Perry E. Metzger@perrymetzger
Now that Chinese AIs are achieving parity with the best US created models, a few short-term predictions:
OpenAI will adapt just fine, they are very pragmatic, and a lot of their value add is understanding how to do inference cheaply at scale.
Anthropic will literally be unable to get out of its own way, because it is too ideologically committed to AI Doomerism, but they will survive anyway, because many of their victims, pardon me, customers, will continue going back to them over and over again no matter how abusive they are, and perhaps even because of how abusive they are. They will also continue to try to use fear as a mechanism for achieving regulatory capture, but with the Chinese racing ahead of them, they are going to have more and more trouble getting a warm reception from all but the far left contingent in Congress. Look for their newly rich employees to be spending vast amounts of money post-IPO on political campaigns in support of Doomer-friendly candidates and attempts to capture the Democratic party, and for that money to have some significant effect, but for it to mostly be wasted because they’re not good at understanding their fellow humans.
Musk is ideologically committed to crushing OpenAI, and so xAI is going to keep its team awake 24 hours a day if necessary until they are ahead; look for them to be at the forefront soon. I would expect xAI to eventually be near or in the lead on commercialization.
Google will not be able to get out of its own way, and it may start arguing more and more for heavy regulation of AI as a way of trying to cripple its opponents. This is insane given that they have some of the best technology out there, but unfortunately, their management is simply not good enough, and not just on AI.
Meta seems to be catching up, but I don’t have a strong opinion on whether they will maintain momentum.
On the Chinese side, I am expecting Chinese R&D to be at the front or ahead most of the time from now on; the US will need policies that adjust for that. I am expecting Anthropic to spend a ton of money on PR and lobbying claiming that this is all through distillation or espionage, although of course it isn’t, and I am expecting that a certain fraction of Congress will be bamboozled, although a surprising fraction will not be receptive, especially after Anthropic employees ham-handedly spend too much money on political campaigns.
It will make no difference, because the only thing that the US could do would be banning Chinese models from being used in the US, and of course, the US can’t actually stop other countries or China from using Chinese models; all this would do is hurt the United States and its interests.
I am expecting more calls for export controls, which will delay the Chinese a bit in the short term but which will ultimately stop working at all, because the Chinese are going to control their full technology stack soon, including having EUV fabs capable of manufacturing domestically designed training and inference hardware. I am also expecting the Chinese to race ahead in robotics, and especially in military robotics.
Some US robotics companies, like Musk’s companies and Anduril, will equal or exceed them, but a lot of the other US companies will be crippled by the fact that US manufacturing is too heavily regulated and restrained by stupid internal policies. They will not have problems keeping up on the technology, but scaling requires manufacturing infrastructure, and much of the US has effectively banned economic development or wants to. Places like New York State and California are already envious of Europe’s self-destruction and want in.
If this continues, look for an eventual decisive Chinese military advantage. Note that this is not what I want, it is the exact opposite of what I want, but absent a big change in US policy about things like data centers, chip fabrication facilities, and just plain normal factories, it’s going to be hard.
