So according to Anthropic, China is very bad at AI but they play dirty and that's not fair, so daddy has to help them.

It's the same old story with big companies, they want a free market to do whatever they want and bully or buy whoever they want with their (loaned) money, but when they get free-marketed themselves, it suddenly becomes a country-level issue and the government has to step in to keep them on top.

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Reads to me like Anthropic just wants to ban competition from open models coming out of China which are eating their lunch. And the actual race isn't with compute availability, it's with energy production. Energy costs in China are already 3x lower than in the US, and that makes running models and scaling them out a lot more affordable.

Meanwhile, the US grid already has only something like 30% leftover capacity, and if that gets gobbled up then there's no slack available for events like heat waves or other natural disasters. So, there's literally no room to grow. And building out new capacity takes years to do. On top of that, Trump admin is making it more difficult to deploy renewable capacity which is the cheapest and fastest way to expand the grid.

Energy production is the real bottleneck here, and there's no simple solution to it in the near term.

As a side note, kind of funny to see Anthropic talk about authoritarian AI when Chinese labs release open models we can review, test, and modify independently, while they have a black box, and we already know this sort of stuff is happening https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17737