18 hours ago [-]
AI gets better with more resources. Even if you have access to the software/models, those with more money to throw at better hardware (and the cost associated with running it) will be better positioned.
I wish we had a good way to solve for that.
jayknight 1 days ago [-]
>I want AI capabilities to remain diffuse and spread out...
The most widely used AI systems are controlled by a few billionaires. I'd like to see it become much more spread out.
mindcrime 1 days ago [-]
Fair. I could have phrased that better. I agree, things should ideally become even more diffuse than they currently are!
keybored 1 days ago [-]
This smells like how markets would work well if everyone had a little capital. But money is too fungible. The more you have the more you can get.
But if electricity and hardware is a proxy for AI then those things are much less fungible. And if those two things in turn are not tied to the hip with money.
> If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
Has OSS won in terms of being software for the people?
safety1st 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mindcrime 23 hours ago [-]
The Chinese government is bad, sure. But notice that recently the US government has been co-opted by people who want to bring back feudalism and reduce most of us to the status of "serf".
And the big US tech companies largely seem to be run by, and occupied by, people who at least tacitly support this whole "techno-feudalism" thing.
So for my money, I'm not particularly a fan of either camp. I'm just hoping that when the cyberpunk dystopia fully develops, I'll have as much open source AI on my side as I can muster to help me survive.
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
This is very true, but:
- very little of this has ever extended outside Chinese borders, apart from the extraterritorial policing of Chinese nationals; they've not "gone global" in the way the US did
"it so happens that I was born not [American] and have no ancestry in [America], and the preponderance of evidence over the last few decades shows that the result of this, is that [American billionaires] will pretty much never "share the wealth" with me in any meaningful form." Moreover, American and Russian billionaires have shown substantial interest in making the politics of my home country much worse.
politelemon 1 days ago [-]
The contents of this post, in some parts, is somewhat alien to me. The need to pick a side, root for someone, and figure out a winner. It's very sports team like and detracts from the goals, effects and outcomes of the topic itself. It is entirely possible that there are no good and bad sides, nor is there any need for someone to win any kind of made up trophy.
yencabulator 24 hours ago [-]
It does start with
> By all accounts, I should be a neofeudalist.
That kind of language is a neofeudalist cliche, "us vs them" while conveniently not mentioning the billionaire overclass.
sph 1 days ago [-]
That investment chart is hilarious and terrifying. You Americans better hope this whole AI thing pans out.
defrost 1 days ago [-]
It's not a chart of investment by patriotic US citizens seeking to better the country such that the country "wins" .. more like a chart of military and motte and bailey investments made by individual feuding Norman clans each seeking to be the last castle standing and in control of all the throttle points and gates across the country and ideally the world.
roenxi 1 days ago [-]
This is a good time to reflect on the etymology of "Banana Republic" [0]. I suspect most people don't see fruit companies as a major threat, but they'll kill and ravage to get people cheap bananas.
This idea that the morals of the people making investments is in any way relevant is a bit of a misframe. Investors are capable of any evil, the default position is of surprise if one of them is investing out of some sense of responsibility. The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins.
Slightly off topic but the Vice banana documentary is a surprisingly interesting 15 minutes https://youtu.be/2Bm5NWCMlPo Some on banana republics and also much other stuff.
I'd say that we might both agree that the US economy is currently heavily dependent on the circular jerking of numbers between AI boosters .. remains to be seen what the average person gets to eat from slops.
thrance 4 hours ago [-]
> Works really well, on average everyone wins.
How can you claim that just after speaking of Banana Republics? These clearly show that free markets alone are terrible for the vast majority of people.
titzer 22 hours ago [-]
> The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins.
When there is a functioning justice system that enforces the law, rather than a corrupt oligarchy/kleptocracy/kakistocracy.
keybored 19 hours ago [-]
> The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins.
Now imagine how much money you have to invest in order to convince people that this weird theory makes sense.
janpeuker 6 hours ago [-]
The chart is also misleading because it paints investment as morally good but ignores most of this investment goes into closed source APIs while the rest of the world does open weights, and does so way more efficiently (spending less money) due to export controls
happytoexplain 1 days ago [-]
He praises a person for careful, nuanced takes, but then links to their writing where the first paragraph contains the sentence, "the human experience of art appreciation is indifferent to the source."
aggakake 1 days ago [-]
It's weird to see geohot rooting against Elon considering his involvement in the early days following Twitter's acquisition.
sph 1 days ago [-]
I dislike Elon and all his fanboys, but I recognize maturity when one is able to move past their mistakes and wrong assumptions, so good on Geohot for that.
It's weird to expect anyone never to make a wrong step in their life, though I can see where this kind of armchair activism tends to be very popular (i.e. on social media)
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
Real error of judgement in not being able to see when Elon went overtly bad. Of course, the libertarian classic: he was only harming other people.
aworks 21 hours ago [-]
I don't have any comment on the post but that chart is fascinating. Both because the US bar is comparatively way off to the right. But also what's up in say, Belgium re: AI?
