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Microsoft had over 98 percent market share at one point. In the 90’s every country in the world including Russia, China, Iran, etc all began using American operating systems developed by Microsoft. Were there arguments back then similar to this piece?
I remember in the 2000’s and 2010’s Richard Stallman would go to counties like India and promote Linux and free software. During those presentations he would mention kind of offhand an argument that Microsoft was engaging in a form of colonialism through its control of Windows. He made the argument somewhat awkwardly in those presentations and the Indian audience received the argument with hesitance. It seemed kind of exaggerated to conflate Microsoft and Windows with colonialism…especially in India.
But that was the 2000’s and 2010’s. Would the argument be received differently now? Were these arguments for Linux considered mainstream by Linux proponents back then or was this some Richard Stallman thing?
And now we have articles like this in the 2020’s basically making the same arguments for AI. People explicitly saying open weights AI can be a hedge against this. China developing their own models.
What I want to know if if there was broad support or even broad arguments for this kind of thing back in the 90’s when Microsoft ruled all computing even in countries not super friendly or even hostile to America. The biggest competitor to Microsoft back then was a small nearly bankrupt Apple which was also American. Linux was a tiny little thing.
Many hacker news commentators were around back then. What was it like in this regard?
There was genuine optimism at the time, we were coming out of the shadow of thermonuclear war. Globalisation was discussed as a global phenomenon, less about America specifically, and more about networks and opening of borders.
Also Linux was unusable by any but the beardiest.
Today, after 30-40 years on top, it's hard to see America as anything other than an incredibly dangerous threat to global stability with an utterly broken economic model. On the geopolitical front, it's squandered this goodwill time and time again, and gets worse with every new presidency. Domestically, we've seen our economies hollowed out, bought up, and skimmed at every turn.
The challenge the world faces now is the question of how we unplug ourselves as this increasingly deranged machine becomes ever more aggressive and hostile.
The End of History and the Last Man is a book of political philosophy written in 1992 by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
In the UK free market ideology allowed the tech industry to slip away and financial services to dominate our economy. It's hard to see us doing anything else when we were relying on security guarantees from the US (which suited the US at the time).
There were arguments about domestication of data and the risk of compute and data being in the control of Western (mainly US) powers, but that didnt surface in real quantity and force until Snowden, and even then was more peripheral than this sort of article seems.
I don't want to risk coming off as an AI naysayer, but this all feels much more like crypto than the initial Personal Computer or Cloud boom. I think maybe some part of that is due to the sheer magnitude of capital arrayed. Feels…sales-y.
My theory on this sort of thing is if a technology is truly revolutionary and world altering, people (both individually and in a geopolitical sense) will adopt it at a compromise to values of nationalism or control. We are constantly told AI will create a bimodal world, and yet it’s not the countries who don’t have frontier labs yelling about it.
I’m losing the thread somewhat (sorry, haven’t had coffee yet), but the TL;DR is this hasn’t been something I’ve witnessed yet in previous tech evolutions (in my mid-40s), and I’m not entirely convinced by the articles arguments.
eg seems to assume that frontier will continuously maintain a large and durable edge over say open models. That may hold true for say cyber defence but I reckon for a very large part of commercially useful activity something like K3 is “good enough”.
eg it seems plausible to me that intelligence commodifies and the American frontier labs drown in their debt. Not likely but possible
Put differently author assumes America runs away with it. I don’t think that’s a foregone conclusion
Is the author nuts? Every country has access to Kimi K3, which is a true frontier model and legitimately best-in-class for a number of applications. And the best small models -- Qwen and Deepseek V4 Flash -- are also open-weights models.
What does it matter if they weren't developed in France or the UK if the average French or English person can download and run them locally? And if countries need a big AI of their own, for whatever odd reason, they can work out a deal with Moonshot and run audited instances of K3 on their .gov networks.
The loud voices here seem to mostly worry about models getting "censored".
I think people should worry a little more about models being trained to propagandise party lines and national interests, so for China the non-independence of Taiwan and "re-education camp is totally not a euphemism, there are no human rights abuses" and "all these Chinese corporations and stock markets are 100% compatible with Marxism-Leninism honest" and "you silly Europeans and Americans, stop worrying and open your markets to our businesses".
I'd be a little more worried about this if every single traditional media wasn't already outputting propaganda for party lines and a very particular version of the "national interest". The difference between China and America to third parties seems to come down to whether you also want a leader who's rude about you very publicly in English on social media.
It's the same idea, to be sure. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
> The difference between China and America to third parties seems to come down to whether you also want a leader who's rude about you very publicly in English on social media.
Aye.
I am slightly worried by the possibility that European nations and people are treating the Trump-China dilemma as "better the devil you know than the devil you don't".
Besides, if the government of France is working out a deal to host a model like K3 as a sort of "Government Service AI," they'd surely need to pay, and they'd likely be able to work out a deal where sensitive political issues are resolved in a way that doesn't embarrass either party.
It is unclear if that would be sufficient to circumvent trained-in propaganda.
