Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 1 of 32

Another Big Profit Opportunity For Elites Is On The Way (Bonds/Carry Trade)

By

On August 19, 2026

22 Comments

Japan has, since the mid 90s, had very low interest rates. The Japanese carry trade was to borrow in Japan and invest in America. You didn’t even need to take any real risk. Borrow Japanese, buy safe bonds in the US that paid more. Or you could use the money for riskier bets.

This has been going on for more than half my life and I’m not young. It was one of those money spigots that insiders and wealthy people have access too, but most of the rest of us simply watch: free money for some.

Now it’s coming to an end. The Japanese Yen is under immense pressure and so far interventions have not done squat. So the Japanese are raising interest rates.

But more than that they’re selling large chunks of their US treasuries in interventions, and Japan is the largest holder of US government debt outside of America. (China is second.)

This happens at the same time as the US bond market is breaking. Treasury literally can’t sell all of its bonds. Rates are high, about at 2007 levels, and they’re selling short term bonds and using that to buy their own long term bonds.

Add to this issues with oil and distillates, especially diesel, the fact that the US military is basically out of a lot of weapons and has lost a war.

Then there’s the real-estate market:

America and Americans are under a lot of stress. Because interest rates are high and Biden and Trump love to spend but not tax there are also soaring interest payments on the US debt.

Now the big advantage the US has over most countries is that its debt is denominated in its own currency. The federal government cannot go bankrupt unless elites lose their will to print money, which so far they haven’t. They’ve printed literal trillions since 2008, though it’s concealed by pretending that Federal Reserve operations which create money out of mid air to keep rich people rich aren’t money printing.

The result was massive inflation in the top end, and a drying up of businesses aiming at the middle class and poor. You see this most clearly in Las Vegas, which used to have cheap rooms and food but now doesn’t, because why cater to people who have no money?

(In China prices are low, even at luxury hotels, because there is a mass market like the one the US had in the 50s and 60s.)

After all this add in the AI bubble and fertilizer and diesel shortages hitting farmers.

The entire system is cracking apart.

The smartest money isn’t the money that has been plunging into the AI bubble, it’s the people who have kept their powder dry, because as everything goes to hell, there will be significant buying opportunities. Warren Buffet, for example, built up a huge amount of cash, though his successor has spent some.

In a serious economic crisis, and one is coming, you can buy up companies and assets (and all those homes, which you then rent at profit maximizing rates which leave millions homeless) for cents on the dollar.

As for you, dear reader, well, probably you won’t be able to take advantage of this, any more than you could in the bounce after 2007.

The Federal Reserve and other central banks will have to decide whether or not to do bail outs, and whether or not to bail out the rich or ordinary people. They’ll choose the rich. But there is a problem with the whole “America’s debt is in dollars so it doesn’t matter theory.”

America’s a net importer. It has less and less to sell to the world that the world needs. There has been a slow but consistent move away from the US dollar as a reserve currency, a movement away from settling trade in US dollars and China’s now forcing companies to choose between America and China. If you enforce US sanctions, they’ll fine you and if you don’t pay, you’ll lose access to their market.

Ultimately the US dollar’s value comes from US strength: economically and militarily. Like the British Pound (which was once worth five times or more than the US dollar) it can be expected to lose value because there is simply less need for it. Everything you really need you can get somewhere else, unless like Europe, you’ve sanctioned other suppliers so much you’re destroying your own economy.

Anyway, all of these things all happening at the same time is all sorts of bad news. I’d expect some sort of financial crisis within a year and it will be a doozy. Wherever it starts it will hit everything in the US and Europe and the Anglosphere and much of the rest of the world. Central banks will have to spent trillions in another bail out.

But this will be the last major US bailout, because after this there will be nothing. The US will not have the tech lead in almost anything, is not creating the world’s future techs other than AI (which China is winning, anyway) and will have lost much of its military intimidation factor.

Welcome to the end of the American Empire. You’ll see it in food shortages, high prices and an elite determined to become an elite similar to India’s or much of South America’s: ruling over essentially poor nations, but filthy rich amongst the rubble.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

The New Cold War Intensifies

By

On August 18, 2026

16 Comments

We all know about American sanctions. They are enforced by removing people from the US/EU banking system, and the SWIFT transfer network.

