China won in cloud services? Nope, not even close. They had to clone AWS just to try to keep up.

China won in mobile? Nope. Although they're very competitive there.

China won in search? Nope. Baidu who?

China won in ecommerce? Nope. Their dominance is overwhelmingly domestic.

China won in software? Nope. Windows is US. Android is US. iOS is US. MacOS is US. Linux is US/Europe/Global. Look at the top 50 largest software companies.

China won in silicon? Nope. Look at the top 50 companies.

China won in .... India and Latin America can manufacture iPhones now.

But sure, China's the obvious winner this time. Good luck.

Remind me which entities (govt or corporate) are going to subsidize that forever. Remind me which entities are going to front the cost just to scale up.

By that premise - wherein you forget everything other than the first ingredient (the model) - Google has no moat either (got $100 billion dollars lying around?). Nor does Uber (have tens of billions in your bank account to clone their business?).

I'm certain building an app (Uber), or building a search engine (Google), is the super duper hard part.

Slapping a GUI on Linux will kill Windows, any day now.

It's like releasing a cutting edge search engine, proclaimed to be on par with Google. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, you need to actually run it somewhere. One of the core moats for Google has been the cost to scale and compete globally with a search engine, which only a few entities on earth could even attempt. Somehow the HN crowd forgets this every single time. The same claims were endlessly made regarding Uber, as though the app was the hardest part of competing with Uber. Here's a hint: the model isn't the only super hard part of the total process at this point. Try running something akin to GPT 5.6 for a billion users, see how much that costs.

The winners will be the owners of the subscriptions and API usage. That's going to be OpenAI and Anthropic as of now, possibly Google will stay in the fight with their scale advantage focused on the consumer. It will never be the open weight models out of China. Who is going to invest the trillion dollars into infrastructure needed to run the latest version of Kimi 3-5 years out, for a billion users? There's only one entity that would ever consider it, and that's China domestic.

And the real money (for a sustainable business model allowing for constant massive reinvestment & infrastructure maintenance) is in pairing up advertising, which is another spot where the open weight models from China will never compete. It doesn't matter if the HN crowd hates this outcome, nothing will stop it from being the future core of mass consumer usage. And the business use will stay with subscription + API use as well: the best option for that today is OpenAI and Anthropic.

If Anthropic has a real problem with API use, they can always raise the price.

It's a critical national imperative for China. If they were to lose the AI race, it would be economically devastating over the coming decades. Their demonstrated capabilities in the open-weight space are making it fairly clear they are not going to fall behind at this juncture.

As a nation, if you don't have your own GPT equivalent, you will be beholden to a master (right now it's mainly either the US or China, pick one). The EU for example is putting their group of nations at risk in a big way by not going all in on having at least two cutting edge independent competing models (Mistal is not enough). Economically the EU is plenty large enough to accomplish that, nobody is driving the bus the right way.

The reason that's not inherently accurate is because it assumes the economic models are identical. That couldn't be further from the truth. It'd be like pretending a globally dominate Google search engine should be worth as much as eg Baidu or Yandex. No doubt Baidu is an advanced search engine, and that's not what defines its economic characteristics: the markets it operates in does, the market ownership does, the ad engine does, the ability to sell does (advertiser relationships), etc.

OpenAI is very likely to bolt on a massive, global advertising platform to GPT over the coming years (and yes, it'll take time to build up). The Chinese labs will have a very hard time replicating that to a global audience the way the US tech companies have repeatedly proven they can. OpenAI will poach proven ad system builders from Meta and Google.

If GPT can maintain or grow usage, the ad dollars will be there given the enormous scale. There is a hundred billion dollars plus worth of advertising waiting in the LLM space. It would be surprising if Facebook doesn't contract for example, losing ground to LLMs on advertising over the coming decade.

Reddit is overflowing with threads where people are getting AT&T to give them 1gbps for $30-$35 per month. Comcast has repeatedly offered me 1gbps for ~$50/m for five years locked-in. I have no practical use for it.

The US has more broadband than it knows what to do with at this point. Somebody needs to figure out a mass public use for home 1gbps+.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48766585

Points: 7

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Even if both groups did exactly the same thing, it would be irrational for the US to not bias itself in favor of its own businesses.

The US has abundant supermarkets to this day. It was overwhelmingly a product of the market economy and remains so. The US has between 45,000 and 75,000 supermarkets (75,000 if you include supercenter stores that also sell groceries). That's not counting smaller specialty food stores.

It's a product of consumer spending capacity (net disposable income), of which the US has an enormous amount and has for over a century relative to other nations.

You don't have to eat much better. You can trivially supplement. It's far more important to eat less.

Realistically Japan is very close to being a second tier economy. It's quite plausible that Croatia and Latvia will pass them on GDP per capita over the next decade. 7-11 Japan would be relatively inexpensive for the citizens of any affluent nation, because Japan is so much poorer than it used to be.

The US saved tens of millions of Russians from starvation a century ago. Culturally they have absolutely no clue about that, they're entirely oblivious in terms of their own history. The good deeds never garnered the US any positive credit. Only the bad deeds garner the US bad credit aplenty.

What cut are you talking about?

If you priced Gates backwards in gold, his $102 billion is about $13 billion two decades ago. He hasn't kept ahead of the destruction of the dollar very well.

If China is going in, we'll start to see large signs of that. They'll begin a number of prominent campaigns, including sabotage, propaganda, extremely large supply movements, and so on.

The masses will have no say in the matter. Just as they had no say in the matter with Google's ads getting ever more intrusive, or cable prices previously, or streaming prices going perpetually higher in the present, or YouTube ads, or anything else. Consumers will have no say in the matter, they'll take it and that's that.

With only three relevant competitors (maybe Mistral in Europe), there will be nowhere to flee the deployment of ads.