People seem to miss the point that it‘s probably more about information than anything else. They know this shit isn‘t productive. Deep down, they know they‘re selling crap. But it produces tons of data from users. Silicon valley knows this best. That‘s why they „protect AI companies“. They just want to harvest the data themselves.
There really is no better way to obtain data. And it’s not just data that’s fed into the AI, but also strategies, methods and processes: ideally, these are incorporated directly into the software.
If American models didn’t cost 100 times more…
USA can’t block the world from using it. So good luck trump. China is winning.
Exact same strategy they used for Chinese EVs… head in the sand while China steals their global marketshare. I still get a chuckle when Americans paint Chinese EVs as poor/lesser quality.
Frankly, this kind of meddling just makes it more appealing to use Chinese models. Chinese models are often open-weight, meaning that they’re basically immune to foreign meddling - if China decides tomorrow to “cut you off” you just need to find some other provider that’s offering those models and buy access from them instead. Or if you’re a big enough organization, just rent or buy some hardware and run it yourself.
This sort of meddling shows that the US government is eager to weaponize access to AI, and if you’re dependent on American models there are no other places you can run them.
This! The irony is that every attempt to turn AI into a geopolitical choke point becomes free marketing for open weight models. People tend to trust tools they can actually control. If access can vanish with a policy memo, resilience suddenly matters more than benchmark bragging.
US was too focused on trying to force dominance, they forgot what actual competition is. They could have spent that effort in becoming better, encouraging more US based companies. Instead here we are.
they forgot what actual competition is
That’s an accurate diagnosis. U.S. big tech companies all follow the same playbook: use VC to buy off or price-dump to death all of your competitors. Become a monopoly. Then enshittify and extract the maximum amount of wealth from b2b and retail customers by increasing the cost of your services.
Any sane country would have drowned these companies in anti-trust cases and carved them up. But political leadership at the time was too high on neoliberal free market ideology and the fairytales these self-styled “tech geniuses” wove around themselves. Now big tech has effectively bought off the U.S. government.
They’re in for a nasty surprise when they find out that the U.S. is not the world, and the rest of the world can do pretty well without the U.S…
If you want a vision of things to come look at the retail industry of the 1980s. All those big box stores and anchor stores of malls all over the US. Absolutely zero presence internationally. You can’t go to Target in London or Best Buy in Paris, because they don’t exist. What we do have though is German shops in Italy and Swedish stores in the UK. Everyone else understood how to do it it was only the Americans that couldn’t, and to be clear they tried to spread internationally, but they weren’t prepared to make the local changes and so they failed.
I have worked for US companies in the past and they always insist on trying to push American work culture in foreign officers, and it never works.
I worked for a us company in Canada and got like 6000 dollars from them because they fired me illegally lol
Oh yeah the idea that they can’t just get rid of people on a whim is a complete alien concept to them.
Agree 100%.
Exactly. Dominance is earned by building products people genuinely prefer, not by making alternatives harder to reach. Every restriction becomes an incentive for competitors to innovate faster. If the US had focused on winning through better models, stronger companies, and real competition instead of political leverage, it would probably be in an even stronger position today.
It doesn’t matter what pedo Trump does, nothing can save OpenAI or Anthropic from their own “dogshit unit economics”.
Zitron is a pinnacle of you can be smart and foul mouthed. Part of the reason he succeeds at this is he actually knows where to properly put cusses in sentences and doesn’t overuse them (like me, for instance).
There was evidence part of the reason people gravitated to Trump was that his foul and odious way of speaking seemed more “honest” because of the vulgarity. As someone who worked in local television news for 10 years, I can say that I think that’s true because it was always so clear that our newscasters were putting on a show and often had very few feelings whatsoever about what they were reporting on, or worse, genuinely were dismissive and cold to people in real tragedy. People have responded to that over time by realizing that all that faux-professionalism just really comes off as covering your ass and/or just using buzzwords to sound like you know how anything works at all when you don’t. It doesn’t come off as sincere, knowledgeable or, most importantly passionate.