Because this system was used by almost everyone for international transfers, the US could forbid trade between third parties: “you can’t buy or sell from Russia/Iran/whoever because we’ll cut you off from our system.”

American law only applies in America. If Russia and Nigeria want to trade something, that should have nothing to do with the US and it should have no say. But it has and entire countries have been devastated by it.

China’s had enough:

This week a Singaporean shipping company received a hefty fine in China, the fine was just short of 5 million RMB. What happened was, they had refused to fulfill a shipment from Shanghai to Panama and returned the goods because the Hong Kong shipper was included on a U.S. sanctions list. I hope you heard that, a Singaporean shipping company, nothing to do with the USA, refused a shipment that was sent from Shanghai, in China, to Panama in Central America, of products that were being shipped by a HK company that is sanctioned.

Had the goods been going to the USA, then this would not have been illegal, because the goods, or the company shipping them are sanctioned there and Chinese domestic law can’t change that.

However, the Shanghai Maritime Court ruled this as a breach of contract, China has not sanctioned this company, the US had nothing to do with the product, the shipping or the destination so, based on Article 12 of the new Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, the court ordered compensation for the loss of over RMB 4.99 million plus interest. It went on to the Supreme People’s Court which subsequently listed it as a typical case, stating it was the first judicial judgment confirming the mandatory applicability of the law.

What this means, if it continues, and the supreme court of China’s language indicates that it will, is that you’ll be forced to choose: you can either obey US sanctions, in which case you can’t do business with China, or you can obey Chinese law and that means you won’t be able to do business with America or its vassals.

It took China a long time to do this. Only recently did China decide that the US can no longer stop its technological and industrial progress: China is ahead in almost all techs, and in the few it’s behind in it doesn’t feel it must have US goods. China forcing even AI companies to use domestic chips was a tell.

Last decade I predicted that a likely outcome of the rise of China and America’s fall was a new cold war. There’s an entire topic category “New Cold War”.

And here we are, with it reaching the serious stage.

The bottom line is that while China is happy to sell to the US and wants to keep doing so, it no longer absolutely needs to. Nor does it need parts from the US. It’s the West that needs tech transfers from China.

And there’s no upside to helping the US other than sales because everything that makes the US stronger is used to hurt China or its friends. Notice that BRICS includes two countries currently at war with the West: Russia and China, America is trying to flip Brazil back to the hard right, and Trump is constantly sanctioning South Africa.

Helping America, if you’re China, is as stupid as it gets given America has clearly treated China as an enemy and is assaulting China’s friends.

In the last cold war Russia was the weaker side, economically, from the start to the end. In this war China is stronger in every way that matters: militarily, industrially and technologically. It also has a larger population.

The smart money is “always bet on the stronger side”. Sure sometimes they lose. But not often. And the West is now the weaker side.

Welcome to the end of the European centuries. We had one hell of a run, but our leaders pissed it away. Let us hope that China is a kinder hegemon than Europe or America ever were.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Yes, There Is Reason To Believe Humans Can Do Better

By

On August 13, 2026

28 Comments

Had a commenter in the last post say that humans always over-consume. When I said that commons had been stable for as long as centuries they answered that this was true, but that those families produced too many kids.

Humans change how they do things. Once we didn’t fly. Once there had never been democracy. Once there had never been kings. Once there were no domesticated animals. Once there were no monotheisms. Once there we no… (insert a million examples.)

If we assume that human nature is always bad or good, we’re fools. Human nature has a lot of range and is very dependent on conditioning.

Right now all the usual fools are screaming that there aren’t enough children being born.

So… we know that sometimes humans don’t over-produce babies and we know that sometimes, very long periods, humans manage commons.

Is there some way we can put those two things together at a reasonable replacement rate? Can we find a way to have a relatively stable non overconsuming good society to live in?

Can we change culture so that over-consumption and display is regarded with revulsion? Certainly there have been cultures like that.

Change is possible and because change is possible better worlds are possible. Because change is possible, worse worlds are also possible.

But we operate on the assumption that human nature allows for good outcomes because if we operate on the assumption that it doesn’t, then all that is left is to sit back and wait for extinction. And if we assume no solutions are possible, and they are, well, we won’t find them, having already written them off.

Intellectual honesty is “I don’t know if we can find a better solution but I also don’t know that we can’t, and I do know that humans have often found new ways of doing things.”

