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Posted by akrylov 22 hours ago

The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization(avkcode.github.io)
210 points | 567 commentspage 3
LurkandComment 17 hours ago|
The current commercialization isn't economically sustainable.
phkahler 17 hours ago|
>> The current commercialization isn't economically sustainable.

And if it were, and the result were like Elon and Scam Altman say it would destroy the economy. Not sure any country wants to lead the race to self destruction.

Havoc 18 hours ago||
Inclined to disagree.

The winner here will be whoever can move atoms with AI not take notes at the daily standup.

i.e. Think boston dynamics vs unitree

They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify.

RealityVoid 18 hours ago||
We are _miles_ behind successful embodied AI. The demos are cool but the success rates are not high enough.

You can tell we're on the cusp when level 5 self driving cars are common an you have multiple companies deploying them on the street. Google is doing great work but the poured TONS of effort into it and the thing still needs intense stacks of perception and processing. Much more than I've seen any humanoids pour into it.

L5 SDV's are much easier to get than humanoids and the have tangible economic benefit. My thesis is that those will come first.

MostlyStable 17 hours ago||
I'm really curious how quickly we would have huge numbers of L5 SDV if we societally accepted ~equal rates of injury and death, both of passengers and pedestrians. I want to be very clear, I'm not advocating for this (and even if I was, I haven't the faintest idea how one would go about getting society more broadly to go along), but part of me thinks that the primary hold up isn't actually capacity but instead standards.

This doesn't really argue against your point, because the standards are what they are, and like I said, I have no idea how one would go about changing them if one even decided they wanted to. And given what they are, it has taken, as you point out, enormous amounts of effort to reach those standards in a practical way.

That all being said, while I agree that SDV's are in many respects easier than other robotics tasks, they are also somewhat uniquely dangerous. Other categories of task, while potentially more complicated, won't have to worry nearly so much about safety, and so may be operating under a different constraint regime. I think this means that we may see adoption happen at a much more accelerated rate than we have seen in the automotive space.

DiscourseFan 17 hours ago|||
Will we all be more or less flesh and bot in the future? Robocop style
watwut 17 hours ago|||
Standards are not higher for self driving cars. Musk lied a lit about capability and safety of self driving, creating impression that it is safer then humans driving.

So far, they are not.

MostlyStable 15 hours ago||
I have no idea where you get this impression. Tesla is no where close to the majority (or even plurality) of fully autonomous self driving miles. Waymo is dramatically safer (less injuries, not quite enough data yet to be certain about fatalities, but they are lower than average, we just can't yet claim statistical significance) than human drivers.

I haven't seen good stats on Tesla (they are less transparent than Waymo), but it would shock me if they weren't also at least slightly safer than the average human driver. Human drivers are really bad at driving.

But even if Tesla isn't safer, taken as a whole, the self driving industry as it currently exists still probably is, purely because it's mostly Waymo, and Waymo is dramatically safer.

hx8 16 hours ago|||
Strongly agreed. AI powered drones will be the winning military strategy by 2030.
jvanderbot 17 hours ago|||
And why are atoms necessary? You're treating embodiment as the _only justifiable_ commercial path for AI. I don't think that's really close to true. Embodied AI is a subset of current LLM/agentic AI products (or perhaps intersection of something and this new AI?). No reason anything needs to move atoms _directly_ (e.g., via motors) to make a trillion dollars.
jasondigitized 16 hours ago|||
The winner is whoever can move the atoms for free, e.g. crack energy.
Havoc 16 hours ago||
Mostly agree. I think there is a big time delay though.

If free cheap energy is unlocked today I reckon it would still take a good 30 years for that to ripple through properly.

It solves lots of problems (water!) but doesn't make the heavy machinery to consume it instantly appear.

euroderf 18 hours ago|||
K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" got a lot of favorable comment when it was published but then it kind of faded from view. Might be worthwhile to revisit it?
oceanplexian 17 hours ago||
> They're both doing well but I'd lean towards China is winning on atoms in light of a huge manufacturing base they can AI-ify.

Why would an American company outsource manufacturing to China if the labor cost is the same in both places? The entire reason the Chinese manufacturing base exists is to exploit cheap labor.

What would be the point of shipping products across the ocean?

rtkwe 17 hours ago|||
Labor is not the only cost in that equation though, there's business regulations, the cost of the operators/repair that troubleshoot and repair the bots when they break, etc. a lot of which could be cheaper still than the price of a container on a slow ship from China.
SwellJoe 17 hours ago||||
China doesn't have to ship parts across the ocean. US manufacturers do, because we gave up the whole bottom/middle of the manufacturing supply chain to China decades ago in pursuit of lower costs. In China, the maker of the parts you need to build your product is a few blocks away. In the US, the maker is in China.

And, if you need changes, you can go talk to them the same day you see a problem.

amunozo 17 hours ago|||
There are more competitive advantages such as expertise, supply chain, regulations, capable government, scale... If it were all price, there are countries that are much cheaper than China.
paoliniluis 22 hours ago||
Alibaba's cloud is something that the author of this article seems to dismiss. It's being used massively in Asia and they're pretty close in services and offerings to what AWS, GCP and Azure provides. Once they start doing inference on their own custom chips it might be hard to compete with them due to the energy costs
akrylov 16 hours ago|
No, Alibaba is excellent top-5 easily.
ripvanwinkle 16 hours ago||
This para caught my eye

>Frontier cyber models may push states and defense firms toward the opposite logic: security by obscurity, with closed software, closed tooling, closed firmware, and closed chips. If a model cannot train on the code and architecture of a target stack, it will usually have less context and less speed. That does not make systems safe, but it does raise the value of proprietary stacks all the way down to hardware.