My old (US) company's AI expert was in Belgium for reasons but the country being on the leader board surprises me.
CodeArtisan 21 hours ago [-]
Belgium could be in the top5 in the next report chart due to Google alone.
I usually don't even know what ai I'm using at any one time. It's just a choice in my IDE between a bunch of different models, and I switch models every now and then when the response time slows down too much (usually when the Americans start waking up). I have no loyalty to any one product.
insane_dreamer 21 hours ago [-]
Anyone "winning" AI means that most of us will "lose".
motbus3 1 days ago [-]
I think this is a late realisation that people are having that none of those guys are good guys.
People passionate by science see rockets to go to mars, politicians see missiles and spy satellites.
I have a conviction that this was the intention all along. I really hope to be wrong about of this and there is a super good guy who will step up and stop all this nonsense.
I agree that the world where AI is a tool that everybody should have real access too should be the way, but history shows that power never came without oppression.
Majority of people took all the risks as paranoia and/or do not have enough understanding.
The moment those tools became slightly better, they started to being used against the wills of everyone who helped building them.
We should stop believing that those folks in charge are good guys or simply doing mistakes. They are doing exactly what they have been working on for 10+ more years.
perarneng 1 days ago [-]
It would be interesting to see that chart per capita
yomismoaqui 1 days ago [-]
I want open weights models to win AI, don't care if Satan himself does the training and finetuning.
dd8601fn 23 hours ago [-]
That would be nice. Kinda seems unlikely though, doesn’t it?
The way they’re made is so resource intensive it kinda feels like saying “the best free and open source nuclear powered aircraft carrier.”
We get whatever the massively well funded companies are inclined to give us.
dartharva 22 hours ago [-]
There is an entire host of Chinese free models out there proving you wrong
dd8601fn 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah, when Alibaba decides to give us a new, lower end Qwen.
They’re not coming from an altruistic guy with a couple gpus in his basement.
PunchyHamster 1 days ago [-]
There is no "winning". It already proliferates.
All US is doing is taking brunt of the cost of developing it
trvz 1 days ago [-]
The brunt cost is taken by the public, whose intellectual property has been expropriated. After all, the worth of our combined data would be at least the sum of the worth of the entire AI industry.
rogermungo 1 days ago [-]
I suppose I'd rather the US wins AI as opposed to, say, China
sunaurus 1 days ago [-]
Realistically I am starting to think China would be more responsible with it than the US.
CharlieDigital 1 days ago [-]
The US no longer feels like a place where the rule of law applies.
For whatever you want to fault China with (human rights, personal freedoms, etc.), there is at least the facade of rule of law.
US is masks off and not even a thin veneer that rule of law applies any more.
davidgf 1 days ago [-]
If you're an US citizen, I would understand why. If you're from elsewhere, looking at how both countries deal with foreign policies, perhaps the answer requires some serious reflection.
malka1986 1 days ago [-]
I'm from the EU.
I'd rather China wins this. By a landslide.
I cant wait for the EU finally turns its back on the US and start integrating seriously with China.
cyanydeez 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, there's nothing about the current America I want to "win" AI; nor the people leading it.
I'm sure China has the same type of leadership, but they've yet to threaten to nuke a whole civilization.
Obviously, we want to be in the middle between what America represents and China, and that's currently Europe.
dartharva 22 hours ago [-]
China is fundamentally anti-elite. It is the whole principle the PRC was founded on. China does not have "the same type of leadership" at all. It has well-raised technocratic cadres who compete within the system, not above it unlike the US.
red-iron-pine 17 hours ago [-]
ITT: we think the CCP is not "an elite"
cyanydeez 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the same people who claim nazis were socialists and north korea is a democratic peoples republic.
A lot of semantics and no dsire to evaluate real world implementations.
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
The real winner in this subthread: negative polarization. It's kind of incredible to watch. Show people two actors, point out the bad things one has done, and they instantly apply "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic and turn into China boosters. Without even considering that there might be, say, other options.
China provides some great manufactured goods (I may well buy a Chinese car) and runs an ordered society with clean streets and good public transport. But because it doesn't have a free press, you and I (and most Chinese citizens) can't see what the downsides are. They're politely but firmly swept under the rug. And if you get on the wrong side of the "ordered society", it can go very badly for you.
Perhaps the real lesson is how the American right have so successfully poisoned the idea of competitive politics and free speech that a literal one party state looks better than .. whatever the hell is going on over there. People would opt to give up their right to politics simply in order to not be subjected to politics.