A better world is easy enough to imagine. And that’s the first step to change: find a pole star and navigate by it. We chose “let’s organize our society around greed” as a polestar and it changed the world. Now it’s running us off a cliff.

Perhaps there are other polestars which would work better?

Humans generally change societies radically after a crisis. But when they do so, they reach for the ideas that are hanging around. If those ideas aren’t good ones (neoliberalism in the 70s, for example) humans will turn a crisis into something worse by choosing a cure that is worse than disease.

So the job is to make sure good ideas hanging around. Eric Anderson has suggested a land ethic. Make your suggestions in the comments.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

The Fundamental Political Question Of Production & Distribution

By

On August 12, 2026

24 Comments

For those of us who want the purpose of government and society to be creating the best life for the most people there are two fundamental questions.

First: how to produce what is good for people and produces a good life.

Second: how to distribute what is good for people and produces a good life.

Among people of genuine good will there’s a lot of disagreement about how to do this.

The argument of capitalists is follows: if you produce something someone wants and is able to buy you’ve increased utility. If they didn’t want to buy it, they wouldn’t, so it must be good for them. Trying to figure out what is good for people is stupid: individuals know better than government or firms, so whatever they actually buy (or do) must be what they want, and what they want must be good for them.

Whoever sells the most at the most profit must be producing most utility, so if you have a lot of money this means you’re doing a lot of good and not only do you deserve your money, you should have it because money is the ability to command resources and you’ve proved that when you command resources you increase utility. Making money is the same as producing utility, in other words.

Now the smarter capitalists (non libertarians) admit that there are edge cases: people may want heroin, but we still make it illegal. They don’t think there are a lot of edge cases.

The counter-arguments are pretty simple: when we look at time periods where oligarchs are in control like the gilded era or the neoliberal era, they all end in disaster for the society. In the case of the gilded age, a direct road to the Great Depression (without which WWII probably doesn’t happen). In the case of neoliberalism, a multi-decade increase in inequality, and in the heartland, most social statistics turning negative. (Things like, oh, lifespan and child mortality.) Massive homelessness, hunger, all that stuff. (I’m old enough to remember when there were no food banks.)

Such people argue that “utility” is meaningless: it’s a circular definition, whatever people do is what they want to do and must be good. We all know that we often do things that aren’t good for us (mmm, a nice can of coke) and all of us who aren’t near the top of society have “freely” worked at jobs we hated because not doing so would lead to homelessness. Coercion is all thru the system, and it can’t operate without it. If it could, they wouldn’t need so many police.

Note that the idea that greed and wealth are good flies in the face of pretty much all traditional ethical teaching. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem or even most pagan faiths: they all condemn having much more than you need when others are poor or hungry.

But, say the capitalists, we tried that for a long time and what worked to create widespread prosperity was capitalism!

Was it?

Or was it industrialization, which we did in capitalist ways and can we imagine that industrialization could have been done in other ways?

Or perhaps the capitalists are right (Marx thought so) and industrialization required capitalism, but once we’re industrialized, we should find a better way, because we know that capitalism is unstable and tends to devolve into fascism, plus tends to create oligarchies over time which then cause massive economic problems.

Or, perhaps the argument is for certain types of capitalism: the New Deal variety worked pretty well, after all. Except that it devolved in neoliberalism and gave away an industrial base which it took the West centuries to build. (Not that China shouldn’t industrialize, but that doing so by wiping out Western industry seems pretty bad for Westerners.)

Then there’s the ecological argument: if capitalism can’t control its environmental destruction, and if that environmental destruction is so serious that it endangers hundreds of millions to billions of lives and is causing a mass extinction event, perhaps whether or not it creates, for a few centuries, prosperity for some people, is not all that relevant. I can keep myself warm by burning my possessions one by one, then burning down my house, but no one thinks that’s smart.

I think a fair reading of capitalism is that it failed to handle to industrialization’s negative side effects and that it regularly devolves into degraded political forms which do great harm.

The “well, it’s the best thing we’ve come up” with argument is foolish: if the best thing we’ve come up with will kill billions of people and keeps causing wars and impoverishing people even though there’s a surplus, we obviously need to come up with something better.

