Douglas Gourlay

Classic deep state Washington thinking around tech is focused purely on *control* and *risk* and has a lack of understanding of technology/developer ecosystems work. As @DavidSacks says: for the American AI stack to win, we need to maximize marketshare. This means maximizing tokens inferenced by American models running on American hardware all over the world. To achieve this: we need to maximize a) models trained on our hardware b) models being inferenced on our hardware (NVIDIA, AMD, etc) c) developers building on top of our hardware and our models (either open or closed). It is instantly clear to anyone in tech that this is a developer+platform flywheel - no different from classic ecosystems such as Windows+x86. They are interconnected: (a) the more developers building on any platform, the better that platform becomes thereby bringing in even more builders and so on. (b) With today's fast changing model architectures, they are co-dependent: the model architectures influence hardware choices and vice versa, often being built together. Having the American stack and versions of these around the world builds us a moat. The reverse is also true: an alternative stack which gets usage (libraries, optimization, github code, HF models making it better) will erode our share. This is the key insight that a lot of classic Washington thinking misses. The Biden export controls and diffusion rules were complicated, onerous and focused on control and not exporting our technology. They drove our allies into an alternate stack by making two key mistakes with an overtly doomer and control-focused mindset. (a) Chilling development of open source in the US and not anticipating DeepSeek and the proliferation of Chinese OSS models [1] (b) Being off the mark on Chinese semiconductor production capacity [2]. Going down that path would have lead to a world that is often picking Huawei+CloudMatrix+DeepSeek/Qwen. The challenge before us is to stop that outcome from happening - through making sure our hardware and models (closed or open) are getting used the world over. This is the heart of the President's vision on American AI dominance the world over and this is what the AI action plan sets out to do.