(remember how Mao recruited the first few Communists effectively one village at a time? The tradeoff was paying taxes to them rather than the Emperor, and if any imperial tax collectors wandered in to ask the rebels would deal with them. A common model for effective revolutions. But it absolutely hinges on being able to deliver better material conditions.)
keybored 22 hours ago [-]
> The real winner in this subthread: negative polarization.
People being against their local elites is largely a good thing. That’s what the China boosting is mostly about.
> It's kind of incredible to watch. Show people two actors, point out the bad things one has done, and they instantly apply "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic and turn into China boosters. Without even considering that there might be, say, other options.
People aren’t cardboard cutouts with preprogrammed opinions. They are answering a pretty much yes-or-no question without necessarily giving all the reasons. And it can be tempting to say No to the US Hegemon on an American website, just as an off the cuff of my chair remark.
(And the person you responded to did the same, but with a US-positive response.)
And people do not necessarily sit around wishing for a better hegemon, either. But here’s the pro-USA (“foreign” policy version) script we’ve been seeing.
- America is a force for good
- ... and it if isn’t a force for good then it is a better hegemon than China
- ... and if it isn’t a better hegemon than China for you foreigners then it’s a better hegemon for me, an American
- ... and if it isn’t a better hegemon for you, poor American, it’s a better hegemon for me, rich American
- ... and anyway there will by necessity be some hegemon so you have to choose one
And they think to themselves. Okay. Going with this lesser evil hegemon logic I choose China.
Which again doesn’t mean that they actively want any hegemon at all.
> But because it doesn't have a free press, you and I (and most Chinese citizens) can't see what the downsides are. They're politely but firmly swept under the rug. And if you get on the wrong side of the "ordered society", it can go very badly for you.
I’m a blank slate on this so whatever you say. Most things I’ve heard about China are from the West. And the US in particular. Now recently there has been much more pro-China propaganda or whatever you call it. In terms of tech, infrastructure, even about being a supposed good hegemon to African countries or wherever.
> Perhaps the real lesson is how the American right have so successfully poisoned the idea of competitive politics and free speech that a literal one party state looks better than .. whatever the hell is going on over there. People would opt to give up their right to politics simply in order to not be subjected to politics.
No, you ask them a yes/no question and they choose the lesser evil!
I have no idea about civic engagement in China. No doubt America will tell me that it’s some kind of Black Mirror but literally real life.
Meanwhile in the West we have democracy, in our names. We have civic engagement. Yes yes yes. It’s not undemocratic. But it’s still dominated by the rich. Pick up a political science textbook and they talk about democracy in the West in real terms. As an elite-dominated institution with people-powered ornamentation.
People are not caricatures that either want the American military boot or the Chinese Han supremacy (or whatever is up with ethnicity in China).[1] But if you ask them if they want the American boot, guess what can happen? Them expressing displeasures with their overlords.
[1] This was apparently one of the super downsides of Chinese supremacy according to some corners of this thread. Ethnic majority racism.
red-iron-pine 17 hours ago [-]
unless USA-ians are willing to jail or hang the people destroying their country and global order they shouldn't be trusted.
or more rather, the techno-oligarchs who now run the country shouldn't be trusted; the American people are useless
1 days ago [-]
AntiUSAbah 1 days ago [-]
What i find interesting is the other article of geohot regarding AGI.
It seems that its financial possible for a handful of companies to learn everything.
It doesn't matter how we solve 'work':
It can be AGI, it can also be the already existing massive global scale Reinforcement Loop we all feed through using ChatGPT and co, it could be to compute RL or by buying experts teaching this knowledge to some AI system.
Companies also start to put the 'human' part into the agentic layer.
A while back anyone was somehow a benefit even if they did some kind of shitty work. Today i don't think this is true anymore. I would prefer to manage some avg ai than a shitty person.
This will and is already disrupting human lives.
pu_pe 1 days ago [-]
The US single-handedly dominating AI at this point probably means a handful of tech overlords in charge of a surveillance society which depends on AI for everything, with some vague promises that everyone else will get some sort of allowance if they feel benevolent enough. For all existential risks discussed about ASI or whatever, having an oligarchy in complete control of this tech is maybe even worse.
So, I guess we all have to hope that more money does not necessarily lead to a "victory" here.
hiddencost 1 days ago [-]
The brain rot required to call the EA people evil while praising the guy that did agree to give the Pentagon autonomous weapons...
18 hours ago [-]
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
The "effective altruism" people speedran the philosophical problem that good intentions do not necessarily produce good outcomes, far faster than any Communist revolution.
UncleMeat 23 hours ago [-]
The EA people who give money directly to poor people are great.
The EA people who decided to spend oodles of money working on AI ostensibly to prevent an insane thought experiment and then converted that effort into a for-profit corporation while insisting that actually giving money to the poor is bad because you'll have greater future utility by spending it on AI are worthy of scorn.
zozbot234 23 hours ago [-]
> The EA people who decided to spend oodles of money working on AI ostensibly to prevent an insane thought experiment and then converted that effort into a for-profit corporation while insisting that actually giving money to the poor is bad because you'll have greater future utility by spending it on AI are worthy of scorn.