We’ve changed our governing forms and our economic forms many times in the past. We’ve tried new things. The idea that this is (or was) the “end of history” and capitalism and neoliberal democracy are the best we can do is argument for running ourselves off a cliff and after the rise of the CPC, the idea that oligarchy/neoliberalism or “liberal” democracy are the best systems even in their own terms is obviously bullshit. China’s crushing them.

That’s not a brief for China, precisely, it has its own issues and continues an over-consumption economy based on planned obsolescence. But it does demolish the idea that how we do things in the West is obviously superior and can never be replaced by anything better.

But this still comes back to the original two questions: how do we produce what is good and how do we distribute what we create?

Add to them “how do we live in prosperous societies with high welfare without destroying the environment or drawing down irreplaceable resources?”

And those are the questions we haven’t got a good answer to yet and which we urgently need answers to because right now we aren’t just walking off a cliff, we’re feeding ourselves into a chipper foot first.

China, as much as I admire them, and as much as they are doing more than anyone else for the environment (it isn’t even close) is just running an old playbook: the same one America ran, the same one Japan ran, the same one South Korea ran.

And while it’s good that they’re increasing electrification and finally getting carbon under control, it’s not enough by itself because there’s still far too much needless consumption in order to keep the profit feedback mechanism which runs markets (and the Chinese have very competitive markets, just ones that operate under general direction guidance).

I’m not giving answers to these questions today. If you have some, feel free to put them in comments. I have a few ideas, of course, but I think it’s more important for most people to start asking the right questions, and to agree that they are the right questions, than to leap to answers, because if we don’t agree on problems and goals, we won’t agree on solutions.

So start thinking.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Understand China’s Plan To Become A Full Socialist State

By

On August 5, 2026

28 Comments

“The banks, as we know, are centres of modern economic life, the principal nerve centres of the whole capitalist economic system.”

–Vladmir Lenin

Deng had four principles for his changes to Chinese Communism:

  • Upholding the socialist road (or socialist path).
  • Upholding the people’s democratic dictatorship (originally often referred to as the dictatorship of the proletariat; the phrasing was later standardized as “people’s democratic dictatorship”).
  • Upholding the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CCP).
  • Upholding Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

    Chinese and American flags flying together

In Marxist thought the capitalist industrial stage is necessary before the final condition of a state completely controlled by the workers, without class.

This is because a significant surplus is required for everyone to have a good life, and it’s capitalist industrialism which creates that.

You can easily create a heavy industrial state in a command economy: both the Soviets and the Chinese under Mao did so. What they could not do was create a state with a lot of consumer goods.

Mao created the pre-conditions: heavy industry, basic infrastructure, and an educated people.

But notice the principles are all “stay socialist and stay in charge.”

The major banks in China are state controlled. The banks that aren’t state controlled are under strong supervision, and in most cases have party members in leadership positions.

Banks (and various shadow banks in the West) are the main way firms get money. If the banks won’t loan, your business won’t happen or won’t survive. If they will loan to you at preferential rates because you are doing what the Party wants, usually based on the five year plan, then you’ll have a good chance of success.

When I wrote my article on principles for running a left wing government I included taking control of the banks and taking control of media as absolute, immediate, necessities.

China has kept control of both.

This issue became especially urgent after the fall of the USSR and the CPC spent a LOT of time studying why the Soviet Union fell.

But despite Deng’s principles what was happening before Xi was the corruption of the CPC and its mingling with the new capitalist rich: after all, if as a party official you helped a firm, they could kick back to you and you’d get rich. Do enough of this and you could become obscenely rich.

This imperiled all four of Deng’s principles, as decision making around loans and regulation was increasingly made not in alignment with the CPC’s goals, but to make people rich. (One example is the massive housing bubble which Xi has since popped.) This is not the issue the Soviets had specifically, but is related: people with power no longer really believed in Communism or put the Party’s power first. (Gorbachev deliberately removed power from the party.)

When Xi took charge his first and most important programs was anti-corruption. At the time I cynically assumed it was a way of taking out his enemies, and that he would tolerate corruption for his faction.

I was, mostly, wrong. Xi’s anti-corruption is real. He’s a sincere Communist who wants to keep the CPC genuinely in charge and not let it be corrupted.

The goal is simple enough: stay in charge, make China vastly prosperous and transition to full socialism. Markets are useful for this, but must be kept under control or they will take control of the party, and capitalists aren’t going to be committed socialists.

