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Posted by akrylov 23 hours ago

The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization(avkcode.github.io)
213 points | 584 commentspage 4
aswegs8 4 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.

bildung 23 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 16 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.
KnuthIsGod 15 hours ago||
If it is a war, then China is delighted.

The USA is very good at loosing very, very expensively....

xbmcuser 10 hours ago||
Lol some of these western arm chair analysts actually need to visit China.
gizajob 20 hours ago||
“It is not the same as profitable AI leadership”

Where are these profits of which you speak?

mikece 23 hours ago||
I feel like the title of this post should have "for now" appended.
ericmay 22 hours ago||
Why though? That could be true of any economic condition. Imagine if any time there was a race or competition in which one group is winning you had to just say "for now".

Michael Phelps is winning the race! ... for now

China is winning the EV race ... for now

It doesn't seem to add value to me, aside from being an opportunity to, as is the time-honored tradition of the haters, to sow doubt and create negative energy to anything related to American success.

epolanski 23 hours ago|||
+1

Of course US has a huge head start, but if AI keeps growing, what matters is how the market's gonna look like years from now.

Most of my clients using AI in the business workflows (in products) use Chinese LLMs, because after benchmarking for a specific use case you nearly always end up finding that you pay half or a tenth.

That's not a new phenomenon. I've adapted Gemini Flash 2.5 years and years ago when people were dissing it as "crap", yet it was the best budget and quality fit for the task I had at hand back then (translating and summarizing tons of documents). It was both faster and around 100 times cheaper than the best GPT 4 model available.

Needless to say, medium-sized Chinese models are far better than those LLMs and a perfect fit for countless applications.

doph 21 hours ago|||
Even with all the Qwens and Kimis and GLMs etc, the latest Gemini Flash models are still an insane value! I recently settled on 3.1 Flash Lite after testing basically everything on offer on OpenRouter, and it was not a close call - cheaper, faster, and better (for translation and visual understanding tasks).
rhubarbtree 20 hours ago|||
It’s interesting to see short term business interests again undermining American sovereignty.

Just as business exported strategically critical manufacturing to China, now it is helping funding China’s race to take over the US in AI and beyond.

Lesson is pure free trade doesn’t work if (a) not everyone is playing by the same rules and (b) the trading territories are or may become opposed.

American economic policy gave the world an authoritarian super power and Trump. Not a great track record.

DeathArrow 23 hours ago||
GLM, Kimi, MiMo, Minimax, Deepseek, Qwen would like to have a word. :)
Galanwe 21 hours ago|
This.

I dont know what the benchmarks are supposed to represent, but to me Kimi K2.6 is indistinguishable from e.g Opus 4.6.

abalashov 19 hours ago||
How much would one have to invest in hardware to feasibly run a usefully large Kimi K2.6?
zozbot234 18 hours ago|||
There's no set-in-stone answer to these kinds of questions, it all depends what "useful" performance means to you.
abalashov 14 hours ago||
Yeah, I know. Was just throwing it out to see what folks would say based on their idea of useful.
Galanwe 18 hours ago|||
Around $35-45k if willing to use it comfortably (fast to answer, large context) as coding agent.
parliament32 17 hours ago||
> Many people use the wrong scorecard.

Correct. "Revenue" is the wrong scorecard when they're selling 20$ bills for 15$. I too can make a bajillion dollars in revenue with that strategy.

Show me a company not speed running the uber/doordash playbook and we can talk.

megous 20 hours ago||
Matters the most to whom? I certainly will not care about expensive models that do about the same thing cheap non-american models do.

It's like the USA Librem 5 vs PinePhone. About the same HW for $1600 vs $150.

Sure will not pay 10x for "US" thing just because it's a US thing.

seydor 19 hours ago|
That's like saying that Louis Vuitton is monetizing shoes the best. Sure, but it's not winning shoes
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