That was the e/acc folks though. Different acronym, even though they were a spinoff from the original EA folks.
oulipo2 1 days ago [-]
AI society is going to be:
- you, chained on your sofa, watching ads "tailored-made by AI for you"
- weaponized robots roaming the streets to ensure everyone is "at work" and not "at leisure activities"
- "no need to vote", of course, because "AI already knows what's good for you"...
mindcrime 1 days ago [-]
> - you, chained on your sofa, watching ads "tailored-made by AI for you"
Why don’t we go out in the streets and protest? Like the french did some centuries ago. If only we stop using instagram, youtube, if we stop searching in google, if we ditch claude, openai, for a couple of days… the billionaries will notice it and get hurt. That would be like a warning from our side
palmotea 21 hours ago [-]
> Why don’t we go out in the streets and protest?
We'll then they'll just send the kill-bots to deal with the problem (you).
Real reason: political polarization and social media has fragmented society, isolated people, and instilled a deep sense of cynicism to sap the motivation of people to take political action that would actually help themselves against the billionaires. Classic divide and conquer.
For instance: what to start a tech union? You're gonna fail because on the one hand you've got people who really want to focus on stuff like trans issues and Israel/Palestine, and then on the other you have a lot of people who want to have nothing to do with the first group. The result: no coordinated worker response to issues like offshoring and AI, and the billionaires and CEOs get to run wild.
tim333 20 hours ago [-]
Because the above comment is hyperbole.
fragmede 21 hours ago [-]
Last century? The French did that just last month!
> weaponized robots roaming the streets to ensure everyone is "at work" and not "at leisure activities"
But I thought everyone was going to lose their jobs...
wongarsu 1 days ago [-]
No, you see, if you lose your job you are poor. And in America, the poor don't deserve leisure. And any work they do has to be as punishing as possible, no matter how little effect that cruelty has on the bottom line
If there's no work to do, we can always invent more work. We just have to figure out who pays for it. Enjoying life is for those "communist" Europeans /s
cyanydeez 1 days ago [-]
Nah, the weaponized robots don't need to ensure you're working. They need to ensure you're either watching advertisements or working!
Obviously, if you're a child you can't work, so you need to be advertising fodder.
chrsw 1 days ago [-]
I had an indignant gasp reflex when he called Cursor "random AI bubble crap" and I'm just a user.
Jamesbeam 23 hours ago [-]
If the US wins AI like they won the Iran war, hell yeah.
Glad to see they are not tired of winning yet. I wouldn’t know what to do with all those wins.
AntiUSAbah 1 days ago [-]
After showing us that these people are willing to vote for Trump twice?
Having people like Peter Thiel over there who thinks daemons exist?
With Elon Musk having all social security numbers and no one cares about that? Or his blant disruption of democracy?
In china people disappear, true, but at least with China you know what you get. With USA its schizophrenia every 4 years and it wouldnt matter to me if suddenly my air travels are no longer possible due to Trump or i have to pay a lot more due to market disruptions.
comrade1234 1 days ago [-]
I assure you, daemons do exist. They've possessed my linux server.
Diti 1 days ago [-]
They live in the Dust gathered in your server!
feverzsj 1 days ago [-]
It's like the largest scam in history. No one will win it except some scammers.
guzfip 20 hours ago [-]
> The AI I dreamed of my whole life is being built, engineer-type strongmen are sort of in charge
Not sure the sort of pedophilic drug addicts running Silicon Valley companies really evoke the idea of an “engineer type strongman”. But I understand that colloquially “strongman” most means “paranoid loudmouth”.
Maybe this was the case when the researchers themselves had a small level of clout/influence, but I’ve seen more product acquisition announcements recently from AI than deep technical improvements.
fcantournet 1 days ago [-]
Don't mean to make Americans sad but "the US" doesn't win AI, a few oligarchs win AI (if US companies end up winning).
The question is not US v China, it's Peter Thiel and Elon Musk vs literally anything else (that would be clearly better).
WA 1 days ago [-]
The question who will benefit from wealth generated by AI is never clearly answered. Or it's hand-waved away with some productivity gains mumbo jumbo (that never result in less work, just more, because everybody loads up on AI tools) or the good old trickle down lie.
keybored 1 days ago [-]
> By all accounts, I should be a neofeudalist. I should love what’s happening. The AI I dreamed of my whole life is being built, engineer-type strongmen are sort of in charge, and people are saying out loud the things I have just thought. You might argue that I like it and I’m just not happy with my seat at the table. I ask myself a lot if this is true, like what if I was Elon. Would I be enjoying it then from that position?