Xi, in this light, is just an extension of Deng: actually making Deng work. Deng’s policies caused rapid technological advance and improved light industry massively, but the principles were not actually being enforced.

Xi enforces them. Not just anti-corruption but changes in how the party recruits and trains and promotes, all intended to keep the CPC on the path to socialism.

Will they succeed? Well the transition will come, if it does, with the next leader, most likely. Xi is putting his successor in a good position. AI and robotics are being directed towards physical activities, there are dark factories with no workers, and so on.

Genuine socialism means people shouldn’t have to work a lot if they don’t want to, and should still live a good life. AI and automation, done properly, offers that possibility.

Of course huge problems around distribution and production remain and will have to be figured out. If China stays the course they’re trying to create something which has never existed: something genuinely new. Westerner’s might call it “fully automated luxury communism” though I don’t know if it’ll get that far.

But the ducks are in a row: massive productive capacity, ways to reduce the amount of workers needed, and keeping control of politics and the economy.

This is the plan. No one knows if it will succeed, but it’s not a stupid plan or one that will obviously fail, IF China can deal with resource depletion, ecological collapse and global warming (all of which it is doing more to mitigate than any other country, though it’s far from perfect.)

China is the future. It’s success or failure will determine what political/economic models are considered usable and successful. The age of liberal democracy is near its end.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

America Almost Out Of Long Range Strike Munitions

By

On August 4, 2026

21 Comments

Why did Trump call off his big attacks? Why did the US stop attacking suddenly?

he U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s ​readiness for future conflicts.
The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.

There are also claims that the US is running out of long range air to ground munitions as well.

Combined these two things mean that if America wants to keep bombing Iran, they have to actually fly over Iran and put themselves in much more danger from Iranian anti-air, and by all accounts the Iranians still have plenty left.

This problem comes from the same place virtually all US problems come from: rather than optimizing for results (production) everyone optimizes for profits. Selling fewer missiles for much more money is a better business deal, yes?

And that the US cannot significantly increase the production is due to de-industrializing: sending most of America’s key industries to China, because hey, it doesn’t matter where things are made.

China is now the US in WWII. They could, in a war, easily retool to produce literally millions of drones. They can produce a hundred warships per warship the US produces. Etc.

These are systematic issues. De-financialization is politically impossible. Without de-financialization re-industrializing is not possible, as it would require companies to make far lower profits. Chinese companies are MUCH bigger than American ones, and make less profit (not revenue, but profit) and have far lower valuations.

In 2025 BYD sold 2.26 million cars. Tesla sold 1.64 million. And China has many auto companies.

The mindset for scaling and the mindset for profit-maxing are very different. American elites are all looking for moats: they all want to be able to charge more for a product than it is worth because no one is competing with them on price. (This is why Chinese EVs aren’t allowed in America: they compete on price and the American car industry would cease to exist on contact.)

America lost the Iran war over fifty years as it changed from an industrial power to a financial power. Power comes from what a country can actually do. What it can buy from other countries is a minor consideration unless it has the ability to force them to sell, and that ability comes from what the country can do. Against Venezuela and Cuba, the US is still strong enough. Against a middle power which prepared for war and knows how to use geography, not so much.

In general terms, everything that is happening was predicted decades ago by objective people looking at the trends. Power comes from capability, America was systematically getting rid of that capability to optimize for the number of rich people it could generate.

Military decline, industrial decline, technological decline: all of this comes from making profits the end-goal, rather than the mean by which worthwhile goals were achieved.

“We need to make a profit do X” is very different from “we do X to make a profit.”

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

“Nothing Ever Happens”

By

On July 27, 2026

16 Comments

Oh?

Almost everything is on track.

  • Covid?
  • The financial crisis?
  • This war? China officially leading the US in tech and industry?
  • Global warming coming on faster than expected?
  • Massive wildfires every summer?
  • Trump being President?
  • The Ukraine war?
  • That little genocide in Palestine?
  • The US being unable to build enough weapons?
  • The complete breakdown of international law and (more seriously) the WTO trade order?
  • A revolution in war making technology which has allowed middle powers to fight great powers?
  • Multiple payment systems challenging dollar privilege.
  • Serious collapses in animal and insect populations, so much so that bug splat doesn’t exist in much of the world any more and that I rarely see songbirds.
  • Constant, inexorable rises in food prices, even before the war.