When we heard Bernie Sanders, AOC, or Mamdani speak, we can hear the passion they have in the way they speak. When we hear Centrist Dems like Chuck Schumer speak, we automatically hear the work of strategy to get people on their side, not that they really believe or care about what they’re doing. I don’t hear passion in Schumer’s voice for anything but Israel. Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, you can hear that passion that they have for citizens and protecting and lifting them up.
Trump is passionate about himself and his followers are passionate about him, too, I guess. It’s that their is spurred by delusion and unaddressed mental health issues.
Anyway, people need to speak more plainly and with more passion, Zitron is a prime example of doing it well. Other than Doctorow and maybe WIRED, I don’t know of any other really hard hitting evidence-based journalism on this stuff, and Doctorow is a little bit too up his own ass on coining fucking words. (In my humble opinion, Doctorow comes off as way too extremely online to connect his ideas with regular people, he’s just too much of a fucking nerd who can’t stop being a nerd long enough to jive with average people)
Your writing is a pleasure to read. Thanks for this.
Propublica.
Good luck expanding that to the rest of the world which is just discovering that, while not perfect, China’s open weights models are
a) good enough for 95% or all companies out there
b) a lot cheaper, also because they’re
c) self-hostable, meaning: they’ll always be available, unlike U.S. cloud AI which you’ll be cut off from whenever Diaper Donnie feels it’s time for yet another bribe.He can ban deez nuts
I had to think about it for a bit but this is good news because it means less power consumed and CEOs will see it as US workers being more competitive (although AI doesn’t actually have any capability to compete with human work, but CEOs don’t know that).
The Chinese models are being released as open weight models, which are what people who want to run these systems locally are using. By banning them this just means that in the US only corporate models will be available to anyone.
The less access to AI, the better. These fucking slopbots produce liability in exchange for a third of our electricity, fuck em all straight to hell. I wish the Chinese would ban the US bots, too, if they haven’t yet.
The technology isn’t the problem. Believe it or not, LLMs are incredibly capable at a variety of tasks, including coding, curating news articles, writing and reading config files, system administration, note keeping / summarization / evaluation, and a whole lot more. Yes, there are a lot of things that an LLM is not good at, but just because I can’t fly a helicopter doesn’t mean I couldn’t drive you to the airport.
The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the potential for the technology to be completely owned and operated by corporations rather than people.
This technology is the equivalent to oil from snakes, it is a problem.
no it isnt, pretty good at short projects and answering any question that has any source available online, the issue is when it runs out of memory or cant find a source, its superior to search engines and has been for years because seo, spam, and promotion ruined searching the normal way
pretty good at short projects and answering any question that has any source available online
If it has a source online then the AI does nothing but obscures and pollutes that information until it is commonly wrong and/or useless.
Any “short project” utilizing AI deserves to fail, and it will, because nobody wants to buy slop and the mere inclusion of AI degrades to value of everything it touches.
why do you think short project means for sale or for anyone other than myself, stuff thatd take me many tutorials or enough learning time that it wouldnt feel worthwhile to do is made easy by ai and costs pennies at most with deepseek, I like automating things to happen like backups sent to my 2nd pc when certain files update, my browser session automatically copied as a second profile to it as well, I would never have bothered manually setting up the automation that ai did in seconds.
It’s extremely useful for mundane tasks for yourself, automating stuff you may not care to do manually, it’s your own problem if you think you need to sell everything and can’t find usecases for yourself.
It can also find and read logs better than I can, saves me a ton of time debugging and I always end up solving the problem. If you’re going off ai from 2 years ago, those with no real access to any agent tools or skills, or free models than ofc youd think they are incompetent but they are far from it. An indespensable tool that keeps me from needing to look up scripts and software that I end up not using because of the hassle involved compared to the importance of the automation.
This sort of “it doesn’t work and it has to be stopped” perspective baffles me. If it doesn’t work you don’t need to stop it, it’s going to stop itself.
Ponzi Schemes work, just not for the people who expect it to. When this scam reveals itself it’s the worlds major economies getting rug pulled and irreparable climate damage being done.