> Of course it’s impossible to know for sure, but I think I really wouldn’t. Even the ideal version, industrial megaprojects at hyperhuman scale while constantly being out over your skis with leverage sounds hellish. It’s not a society I want to live in, regardless of my seat. I would much prefer someone like this design society, with careful nuanced takes about technology.
Who writes like this? Hehe, my self-analysis says that I should be neofeudalist but I against the apparent odds am not. Congrats?
> It is coming, and the anti AI people would do poorly to bury their heads in the sand. Doing that won’t stop AI from being built. The good world is where everyone has AI, and not as a revokable privilege through an API, but through hard possession. Pay attention to who is releasing AI to the world and who has released nothing, then think about who the good guys are.
Who wants to follow these off the cuff rants? Oh right, the very reasonable move-to-Mars idea. But anyway, with regards to AI I hope the good tech bros win.
The tech bros from the same milieu where you openly muse about whether you are a neofeudalist, Church of Singularity Adherent, Rationalist, or whatever other Silicon Valley mind-degeneracy?
No thanks I don’t want any tech bro overlords. Bad or supposed good.
And people wonder why there is a partial backlash to AI?
theturtle 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
undeveloper 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
AntiUSAbah 1 days ago [-]
Urgh wtf :|
Unfortunate i can't find the source though:
"He had a video on Youtube where he proudly gloated about how he voted for Trump in not one but two elections, how happy he is that he can now openly talk about it, how its a fresh start for US, how catastrophic Harris would have been.
Did he take down the video because of embarrassment or did he fear negative impact on his sales?"
So i asked him and he voted for Trump only in 2016 so at least this source is not true.
I don’t want the US to win anything ever again. They are a net negative in this world, obsessed with short term profits. Countries like China with long term objectives are better.
throw42356 1 days ago [-]
America, China and Russia are all same.
AntiUSAbah 1 days ago [-]
I don't agree.
China took a very rich business man and told him to stop showing his richness and start doing more for china.
China has a real plan for renewable energy and pushing through it.
China is smarter because it doesn't allow some people to vote for people like Trump and its smarter than russia because it is less motivated by one persons personal agenda.
quater321 1 days ago [-]
you don't really need to explain that to someone with common sense. If someone says a communist countrie should be the top of the world, they are obviously part of the communist party or simply re*rded.
AntiUSAbah 1 days ago [-]
I'm clarifying my viewpoint to a comment from someone else to have a proper discussion.
It could lead to a good discussion, it often doesn't.
defrost 1 days ago [-]
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
A Marxist Leninist vanguard party is objectively demonstrating better management over markets and improving citizen welfare than our decadent bourgeois financial elites. As an American and previously a China hater, it’s painful to admit but it’s clearly true
rob74 1 days ago [-]
I'm a bit sad that the US now look less reliable (and, on average, more of a net negative) than China, but I can't blame anyone who has that impression right now. As long as the guy who sets the long term objectives is reasonably sane, I guess? Putin attacked Ukraine, Trump (and Bibi) attacked Iran, I'm hoping Xi is smarter and doesn't attack Taiwan, otherwise we can all say good bye to our jobs, and who "wins" AI will be the least important question on our minds...
keybored 1 days ago [-]
It’s all about appearances isn’t it. America has dropped more bombs than China. When did China bomb a country last time? But appearances change and that is sad.
The only thing that changed was that America turned on its client states and started saying unhinged shit instead of appearances-speeches like spreading freedom and democracy.
Edit: replaced “has bombed more countries than China” with “dropped more bombs”
deadbabe 1 days ago [-]
America’s goal is to rule the world through a hegemony built on fear and violence. With the current administration, it’s just that the mask has slipped.
Americans are all the same really, it doesn’t matter who voted for who: FIX your shit, fix your society. Stop oppressing the world with destructive capitalism. And yea maybe that means you have to slow down and live a little more inconveniently, but it will be for the betterment of the world.
ozmodiar 1 days ago [-]
I think China has too much to gain by looking like the word's stable alternative to America. What really gets me depressed is their current trajectory towards cultural homogeneity, even internally. There seems to be a real push to calcify the Han identity. I don't know why dictators are so drawn to homogenizing their own cultures when nature itself seems to point to diversity as strength. It leaves me still kind of hoping America is somehow able to pull its head out of its ass, but they'll have to overcome their own oligarchy and entrenched structures - Trump was a symptom.
quater321 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
azangru 1 days ago [-]
I am puzzled by this sentence, which combines nationality, psychosis, and intelligence into one. What if the parent commenter is Vietnamese? Or Hungarian? Or Turkish? Will this fall into the "or" clause?
torlok 1 days ago [-]
Beside posturing, modern China was only involved in skirmishes at the Indian border. What's delusional is blindly comparing China to Russia or the USA.
silexia 1 days ago [-]
The author doesn't really address the question in the title.
