Steelmanning the idea in general, this can be a form of commoditizing your complement: https://gwern.net/complement
Now, commercially, this may not make a lot of sense at the moment because no one is getting filthy rich on high-moat AI-using applications such that commoditizing the AI itself is a good idea commercially. I'm not sure anyone would even be confident enough to be the farm on the idea of someday being in that position.
However, if you analyze this from the perspective of world politics, where both explicit and implicit strategies are based on what tech companies have what tech and where it is located, it makes a lot of sense that if China is concerned that the US really is ahead in AI tech and that US financial and technical dominance is being driven by this dominance and being used to suck capital out of the countries that are behind, it makes all kinds of sense to commoditize the complements as basically a way of throwing the current game board up in the air and restarting again.
(One may also note that this analysis also says that just straight-up stealing the OpenAI tech and slightly AI-washing it before handing it out to everyone is also a logical move. I don't know enough to have any independent opinion as to whether that's where DeepSeek came from. I'm just saying that given the visible circumstances it is a strong strategic move for China at this point.)
Much of this purported strategy hinges on 'winning' at all cost by undermining the lead.
What is there to be won at the end? Does one party taking the reigns prevent the other from achieving similar capabilities? Is it necessary to win this race?
Or is this a cumulative, distributed effort that benefits all of us?
Whether it's true or not, world leader's ears are being filled with the claim that whoever wins the AI race wins everything, because AI will be able to win every other contest. They're being told it is winner-take-all like no contest has been winner-take-all before.
And they're all stupid enough to actually believe it? Why would a world leader listen to anyone in tech? They should ask an actual expert.
Edit: to be clear, what I mean is that to a first approximation technologists are charlatans and frauds. If you're looking for accurate information ask a scientist.
From a politician's perspective, scientists are like gold prospectors digging holes seemingly at random. $100 billion startups are what you get when the prospectors strike gold.
Why would you discuss gold with the wild-haired eccentric at the bottom of a hole, who has not yet found any gold, when you could talk to a gold mine owner who has - and who employs 1500 voters, and who like you wears a suit and tie?
> world leader's ears are being filled with the claim that whoever wins the AI race wins everything, because AI will be able to win every other contest
This describes a narrow slice of Silicon Valley numpties.
World leaders see an economic opportunity. Both to spend and to produce. No politician will turn down the opportunity to announce half a trillion dollars of spending.
> Or is this a cumulative, distributed effort that benefits all of us?
This. There are a few theories of geopolitics, one of the most successful being ones we be bunch under an umbrella called realism [1]. (The others are idealism [2] and liberalism [3]. Historia Civilis made a great three-part video series on these [4]. Note that Realpolitik [5], which relates to realism as its praxis, is not the same thing.)
One of the consequences of realism is balance of power theory, which “suggests that states may secure their survival by preventing any one state from gaining enough military power to dominate all others” [6].
What is to be won? Not being dominated; ideally: less war, since war is irrational. (See: Ukraine.) Does preventing others from dominating you prevent you from dominating others? No. Is it necessary to win? No. But that means ceding sovereignty and increasing the chances of violent conflict as geopolitical fault lines reälign.
A note on liberalism: it works. But it requires great power at its centre. America was that benevolent great power. Now it seems we don’t want to be. The power America has to hurt its allies, and the incentives to reap that advantage, is the consistent failure mode of liberal foreign-relation structures, since the days of the Delian League.
Now, commercially, this may not make a lot of sense at the moment because no one is getting filthy rich on high-moat AI-using applications such that commoditizing the AI itself is a good idea commercially. I'm not sure anyone would even be confident enough to be the farm on the idea of someday being in that position.
However, if you analyze this from the perspective of world politics, where both explicit and implicit strategies are based on what tech companies have what tech and where it is located, it makes a lot of sense that if China is concerned that the US really is ahead in AI tech and that US financial and technical dominance is being driven by this dominance and being used to suck capital out of the countries that are behind, it makes all kinds of sense to commoditize the complements as basically a way of throwing the current game board up in the air and restarting again.
(One may also note that this analysis also says that just straight-up stealing the OpenAI tech and slightly AI-washing it before handing it out to everyone is also a logical move. I don't know enough to have any independent opinion as to whether that's where DeepSeek came from. I'm just saying that given the visible circumstances it is a strong strategic move for China at this point.)