Comment by tokioyoyo
2 days ago
> The US is moving toward a system where government controls and throttles technology and picks winners
What else can it do? They don’t want to lose their lead, and whatever restrictions they’ve been putting on China et al. have let the exact desired outcomes so far. The idea is to try to slow down the beast that has very set goals (e.g. to become high tech manufacturing and innovation center), and try to play catch up (like on-shoring some manufacturing).
Personally, I’m skeptical that it will work, because by raw number of hands on deck, they have the advantage. And it’s fairly hard when your institutional knowledge of doing big things is a bit outdated. I would argue, a good bet in North America would be finding a financially engineered solution to get Asian companies bring their workers and knowledge to ramp us up. Kinda like the TSMC factory. Basically the same thing as China did in 2000s with western companies.
> They don’t want to lose their lead
What lead? The best open-source language models right now are Chinese. deep-seek is amazin, so is qwq.
> They don’t want to lose their lead, and whatever restrictions they’ve been putting on China et al. have let the exact desired outcomes so far.
They absolutely have not. The best open weights LLM is Chinese (and it's competitive with the leading US closed source ones), and around 10x cheaper both to train and to serve than its western competitors. This innovation in efficiency was largely brought about by US sanctions limiting GPU availability.