Read "Superintelligence", we are basically racing towards the extinction of our species by creating a self generating alien intelligence that will quickly grow and escape any controls we attempt to place on it.
api 1 days ago [-]
This assumes two things: that AI will not asymptote due to limits in things like training data or compute, and that a superintelligence would necessarily cause our extinction.
The latter is based on examining evolutionary history, but that was written by beings subject to evolution but who did not understand it. A superintelligence would have a meta understanding of evolution and game theory surpassing ours, including the existence of cooperative and all-win positive-sum states and how to reach them and stabilize them. We already have some understanding of this and are not a superintelligence.
And with that, I just added that as a prompt to the training data.
Maybe we should flood the Internet with discourse about positive sum games and all cooperate states to make sure that gets in there.
josefritzishere 21 hours ago [-]
I define Winning AI as burying it in the back yard like Quibi and Netscape.
cindyllm 21 hours ago [-]
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Rendered at 12:32:39 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I don't want any one particular country, or organization, to "win" AI. I want AI capabilities to remain diffuse and spread out, so that everybody has access to approximately equal levels of AI. If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
Getting free labour, lipstick of "freedom", and enable to put millions invested in what open source never can do: Scaling, infra, win big contracts, etc.
Open Source NEVER win the market game.
It only give consolation to few that can run things locally.
2) That still equates to "Meta is not in the AI game any more" in meta-corporate speak
Otherwise big corporations and/or governments will own everything and most folks will be serfs. However if you can buy a few robots and go run a homestead then there can be a counterbalance of people not beholden to the system.
A telling sign of techno-feudalism will be AI becoming heavily regulated and even illegal for common people to make or own. You know because “public safety”.
I wish we had a good way to solve for that.
The most widely used AI systems are controlled by a few billionaires. I'd like to see it become much more spread out.
But if electricity and hardware is a proxy for AI then those things are much less fungible. And if those two things in turn are not tied to the hip with money.
> If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
Has OSS won in terms of being software for the people?
And the big US tech companies largely seem to be run by, and occupied by, people who at least tacitly support this whole "techno-feudalism" thing.
So for my money, I'm not particularly a fan of either camp. I'm just hoping that when the cyberpunk dystopia fully develops, I'll have as much open source AI on my side as I can muster to help me survive.
- very little of this has ever extended outside Chinese borders, apart from the extraterritorial policing of Chinese nationals; they've not "gone global" in the way the US did
- the current US faction is also trying to work towards an ethnostate, and has turned hard against non-USians and increasingly against non-white US nationals: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigratio...
As a Brit:
"it so happens that I was born not [American] and have no ancestry in [America], and the preponderance of evidence over the last few decades shows that the result of this, is that [American billionaires] will pretty much never "share the wealth" with me in any meaningful form." Moreover, American and Russian billionaires have shown substantial interest in making the politics of my home country much worse.
> By all accounts, I should be a neofeudalist.
That kind of language is a neofeudalist cliche, "us vs them" while conveniently not mentioning the billionaire overclass.
This idea that the morals of the people making investments is in any way relevant is a bit of a misframe. Investors are capable of any evil, the default position is of surprise if one of them is investing out of some sense of responsibility. The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Etymology
I'd say that we might both agree that the US economy is currently heavily dependent on the circular jerking of numbers between AI boosters .. remains to be seen what the average person gets to eat from slops.
How can you claim that just after speaking of Banana Republics? These clearly show that free markets alone are terrible for the vast majority of people.
When there is a functioning justice system that enforces the law, rather than a corrupt oligarchy/kleptocracy/kakistocracy.
Now imagine how much money you have to invest in order to convince people that this weird theory makes sense.
It's weird to expect anyone never to make a wrong step in their life, though I can see where this kind of armchair activism tends to be very popular (i.e. on social media)
My old (US) company's AI expert was in Belgium for reasons but the country being on the leader board surprises me.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/infrastructure-and-clo...
People passionate by science see rockets to go to mars, politicians see missiles and spy satellites.
I have a conviction that this was the intention all along. I really hope to be wrong about of this and there is a super good guy who will step up and stop all this nonsense.
I agree that the world where AI is a tool that everybody should have real access too should be the way, but history shows that power never came without oppression. Majority of people took all the risks as paranoia and/or do not have enough understanding.
The moment those tools became slightly better, they started to being used against the wills of everyone who helped building them.
We should stop believing that those folks in charge are good guys or simply doing mistakes. They are doing exactly what they have been working on for 10+ more years.
The way they’re made is so resource intensive it kinda feels like saying “the best free and open source nuclear powered aircraft carrier.”
We get whatever the massively well funded companies are inclined to give us.
They’re not coming from an altruistic guy with a couple gpus in his basement.
All US is doing is taking brunt of the cost of developing it
For whatever you want to fault China with (human rights, personal freedoms, etc.), there is at least the facade of rule of law.
