Do not have any empirical evidence, but reality is that China's semiconductor capabilities are not at par with Taiwan yet and the US is able to influence Nvidia's sales to China as well as access to other vendors (TSMC) and technologies, giving the West an unfair advantage.

Just like Chinese EVs and Chinese renewables eventually beat the West, I have no doubt that China can probably eventually pull ahead, but I think it is probably accurate to say that China is currently still behind (how far is hard to say) because they have a slight technology handicap imposed by the US.

> There are no switching costs for users to move to a new model.

This depends on how many proprietary APIs are in the way of the model itself.

> This is simply not true?

Yes, this is purely delusional.

This is absolutely false as a recent study from Stanford clearly states https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeawa...

I think English is definitely a reason that I took for granted. To add to that from my experience:

- The culture is, I think, the root of the flywheel. The entrepreneurship and competitive intensity is unlike anywhere else I've lived (not an American). It's okay to go bankrupt. It's okay to fail multiple times and burn millions in VC money, in fact it's encouraged! Take a break and raise another round and go again, VCs like second time founders. In my home country having one business go under is the worst thing imaginable.

- The capital markets, even YC (one of the lower tier accelerators by now) gives you 500k for 7%, sometimes pre-revenue. That is an absurd proposition elsewhere

- Surrounding yourself with top talent raises the ceiling for what you think is possible and accelerates your career really fast. It's inspiring for me to be around so many smart and successful people.

It's an advantage, but I don't see that changing for a very long time:

1. English became the lingua franca right when the world really became globalized. So everyone from Europe to Asia to Africa has wanted to learn English as a second language for decades. So even if American power went away, I still don't see English falling from its perch. I often say it's really hard for Americans to learn another language because if you go to another country hoping to learn that language, so often you'll find many/most people just want to speak to you in English.

2. The only other power I could see surpassing the US in the mid term is China (and that's in no way guaranteed), but the Chinese language (Mandarin), and especially Chinese writing is inherently more difficult for foreigners to learn. I'd also argue the Chinese writing system is inherently more poorly suited to the digital world.

I’m on a motorhome holiday in Norway right now. The younger people I’ve spoken to, from the Netherlands, through Germany and Denmark and into Norway have as good English as me. As with most American-exceptionalism, you ain’t that special. On previous holidays in France, often held up as “never-willingly-speak-English”, we’ve had similar experiences.

Older people here in Northern Europe often seem to speak English quite well, in France less so.

This.

But this advantage is vanishing. While automated translation is still not good enough for someone fluent in English to tolerate, it's more than good enough already and the progress have been insane over the past few years.

I don't think English speakers are going to have any edge moving forward.

The language of global commerce and technology has not and has never been English

It is money.

Specifically, right now, petro-dollars. For a while before that, it was pounds

The writer is asking how much longer that will continue to be true that it is petro-dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_currency

> but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago.

Actually, there is. English is relatively unique in its ability to incorporate loan words and features of other languages. This is in part due to its history as a merger of 10k French (thus, Latinate) words into an otherwise Germanic language. But it's also due to the unfortunate history of the British empire, followed by American hegemony, which spread English to many other cultures who freely adapted it.

Whether this is enough to justify a continuing status as "the international language" is obviously debatable. But English is different from almost all other human languages, not because it is better, but because it is just ... more

source: revenue, people opening their wallets

I'm working in a large enterprise that is leveraging AI aggressively.

Anecdotally, I'd wager that the modest/incremental but real gains from boring, daily application pale in comparison to the wasted cycles on terrible ideas, disrupted roadmaps due to poor business decision making, and the uncritical injection of insane, LLM generated bullshit into official business documents (fake KPIs for unmeasurable outcomes, references to nonsensical or non-existent process, data-driven decisions backed by hallucinated data. etc.).

I'm deeply skeptical that organizations will see real, lasting gains. I think they'll see some acceleration of copy/paste-adjacent workflows and gains in non-work like generating slide templates, but that's about the limit of it.

As prices rise to meet actual cost, I shudder to think about the idiotic, reactionary ripples it will send through corporate leadership, with everyone scrambling to evade responsibility at the same time and blaming their tech teams for failing to deliver on bullshit/impossible AI initiatives.

TL/DR yeah, I'd also like to see some real numbers.

Thank you for your perspective!

I think it's obvious that demand is overwhelming supply right now. I agree that we don't know how much of the demand is due to perception, perverse incentives, or poor management, and how much of the demand is 'real'. I personally believe that the demand is mostly real and will continue to go up, but I don't have a crystal ball.

I also acknowledge that the productivity gains are highly dependent on your specific company's implementation and the work that you're doing. I think the role of a technical IC (which I am as well) is going to be managing fleets of agents, and many people who aren't suited to that type of work will leave the industry (and many people who are will join).

I generally agree with you on the points about American politics, I don't think the way they are cracking down on immigration is very wise.

As for correctness - it's a nontrivial problem to deploy AI in prod that works and doesn't blow up over millions of runs+. Hence why the initial value has accrued to the intelligence layer (labs) but the bulk of the remaining value will accrue to the applied layer in my opinion.

Reasonable conclusion, if you think the entire software industry is rotten then accelerating rot won't do much

I personally disagree with that worldview. (I read the article and the guy's tone is lowkey salty)

The reality is it's insanely hard to convince people (/especially/ consumers. //especially// technical consumers) to pay up to use software. Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value and anything that raises an eyebrow means you're toast

Ofc there are perverse incentives and I think those are bad

Can't that be countered by the fact that you can pay a reasonable price (something like 20 or 30 bucks) for small businesses independent flat-rate inference subscriptions of models like GLM-5.1? They aren't being subsidized, they just balance normal and power users around their flat rate. Just check something like synthetic.new, Ollama Cloud or OpenCode Go.

I hear this analogy (selling a dollar for 10ct) but it's unclear to me how we can cleanly map intelligence to cents.

If the LLM was GPT-1, most people wouldn't even use it for free. So clearly there's another axis here?

The estimates I've seen are that running inference at scale on a Deepseek V3 sized model (so 700B parameters) costs roughly $0.70/mtok or so given current H100 rental costs. Sonnet charges $15/mtok on the API so the delta between the true cost and the API cost is quite large, to the point where even many subscription users are likely profitable.

This is the ultimate "no true Scotsman" post.

Thank you for sharing the article, it's an interesting perspective and I'm inclined to agree with the point about prior restraint.

I'm sad that America is making it more difficult for foreign talent to come in. But with the flip-flops between D/R in the white house it's really hard to predict what immigration looks like even 5 years from now

Indeed! China is leaning heavily into AI as state policy, as the solution to its looming demographic crisis. Any advantage the US has is going to be brief. It'll be like comparing the high speed trains in China with the high speed trains in California...

Can this be backed up with any numbers, especially in the US? Every company I've seen using an AI something has obviously been using the API of one of the bigger companies. If this is a valid approach with proof it's basically as good, it would be something I would recommend to my company

ai generated video script

"Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now" - just untrue. you think people inside Cursor use composer for most of their work? haha

the talent at the labs far surpasses the global research community its just not comparable

I'm not saying I prefer it this way, I want open source to do well but it's just not happening at the current pace