Swap that to "oil" and everyone goes "well, yes, obviously, oil is so powerful that people start wars over it".

Iran has hit the Amazon data center in Bahrain. The Ukranian deep drone bombing campaign has hit refineries, but also Wildberries, the "Russian Amazon" warehouses. The US campaign against Iran now, Iraq and Serbia previously, targeted power infrastructure. It will obviously be a target in the next war, and AI goes on that list too.

Every time the US completes an AI data center, someone in the Chinese nuclear command updates their target priority list. And vice versa.

but its difficult to use more electricity directly to get more utility. There are some rare ways - things like PtX systems - but even those are linear at best. AI is concentrating power in the sense that nobody wants to use the twentieth smartest AI - so if you can use the most compute, you get an outsized share of the rewards (in terms of paying customers) - over and above your share of the compute. There are other business sectors where similar dynamics exist - where the biggest capital tends to win - a sort of natural monopoly type situation, its nothing about hyperscaling or whatever.

Competition is only one of the ways to keep a corporation aligned. In the case of France, having a state monopoly on electricity even worked very well until we broke it for the sake of competition.

> The point "AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power" is not that correct. They need this statement to be true, otherwise no way to justify the trillion evaluations.

How is it not true?

The biggest companies in the world are, quite obviously (just look at the numbers) going to be AI companies. The most powerful governments in the world are quite clearly going to be those that are close to (or in control of) AI companies. People have a very hard time seeing the second order effects of the control of intelligence - we need to fix that.

You realize utilities are arguably the most regulated industry in the US, right? Like this isn't just a bad counter, it's the example of necessary regulation due to concentration.

Trump already banned solar and offshore wind, in order to concentrate power (literally) with the oil companies.

Except that's a bad analogy: electricity is the means by which to do work.

The outputs of models in AI datacenters are the work.

The electricity company does not get the entirety of my useful input to the work as a result of me using electricity, but an AI company does.

The Chinese labs are picking up on the low hanging fruits on efficiency, and no, you do not need to abandon transformers, you just need to push them closer to the more computationally efficient architectures of the past. OpenAI and Google seem to be trying a few things too.

Anthropic clearly are not though, and to call their operations wasteful is an understatement.

You're missing the point, what will happen is this:

1) in things like tax law, registering with city hall, dealings with the DMV, your phone subscription, insurance contract, ... you will find that one of the new fine prints in the contract will be that you're not allowed to use AI to communicate with them.

2) because of how SynthID works (you need the SynthID keys to verify, which are secret. So the only way to find if text is ChatGPT/Google/Anthropic watermarked is to ask ChatGPT/Google/Anthropic), government and large companies can enforce this against you. That is what the watermark is for. To end any insurance claim written by AI with "you're not allowed to submit AI written insurance claims" and refuse it outright there and then.

"Sorry your request was AI watermarked and pursuant to law 234 of 2025/03/11 chapter 3258 paragraph 33 decile 1299 we hereby close it without response"

3) when they reply, however, they use a custom model that also has custom SynthID keys. You will not even be able to tell their responses are AI written, or at least, you won't be able to prove it. You won't be able to enforce any AI-related rights (ie. the right to talk to a human) you have under the law against large companies.

In other words: this is to make sure that all the advantages AI provides are available to deny your unemployment claim, and to Verizon to charge you more, but completely inaccessible TO YOU when you want to change to a cheaper subscription. They can inundate YOU with AI-written requests BUT YOU CAN'T.

Self-hosting helps because it prevents them from verifying if your responses are AI written, because you can generate non-watermarked AI text and so there is a level playing field.

Which percentage of people have GPUs capable of running Qwen3.8 27B? I am one of those, and for my job I am still resorting to hyperscalers because tasks are completed faster and more accurately that way. Even if we assume that models will no longer improve and we reach a point where everyone can run Fable in their laptop, surely running 1000x Fable agents would give you an advantage.

I think access to compute will matter just as much, if not more, as access to models.