oh yeah, not denying that the prototype will be more expensive and resource intensive than following versions, but the whole “US overspends on novel technology, China blows that technology out of the water and shows this tech is both accessible and affordable, US bans Chinese product because American companies don’t want to compete” shtick is just getting old
I just find it amusing how when proprietary data/company secrets/whatever are being sent to openAI it’s a matter of “that was irresponsible don’t let it happen again” but some guy in Kentucky isn’t able to get a detailed description of Tiananmen Square from the US perspective without a little effort and it’s the end of national security as we know it.
Same with the tiktok ban. How many classified military secrets do we think some regular dude in a trailer in Alabama really has on his phone?
“National Security” in the US is literally just code for rich people’s bank accounts at this point.
Of course it’s a national security threat, it’s just more proof that the US economy is just a giant ponzi scheme.
If China can do it better on a budget of $6m in 18 months with low end equipment, then why does it take an American company 10 years, half a trillion dollars, and the entire nation’s supply of high-end graphics cards?
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 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.
“snarfing" and “throbber” are two of my favorite niche tech terms