Is this really true. Are there any experts who can weigh in on this.

Should we interpret this to mean that in the new world Windows is more resistant to attacks than say Linux.

ipython 16 hours ago||
I think there’s some credence to the concept that more context == faster iteration cycles. Source code can be one major source of context.

I think “security through obscurity is no security” concept was aimed toward people not relying on obscurity alone as a security mechanism. And largely that message succeeded. But now we are in a rapid acceleration of capabilities (on both sides) where any advantage to one side will result in outsized gains, at least in the short term.

vb-8448 15 hours ago|||
In general: less data = less "intelligence".

And basically all the security bugs I've read about were find looking on the source code.

But it doesn't mean windows is more secure, just image a scenario where someone is stealing windows source code and sell it to rogue actor, it will make it even less secure because no one (expect windows) would have had the chance to search for bugs in the source code.

gpugreg 15 hours ago||
> Should we interpret this to mean that in the new world Windows is more resistant to attacks than say Linux.

LLMs can read assembly better than most, so probably not. But reality has never stopped people from trying to obfuscate.

1shooner 19 hours ago||
>Trump fits this moment well. He is a salesman at core, and Larry Ellison is too. That helps explain why AI infrastructure is an easy political product. Selling AI today is easier than selling Oracle databases in the 1980s.

I feel like the author (and perhaps many here on HN) are on a different planet than almost everyone I interact with.

aswegs8 3 hours ago||
Article with an interesting premise albeit kind of shallow? 500+ comments?? Color me excited!

Opening up comments to see top comments are 90% "NO U" without any substantial discussion - you disappoint me, HN.

amelius 15 hours ago||
Considering that you can easily swap out one AI for another and there is zero lock-in potential, does it really matter who is winning now?
elictronic 15 hours ago||
Government, industry, and general integration into the business software stacks are not easily swapped out.

Most businesses are adding limitations on using open models.

lmm 11 hours ago||
> Government, industry, and general integration into the business software stacks are not easily swapped out.

My business's integration literally has a dropdown for which model you want to use. I think that's pretty standard.

trhway 15 hours ago||
couldn't you say the same about search?
oytis 18 hours ago||
Same as software in general I guess? Lots of critical software has been developed by Europeans, but it's the US who build hyperscalers with it
chromacity 16 hours ago||
I continue to be impressed by our collective willingness to engage with obvious AI slop, as long as it also talks about AI. Sincere question for any of the nearly 300 folks seem to be arguing about the article: why? The author couldn't be bothered to present their case, so they probably don't care about our opinion. They just want traffic and search ranking with the least amount of effort. The community is literally being played for clicks.

Is it just that the subject line alone is a springboard for casual discussion? If so, maybe that's fine, but then, it feels like we'd be better off cultivating these discussions as "ask HN" posts instead of boosting this kind of web content.

scared_together 15 hours ago||
> Is it just that the subject line alone is a springboard for casual discussion?

I think this has been the case on many sites, for decades. Many people just want to read and write comments without engaging with the OP.

Have a look at this Reddit thread [0] about this Ars Technica article [1] - both are 15 years old.

I suppose in the 2010s this was an amusing detail of online discussion. In the 2020s it makes me feel a little uneasy - it suggests that the entire concept of people jumping from site to site, clicking links and understanding what they are writing about was flawed from the start. No wonder the internet became centralized and slopified.

And no, I didn’t read the OP, I found your comment to be more interesting to discuss. These days with AI articles flooding the internet it seems foolish to actually read articles before the comments.

Edit: although we have to contend with AI generated comments as well. I wonder how many of the comments on this page actually have original insights into the politico economics of AI.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/gz9k7/the_internet_is_...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot...

delis-thumbs-7e 16 hours ago||
This is HN equivalent of pretty girls changing clothes on TikTok. You would learn more about AI from reading a cereal box than this blog.
bildung 22 hours ago|
The whole "race" narrative is silly. It is all built on the assumption that one country (corporation, actually) somehow creates AGI and thus, essentially, the singularity. Great for raising VC, apparently, but at its core this is magical thinking.

Even if any of the US corporations would eventually end up in a scenario where their revenue is at least as high as their inference cost, what harm would that do to the other contenders? It's not as if there is any kind of network effect here that would exlude them from market participation.

akrylov 15 hours ago|
No US has been "winning" or rather leading thus far, but there is no guarantees that it will ever "win". I do not subscribe to idea of omnipotent omnipresent AGI. China plays a long game, I think DeepSeek does not engage in platform building on purpose. DeepSeek was probably assigned with a role of a primer lab, the goal is to replace CUDA, align with Huawei chips to do cutting edge research and cross-pollinate other teams in China. They might even hide the best models on purpose. In a long run China will use its industrial capability to apply and use AI better than anyone else. And that would be a good thing for the World.
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