Notice that food per capita line. Remember all the screaming about fertility rates and look at the births line (though I think the collapse is more severe than modeled.) Industrial output is still increasing, as the chart suggests, but China’s about to go over a demographic ledge and I expect it will peak within ten years of the chart’s prediction. Resources are very definitely being depleted, though less fast than predicted. Still, it’s happening. Just read in detail about oil production.

Collapse happens slowly, then all at once. The post-USSR order has collapsed. It’s gone. The trade order has collapsed. Military supremacy is gone. Every summer we get wildfires and smoke in major cities, which did not happen before about 2019. This is a textbook example of climate change re-ordering the environment. What will grow up afterwards will be a different mix of plants and animals.

Things are happening. Big things. If you want the official “big collapse” well, it’s not here yet for the first world, but the death by a thousand self-inflicted wounds continues. As much as I admire what China has done, and as impressed as I am by solar and so on, they are still an industrial society based on planned obsolescence and over-production and are about to hit a demographic cliff (good in the long run, but it will cause issues.) The only escape from much of the resource trap would be large scale off world mining. Musk isn’t going to manage it. The Chinese are taking a shot, we’ll see. That wouldn’t, by itself, fix ecological collapse, however and won’t supply all necessary resources. It’s also unlikely to come on line in time, if at all.

You’re living thru an epochal period, similar to the WWI thru WWII period: everything is changing, but this time including serious environmental issues. There’s also all the social issues related to AI, phones, the collapse of reading and reasoning ability in some societies, mass surveillance and the rise of authoritarianism, even as civil liberties are contracting in almost every country in the world.

The post-war and post-cold war orders are dying or dead. The negative consequences of the industrial revolution are hitting home after we got the goodies for a couple centuries.

Things are happening. More things will happen over the next couple decades. If you can’t see that, you’re blind.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

America’s Losing the AI Race Hard

By

On July 21, 2026

32 Comments

Amazing stuff, and sooner than even I expected. China’s Kimi is now about equal to GPT and Claude:

For the first time, a Chinese model Kimi K3 has taken on the Frontend Code Arena and is scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks.

And the majors are noticing:

Meanwhile Trump is talking about banning Chinese AI. 

Alternatively, the smart lads at Open AI have a regulatory plan:

I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don’t need to “ban open source” (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. “A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models.” It needn’t be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don’t want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There’s a happy middle ground here. I’d assume they will do some version of this.

Even more fun, the Feds want to approve all AI releases and not allow everyone the full models.

The Trump administration has taken new steps to assert more control over the rollout of future artificial intelligence model releases by dictating which companies and entities are allowed access to the latest frontier models, two people familiar with the matter told CNBC…

….

This week, the administration launched its own program, dubbed “Gold Eagle,” aimed at collaborating with the private sector to find and fix cyber vulnerabilities.

The so-called clearinghouse would put the White House in charge of greenlighting which companies can access new AI models, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss information that is not public.

China is going to eat America’s lunch on this. If they ban Chinese AI (harder than it seems, given it’s open source) all that means is writing off the rest of the world. And since American models are handicapped, smaller American companies will be stuck with worse AI.

Since Chinese AI is far cheaper, as well, I’d expect American companies to set up subsidiaries overseas to use it, rather than be stuck with American AI.

The entire situation is a complete clusterfuck. Major companies have taken on serious debt in order to build data centers which have a lifecycle of five to seven years, and often less (since new generations of GPUs are much better.)  But the Chinese product is cheaper, open source, lacks nearly as much sovereign risk and I’ll bet multiple models will soon be about as good as Anthropic and OpenAI’s.

Where’s the business case that spending all these trillions of dollars is going to produce enough revenue from US AI to pay for all of it?

There isn’t one. It doesn’t exist.

And that means that, at least in America, this is an AI bubble. All bubbles burst and this will not be an exception. If the government bails them out it will be the last major US bailout.

This is also very likely one of the last major tech revolutions which will start in the US (which it did.) Going forward they China will produce the vast majority of them.

This is the endgame. The turning point where China obtains not just the industrial base but the absolutely undisputed tech lead. From now on China will like America in the 1950s — it’s where almost everything new is created, the dynamic center of the world, and soon people will be competing to move there, because everyone knows it is the future.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

Page 1 of 32

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén