I am not lacking confidence in the home team (except in soft power). I just hate sharing with people that want to harm my tribe. I think it's insane. I always think about the global tragedy of Caucasians copying Chinese technology especially gun powder and then raping the entire planet. I never want that to repeat again. I already gave the example of an upgraded India with Chinese robots.
You look at Caucasians. How did they stay so strong for so long? They held onto their advantages. That's the smart thing to do.
You are looking at the positives of democratized AI. Imagine the open sourced Chinese tech leads to a gunpowder 2.0 situation, where a Chinese technology is once again weaponized by Caucasians to enslave everyone.
re: quote
There's a big difference between having a moat for self protection and prosperity vs plundering the world like Caucasians.
If we don't share nuclear technology then why share AGI, which is the ultimate weapon. Deepseek is not AGI, but that's their goal.
If I may, China's primary goal (or at the minimum, one of its primary goals) in the 21st century is the dismantling of the American empire. This is because not only is the American empire hostile to Chinese interests, but it is by far the most dominant empire the world has ever seen, wielding extra-territorial influence like nobody - not even the British - has ever done before.
This combination makes for an extremely oppressive environment for China's continued rise. We see it in the form of the US being able to stop
other countries from doing business & sharing technology with China, attack China's market shares in
other countries via sanctions and bans, overthrow
other countries friendly to China, and so on, so forth. The US's extra-territorial powers and interests are at the heart of the problem. If the US were isolationist, China would not have much of a problem with it, nor would it be able to affect China very much, and relations could be relatively cordial, if not friendly.
How do you dismantle an empire? Well, historically, you could do it by defeating it in a war and conquering its territories. But this is highly risky in a post-industrial, post-nuclear world. Even the US avoids going to war against great powers. Hence the reason it is using proxies vs. Russia, as opposed to direct military engagements. Starting a war against the US and its vassals would lead to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of deaths. This is a path that China is wise not to take.
The other way to do it is to bankrupt the empire. This is the route China is pursuing. But how does it work? Well, it's the same with any economics problem - poor return on investment. You get the US to waste money, basically, until its bad debts pile up so high, that it has no choice but to default and sell off. This was how the British Empire collapsed. It could no longer afford to maintain the empire.
This brings us back to the current AI bubble and the reckless pursuit of AGI/ASI. The US is all-in on the effort and is devoting trillions every year. It has been convinced by the Silicon Valley hyper scalers that dominating and monopolizing AI is its path to a thousand years Reich. I mean Dario Amodei practically spelled it out for the public - it's really not about democracy or human rights or liberalism (as seen in the whole three sentences Dario devoted to it in his 10+ pages article, and Silicon Valley's cozying up with Trump), but about turning AI into a product that the rest of the world is dependent on the US for, like a drug dealer gathering its legion of addicts.
Similar to its British example, the US is forever looking for an "opium" with which it can hook the world (and particularly its vassal addicts). In comes Deep Seek with its open source AI and promise of democratizing AGI/ASI for all. What if - the trillions that the US is investing in AI all this time was for nothing? What if there's no return on investment because your competitor is basically giving it away for free? China is - whether consciously or not - using the same strategy here that it's using in every other industry - starting a price war that will eventually squeeze other players out of the market because they just can't make money. In this scenario, China wins even if it doesn't ever make a cent - global adoption of Chinese models and technologies will bankrupt the US AI industry and is just another nail in the empire's coffin.