US is masks off and not even a thin veneer that rule of law applies any more.
I'd rather China wins this. By a landslide.
I cant wait for the EU finally turns its back on the US and start integrating seriously with China.
I'm sure China has the same type of leadership, but they've yet to threaten to nuke a whole civilization.
Obviously, we want to be in the middle between what America represents and China, and that's currently Europe.
A lot of semantics and no dsire to evaluate real world implementations.
China provides some great manufactured goods (I may well buy a Chinese car) and runs an ordered society with clean streets and good public transport. But because it doesn't have a free press, you and I (and most Chinese citizens) can't see what the downsides are. They're politely but firmly swept under the rug. And if you get on the wrong side of the "ordered society", it can go very badly for you.
Perhaps the real lesson is how the American right have so successfully poisoned the idea of competitive politics and free speech that a literal one party state looks better than .. whatever the hell is going on over there. People would opt to give up their right to politics simply in order to not be subjected to politics.
(remember how Mao recruited the first few Communists effectively one village at a time? The tradeoff was paying taxes to them rather than the Emperor, and if any imperial tax collectors wandered in to ask the rebels would deal with them. A common model for effective revolutions. But it absolutely hinges on being able to deliver better material conditions.)
People being against their local elites is largely a good thing. That’s what the China boosting is mostly about.
> It's kind of incredible to watch. Show people two actors, point out the bad things one has done, and they instantly apply "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic and turn into China boosters. Without even considering that there might be, say, other options.
People aren’t cardboard cutouts with preprogrammed opinions. They are answering a pretty much yes-or-no question without necessarily giving all the reasons. And it can be tempting to say No to the US Hegemon on an American website, just as an off the cuff of my chair remark.
(And the person you responded to did the same, but with a US-positive response.)
And people do not necessarily sit around wishing for a better hegemon, either. But here’s the pro-USA (“foreign” policy version) script we’ve been seeing.
- America is a force for good
- ... and it if isn’t a force for good then it is a better hegemon than China
- ... and if it isn’t a better hegemon than China for you foreigners then it’s a better hegemon for me, an American
- ... and if it isn’t a better hegemon for you, poor American, it’s a better hegemon for me, rich American
- ... and anyway there will by necessity be some hegemon so you have to choose one
And they think to themselves. Okay. Going with this lesser evil hegemon logic I choose China.
Which again doesn’t mean that they actively want any hegemon at all.
> But because it doesn't have a free press, you and I (and most Chinese citizens) can't see what the downsides are. They're politely but firmly swept under the rug. And if you get on the wrong side of the "ordered society", it can go very badly for you.
I’m a blank slate on this so whatever you say. Most things I’ve heard about China are from the West. And the US in particular. Now recently there has been much more pro-China propaganda or whatever you call it. In terms of tech, infrastructure, even about being a supposed good hegemon to African countries or wherever.
> Perhaps the real lesson is how the American right have so successfully poisoned the idea of competitive politics and free speech that a literal one party state looks better than .. whatever the hell is going on over there. People would opt to give up their right to politics simply in order to not be subjected to politics.
No, you ask them a yes/no question and they choose the lesser evil!
I have no idea about civic engagement in China. No doubt America will tell me that it’s some kind of Black Mirror but literally real life.
Meanwhile in the West we have democracy, in our names. We have civic engagement. Yes yes yes. It’s not undemocratic. But it’s still dominated by the rich. Pick up a political science textbook and they talk about democracy in the West in real terms. As an elite-dominated institution with people-powered ornamentation.
People are not caricatures that either want the American military boot or the Chinese Han supremacy (or whatever is up with ethnicity in China).[1] But if you ask them if they want the American boot, guess what can happen? Them expressing displeasures with their overlords.
[1] This was apparently one of the super downsides of Chinese supremacy according to some corners of this thread. Ethnic majority racism.
or more rather, the techno-oligarchs who now run the country shouldn't be trusted; the American people are useless
It seems that its financial possible for a handful of companies to learn everything.
It doesn't matter how we solve 'work':
It can be AGI, it can also be the already existing massive global scale Reinforcement Loop we all feed through using ChatGPT and co, it could be to compute RL or by buying experts teaching this knowledge to some AI system.
Companies also start to put the 'human' part into the agentic layer.
A while back anyone was somehow a benefit even if they did some kind of shitty work. Today i don't think this is true anymore. I would prefer to manage some avg ai than a shitty person.
This will and is already disrupting human lives.
So, I guess we all have to hope that more money does not necessarily lead to a "victory" here.
The EA people who decided to spend oodles of money working on AI ostensibly to prevent an insane thought experiment and then converted that effort into a for-profit corporation while insisting that actually giving money to the poor is bad because you'll have greater future utility by spending it on AI are worthy of scorn.
That was the e/acc folks though. Different acronym, even though they were a spinoff from the original EA folks.
