| SvennoJ said: And just like blue collar jobs were outsourced to cheap labor countries, AI can just as easily be outsourced to cheaper systems... Quality nor 'loyalty' was never a priority for capitalism, profits are, so AI jobs will also go to the cheapest bidder, and that shift is a lot easier than building factories in China and offices in India.
So if AI succeeds in taking over jobs, cheaper AI can just as well succeed in taking over the US AI made at enormous investments. It's like building the first ultra expensive car manufacturing factory in Detroit, just to be replaced a year later or even before opening by overseas production. No time to recoup the investments. |
I think it depends a lot on how the "agents" are achieved. What seems to be happening currently is that software engineering eco-systems and tooling are being developed to perform tasks on top of base models, and it is this which is making the models useful and production-able. Deepseek and Qwen are really good at training base models, and have performed a lot of excellent fundamental research, but I think they're lagging behind on product eco-systems and there is a reason why you don't see them being used much in "agent" toolsets, despite the cheaper costs.
The U.S is just really good at software-development and being able to productionize and market things. Marketing and productionization are probably one of the few things the U.S has and Americans have ever consistently been great at. China is a good second (Tencent and ByteDance have shown us) but they are still quite far behind.
I suppose having the best base models can act as an accelerant, but I don't think anybody is going to jump very far ahead of anyone else by doing this.
There is also the matter that using Chinese models can be a data security concern. I work for a large healthcare company, and they pretty much only use Anthropic models on AWS for batch inference tasks because it is HIPPA-compliant, and Open AI enterprise for day-to-day chat/coding. I am not confident that the U.S industry won't use regulatory capture to push out Chinese solutions. This is especially since we're in a post-neoliberal world when it comes to global markets.
Day-to-day people will be using Chinese models regardless, but they aren't the main consumers.
