Even less clear is Chinese advancements in AI — regarded as one of the key determinants of future economic and geopolitical power. While OpenAI, Microsoft Corp. and Google continue to publicize new AI developments and support a thriving startup ecosystem, Chinese companies like Baidu Inc. labor under chip and data-content restrictions, and have yet to show evidence of significant breakthroughs.
I hope that in my lifetime all of this tech hype will be proven false and I won’t have to read about it anymore. I usually don’t read the whole article this is doing some serious damage to me. The least they could do is name specifically how this “AI” technology has influenced “future economic and geopolitical power” beyond supporting…startup ecosystems??? Oops, all signifiers!!
“AI” is another monopoly moonshot. Its main promise for capital, aside from being an excuse for layoffs, is the possibility of becoming the only shp in town when it comes to certain activities.
One example is the stock imagery industry. People started using “AI” for this immediately, even when it sucks at it. Replacing the need for hundreds of thousands of people to simulate a ton of different situations, you could just synthesize something comparable. But just “automating” this is not the real end goal. It is to become the exclusive monopoly company on stock images, to create a huge war chest of IPs about the topic so that you can charge massive amounts of economic rent. Stock images would soon become more expensive, not less.
China will be fine so long as this tendency can be resisted internationally. If the above scenario happens, it be another WTO IP fight on slightly different terms.
Another possibility is that piracy and/or open source nerds prevent those monopolies from ever taking hold because once models are trained, deploying them isn’t actually that resource-intensive. If there is a “good enough” free stock image generator it will make it very difficult for a monopoly to take complete control.
So these companies are basically betting everything on nobody being able to compete with them, mostly because they have large datasets they won’t share.
thanks! this makes sense. The article ups the stakes and claims there will be some geopolitical implications from AI in the future but I suppose when pressed they’d say the far, far future.
I suppose in the stock image example the biggest market suffering would be advertising?
Yeah basic advertising. Getty already has a monopolistic position in that industry, tech is looking to “disrupt” it, which is just how they do this finance-backed monopoly creation thing in other industries. Uber is a financial “disruptor” of a taxi monopoly premised on becoming its own monopoly. They have jacked up prices now that it is clearly just them and Lyft. Same story for AirBnB. Nothing was really improved and in fact it cut into wages and ended up making service more expensive once the finance-backed underpricing (to establish a monopoly) ended.
They have jacked up prices now that it is clearly just them and Lyft. Same story for AirBnB.
Thing is that cabs are now competitive again. Took one from the airport last time cause like 6 of them were lined up while the Uber was a 15 minute drive away. the ride was the same cost. They’re losing at their own game cause they bought their own bs.
Similar for Airbnb. They extracted so much profit that is just more convenient to get a hotel that’s “professionally run” to some extent for the same price.
That’s very much true. The attempt to get a monopoly isn’t guaranteed to work. But it is what they are all searching for. They call it things like maximizing marketshare over profitability.
I hope that in my lifetime all of this tech hype will be proven false and I won’t have to read about it anymore. I usually don’t read the whole article this is doing some serious damage to me. The least they could do is name specifically how this “AI” technology has influenced “future economic and geopolitical power” beyond supporting…startup ecosystems??? Oops, all signifiers!!
“AI” is another monopoly moonshot. Its main promise for capital, aside from being an excuse for layoffs, is the possibility of becoming the only shp in town when it comes to certain activities.
One example is the stock imagery industry. People started using “AI” for this immediately, even when it sucks at it. Replacing the need for hundreds of thousands of people to simulate a ton of different situations, you could just synthesize something comparable. But just “automating” this is not the real end goal. It is to become the exclusive monopoly company on stock images, to create a huge war chest of IPs about the topic so that you can charge massive amounts of economic rent. Stock images would soon become more expensive, not less.
China will be fine so long as this tendency can be resisted internationally. If the above scenario happens, it be another WTO IP fight on slightly different terms.
Another possibility is that piracy and/or open source nerds prevent those monopolies from ever taking hold because once models are trained, deploying them isn’t actually that resource-intensive. If there is a “good enough” free stock image generator it will make it very difficult for a monopoly to take complete control.
So these companies are basically betting everything on nobody being able to compete with them, mostly because they have large datasets they won’t share.
thanks! this makes sense. The article ups the stakes and claims there will be some geopolitical implications from AI in the future but I suppose when pressed they’d say the far, far future.
I suppose in the stock image example the biggest market suffering would be advertising?
Yeah basic advertising. Getty already has a monopolistic position in that industry, tech is looking to “disrupt” it, which is just how they do this finance-backed monopoly creation thing in other industries. Uber is a financial “disruptor” of a taxi monopoly premised on becoming its own monopoly. They have jacked up prices now that it is clearly just them and Lyft. Same story for AirBnB. Nothing was really improved and in fact it cut into wages and ended up making service more expensive once the finance-backed underpricing (to establish a monopoly) ended.
Thing is that cabs are now competitive again. Took one from the airport last time cause like 6 of them were lined up while the Uber was a 15 minute drive away. the ride was the same cost. They’re losing at their own game cause they bought their own bs.
Similar for Airbnb. They extracted so much profit that is just more convenient to get a hotel that’s “professionally run” to some extent for the same price.
That’s very much true. The attempt to get a monopoly isn’t guaranteed to work. But it is what they are all searching for. They call it things like maximizing marketshare over profitability.
Which is also weird, because Alibaba has a very good open source LLM called qwen which outperforms llama and Mistral in coding tasks.