- you, chained on your sofa, watching ads "tailored-made by AI for you"
- weaponized robots roaming the streets to ensure everyone is "at work" and not "at leisure activities"
- "no need to vote", of course, because "AI already knows what's good for you"...
Blipverts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
We'll then they'll just send the kill-bots to deal with the problem (you).
Real reason: political polarization and social media has fragmented society, isolated people, and instilled a deep sense of cynicism to sap the motivation of people to take political action that would actually help themselves against the billionaires. Classic divide and conquer.
For instance: what to start a tech union? You're gonna fail because on the one hand you've got people who really want to focus on stuff like trans issues and Israel/Palestine, and then on the other you have a lot of people who want to have nothing to do with the first group. The result: no coordinated worker response to issues like offshoring and AI, and the billionaires and CEOs get to run wild.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/08/t...
But I thought everyone was going to lose their jobs...
If there's no work to do, we can always invent more work. We just have to figure out who pays for it. Enjoying life is for those "communist" Europeans /s
Obviously, if you're a child you can't work, so you need to be advertising fodder.
Glad to see they are not tired of winning yet. I wouldn’t know what to do with all those wins.
Having people like Peter Thiel over there who thinks daemons exist?
With Elon Musk having all social security numbers and no one cares about that? Or his blant disruption of democracy?
In china people disappear, true, but at least with China you know what you get. With USA its schizophrenia every 4 years and it wouldnt matter to me if suddenly my air travels are no longer possible due to Trump or i have to pay a lot more due to market disruptions.
Not sure the sort of pedophilic drug addicts running Silicon Valley companies really evoke the idea of an “engineer type strongman”. But I understand that colloquially “strongman” most means “paranoid loudmouth”.
Maybe this was the case when the researchers themselves had a small level of clout/influence, but I’ve seen more product acquisition announcements recently from AI than deep technical improvements.
The question is not US v China, it's Peter Thiel and Elon Musk vs literally anything else (that would be clearly better).
> Of course it’s impossible to know for sure, but I think I really wouldn’t. Even the ideal version, industrial megaprojects at hyperhuman scale while constantly being out over your skis with leverage sounds hellish. It’s not a society I want to live in, regardless of my seat. I would much prefer someone like this design society, with careful nuanced takes about technology.
Who writes like this? Hehe, my self-analysis says that I should be neofeudalist but I against the apparent odds am not. Congrats?
> It is coming, and the anti AI people would do poorly to bury their heads in the sand. Doing that won’t stop AI from being built. The good world is where everyone has AI, and not as a revokable privilege through an API, but through hard possession. Pay attention to who is releasing AI to the world and who has released nothing, then think about who the good guys are.
Who wants to follow these off the cuff rants? Oh right, the very reasonable move-to-Mars idea. But anyway, with regards to AI I hope the good tech bros win.
The tech bros from the same milieu where you openly muse about whether you are a neofeudalist, Church of Singularity Adherent, Rationalist, or whatever other Silicon Valley mind-degeneracy?
No thanks I don’t want any tech bro overlords. Bad or supposed good.
And people wonder why there is a partial backlash to AI?
Unfortunate i can't find the source though:
"He had a video on Youtube where he proudly gloated about how he voted for Trump in not one but two elections, how happy he is that he can now openly talk about it, how its a fresh start for US, how catastrophic Harris would have been. Did he take down the video because of embarrassment or did he fear negative impact on his sales?"
So i asked him and he voted for Trump only in 2016 so at least this source is not true.
China took a very rich business man and told him to stop showing his richness and start doing more for china.
China has a real plan for renewable energy and pushing through it.
China is smarter because it doesn't allow some people to vote for people like Trump and its smarter than russia because it is less motivated by one persons personal agenda.
It could lead to a good discussion, it often doesn't.
~ Hacker News Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The only thing that changed was that America turned on its client states and started saying unhinged shit instead of appearances-speeches like spreading freedom and democracy.
Edit: replaced “has bombed more countries than China” with “dropped more bombs”
Americans are all the same really, it doesn’t matter who voted for who: FIX your shit, fix your society. Stop oppressing the world with destructive capitalism. And yea maybe that means you have to slow down and live a little more inconveniently, but it will be for the betterment of the world.
Read "Superintelligence", we are basically racing towards the extinction of our species by creating a self generating alien intelligence that will quickly grow and escape any controls we attempt to place on it.
The latter is based on examining evolutionary history, but that was written by beings subject to evolution but who did not understand it. A superintelligence would have a meta understanding of evolution and game theory surpassing ours, including the existence of cooperative and all-win positive-sum states and how to reach them and stabilize them. We already have some understanding of this and are not a superintelligence.
And with that, I just added that as a prompt to the training data.
Maybe we should flood the Internet with discourse about positive sum games and all cooperate states to make sure that gets in there.