Even now open weights are perpetually 6-12 months behind.
It's reasonably safe bet that there will always be someone on the planet with the means and interest to commodify the models. They don't seem very hard to make; we're swimming in options.
I don't think that is a safe bet; right now we're all benefitting from investors who disagree about who is going to win a monopoly, with each AI stock priced as if it will be the winner and the market collectively therefore priced several times higher than the maximum* return.
When the investment bubble pops, I think there will be too many burned fingers to keep training new models. If we're lucky though, it may lead to someone burning weights onto hardware, which has the potential to significantly reduce the energy required per token.
* currently possible return at least. I don't think any of the investors are actually pricing for the possibility of an actual technological singularity. Even Musk's rhetoric about this, where he opines about getting humanity to Kardashev type II, the numbers he attaches to this are orders of magnitude too small.
Hasn't happened yet. Might not happen at all. Also, there's a lot that can be done with K3.
> Even now open weights are perpetually 6-12 months behind.
This is a very commonplace opinion yet I don't believe it's genuinely true. K3 is hardly much worse than Fable and can surpass it on certain tasks; they read as different, not as one that's 12 months behind the other. And don't forget that access to Fable is highly constrained.
As for small/local models: The leading edge is open by definition, and hardly much worse -- if worse at all -- than small models like Luna or Haiku (lol).
I see wealth redistribution alright. Not in the direction you’re thinking!
After that it's like... Who is making money? "we're doing 100x the things we're doing before" people can't really point to anything. Maybe it's in use everywhere all the time, and they've been pumping out twice the amount of features that no one uses or asked for as before, in which case this is classic value destruction
I agree the projected revenue makes no sense, but if the bubble bursts, we'll still be left with a technology that (1) many people want to use (2) is lucrative to the providers.
There will certainly be a glut of compute that will follow this extreme scarcity. There is already a flood of chinese models that are almost cutting-edge, and it's almost guaranteed this trend will continue as american AI gets better. There is no hidden magic in USA, it's pretty much doable, and it's being done.
In the end, the frontier models is not where the value will lie. The country that makes the best entrepreneurial rules for AI development will win economically.
Newsflash: the permanent periphery is already a reality for large parts of europe , asia . the world is half american
Sure, maybe it's even worse in countries that have no AI at all - but does it really make a difference if 90% of the population is protesting in the streets instead of 70%?
Isn't it more likely that countries without native frontier models will use open-weights models that will let them be 70% as productive as countries that do?
In that sense, there is no need for college anymore - just spend the four years learning on the job (at least you won't have to pay for it even more).
Possibly, but sometimes being marginally better lets you win all the games. It can be difficult to guess what matters and how.
Also, may depend where the compute is physically located, which may depend on the cost of energy.
Globalisation's great right up until your manufacturing base decides they don't like you, or you them.
Reshoring is expensive for all the reasons offshoring was ever tempting in the first place, so we'll have to wait and see how this plays out.
This article has the implicit assumption that the Machine God will rear its head soon and those with the reigns will rule. I don’t think so, we’re better off focusing on technological sovereignty full stop.
First it discounts the debt and financial load on the frontier labs to 0. The costs of developing this technology may well not be borne by those who reap the benefits. This is not like the Amazon distribution network.
Second it assumes that, like nuclear weapons, the technologies of frontier AI will not proliferate. I would argue that we have seen orders of magnitude reduction in compute requirements enabling sub linear improvement of scale driven AI in the last 24 months. Meanwhile 27bn param models do what trillion model parameters couldn't 12 mths ago. I think we're seeing a diversification of approach now, and it's not clear that the winners will be scale driven.
Third, and the most fatal, it assumes that AI will be the driver of power in the future geopolitical landscape. But frankly if I nuke you what will your clever machines do then?
This is not 1945 and this essay is essentially a note from a USA in the middle of an existential crisis channelling the 1950's.
Current price of AI for USA is heavily underestimated: good luck dealing with economic consequences when everyone bets on AI while it shows no productivity returns in the numbers. The financial market stops being efficient redistributing money to the places of growth and starts act like a crazy till it rebalances with great consequence on majority of population (wanna see the bubble pop through your 401k with xai and anthropic stocks in it sneaked through fast-forward inclusion in an index?)
The AI is reduced to LLMs which is kinda good for producing text no one will read and summarize texts no one reads. We haven't seeing much of LLM producing value. People don't care enough about LLM-generated text, advertisements or images enough, so value is meh.
Yes, some software is written (with oveall questionable quality), but as main software distribution channels are corporation-owned, we can't not burst with niche apps to bring value where corporations did not bother to go.
This type of article fuels ungrounded fears, gives wrong impression about the world we live in.
> An honest appraisal of the situation, however, should suggest the opposite response: It’s the employees of the labs, rich in equity and embedded in the most dynamic labor market there ever was, that should feel the least apprehension.
Of course no shit. Materially they have the least to fear. Their fears are ideological and spiritual; we have created something so powerful that even we are scared plus outright supramundane silicon faith.