Why are we in an AI arms race? What's actually at stake?
Why are we in an AI arms race? What's actually at stake?
The US blocked high power graphics cards to specific countries, and then got all shaken up when their money moat was pole-vaulted by an embargo'd country wielding jank cards.
Why is this a big deal, exactly?
Who benefits if the US has the best AI, and who benefits if it's China?
Is this like the Space Race, where it's just an effort to spit on each other, but ultimately no one really loses, and cool shit gets made?
What does AI "supremacy" mean?
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The two biggest implications in my opinion are firstly that it shows that this "trillion dollar" industry is a massively overvalued bubble waiting to pop. What takes an American company several hundred billion dollars and a decade of research takes deepseek less than $6M and 18 months. To drive the nail in the coffin even further they recently announced Janus Pro which is an image generator rivaling Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. All this by an embargoed company that didn't even exist when the first editions of these chatbots and and image generators were released.
Second, there's the "national security" implications since the US wants to aggressively militarize AI tech and China just demonstrated that they're already caught up in a fraction of the time for a fraction on the cost so there's no way they don't surpass US capabilities within the next year, if they haven't already.
I think this may be major turning point for global alliances and there will be massive realignment away from the US and toward China on the geopolitical stage. The US and its oligarchy have been called out on their bullshit essentially.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the military aspect: combat drones and robotics
It also opens up a big question, is US military tech and the US army as much better as they claim because of their funding, or is it overvalued by orders of magnitude as their AI tech seems to be?
Absolutely overvalued. Companies overcharging on military contracts by orders of magnitude is the standard. Hell, the air force was buying mugs for over $1k/mug not too long ago, I'm not sure if they ever actually did anything about it but I remember it being reported on a couple of years ago.
The US is scary because of its nuclear arsenal. Most of the $850B budget goes to the contractors solely for R&D, sustained production is rare, and even the "sustained" results in at most 200 units.
AI has been proven to show bias because the data its trained on shows bias but the us doesn't care as long as that bias is pointed at the "enemy" (read: anyone south of Texas or east of Ukraine) so that enemy can be most effectively eliminated. We're not leading in any development, production, or ethics, we're just paying rich assholes to make indiscriminate killing machines unbound by morals and easily scapegoated when things go wrong.
I see people actually in the military constantly complaining about how far behind technologically the military is. Only the special forces/CIA/seals/etc get the really cool toys
The issue I have is there is no surpassing to happen here. We've platued on possible AI milestones, so the only new move will be the next big thing... which is impossible to predict when it'll happen.