Comment by someguyornotidk

It might not be a coincidence that POTUS wrote yesterday on Truth Social that 100% tariffs would be imposed on any country proceeding with taxing US' digital services.

This is far from a new challenge though. Another recent example, China has an advantage on cost of labor and manufacturing, and lack of enforcement of IP rights. They can produce for much cheaper than many other countries but it hasn't led to everyone banning trade with them.

They don’t, they wouldn’t need tariffs if they did.

America mostly produces cheaper ag commodities than the EU but more expensive than South America. Deepseek is already a better search engine than Google. (Not sure if it does Google searches)

Travel the world it’s not American companies gaining market share. I would especially recommend trying Chinese AI or riding in a BYD car and judging for yourself.

> The world needs to act quick before their industries fail.

It's a cost problem. If you want to try for a SOTA model, you're going to need to spend big time.

Germany spent ~$115B last year on it's defense, roughly 2% of it's GDP.

In contrast, ~$145B was spent last year just on AI infrastructure by Meta, and, well no one talks about Meta winning any AI races.

It feels less like a pure tech market now and more like cloud, semiconductors and defense policy all getting mixed together

You are assuming that governments care and are not corrupt.

I think they have very little room for manoeuvre - companies like AWS or Microsoft can simply you are too cocky and we will shutdown infrastructure your country is running on if you don't bend the knee.

Yes, this is exactly the implication. The decoupling of economies between those that have advanced AI, those who do not, and those who decide to ban AI outright or above a certain level of capacity.

> If US companies have a large unfair advantage

The US companies with access have a large unfair advantage over other US companies.

Imagine being Rivian if Tesla gets access, Rocket Lab or Blue Origin others if SpaceX gets access, most of SV if major tech companies get access, ... imagine being a startup.

One would have to have leverage to put tariff on US and not worry about retaliation. Almost every country is tightly coupled with US, let it be trade or reliance on technology.

I can only think of Russia that is decoupled from US at the moment and they are stuck with Putin that still lives with imperial mindset rather than actually being a rival to US

The rest of the world already has quite a few restrictions.

We don't need more fear mongering with AI, it already made a mess. Industries are not gonna fail, they fall behind, like how US doesn't share weapon tech or certain IP's. Plus you have China providing a close 2nd/3rd place LLM tech for free.

The incentive is that Americans are huge consumers and closing markets to US also means losing US markets, that's why Trump's taxation on Americans for imports(AKA tariffs) caused huge stir. That said, if the risk is not tolerable then it's not worth it and can be sacrificed. EU was fully on board to do that if Trump invaded Greenland and EU as rest of the world are aggressively diversifying.

BTW EU will never have a "tech" industry in any meaningful size as long as US have access to EU markets, anyone who eventually got tech industry are those who blocked the US or were blocked by US.

So if US keeps its course, in a few years we may end up with fragmented markets with US blocked out because the US is very unpopular but the current politicians everywhere including in the EU are very pro-US actually hoping that current situation is just a glitch, which is not aligned with what the general population demands and as a result the next elections they will align with anti-Americans.

Its utterly unsurprising that in the reckoning of pro-socialist society (work less, tax more, live easy), the failure of European industry over the last 30 years, utterly unsurprising that the knee-jerk reaction is "You need to share your labor with all of us" rather than "We need to get our shit together and build a competitor"

Europe isn't cooked because it lacks talent, there are untold smart capable people there, it's cooked because it built a social allergy to the very thing it needs most.

Worse, why would you ever take a dependency on a US company. Even China seems more trustworthy at this point.

Is the rest of the world really that dependent on emerging AI? I don’t think so. The US could cut off all foreign access to AI, nobody would notice.

The US as a large-scale import nation and so does not need the rest of the world (except perhaps Europe, and only small parts) to keep its markets open to the US.

Even in the European case, Europe would lose much more than the US would if they closed their markets. Plus, a lot of Europe is either very close to breaking point and unwilling to change (Italy), or rapidly worsening into a crash, and unwilling to change (France).

It's Europe that is dependent on a large trade surplus with the rest of the world, financed by dollar loans to 3rd world countries. Now China is taking away their trade surplus, even directly (meaning Europe has a massive trade deficit to China), and indirectly (replacing demand for European goods, famously cars, everywhere). This is causing large-scale job losses in Europe as well as total disaster for government finances across the block, finances that were unhealthy to begin with.

Now Europe and China are unwilling to lend to the rest of the world (because initially that would make very rich Europeans/the CCP a little bit poorer, by raising inflation quite a bit, thereby raising interest rates, which will move government finances from disaster to catastrophe), so if these money flows are to keep going, either the US MUST export to China, which is not happening, or EU and/or China must loan several times their own GDP to the third world, or the EU and/or China must massively increase their dollar holdings (which will, of course, inflate the Euro and Renminbi something awful whichever way it goes). But either WILL happen, because a crash will do that too. Which is what people mean when they say the worldwide system is on a crash course.