Their size meant Google, Microsoft & Meta all benefited from becoming default global standards. Silicon Valley is gambling that the same will happen again with someone like OpenAI or Anthropic. Hence why investor money is piled into a tiny number of AI companies, with everyone hoping they’ve placed an early bet on a global unicorn.
However, free, open-source Chinese AI is only months behind them. Even most US businesses are choosing it. If that weren’t incentive enough to avoid US AI, the American government has just made it even less attractive. Now the US government arbitrarily decides who can & cannot have access to it. Needless to say, no serious business can tolerate this.
Europe, too, is turning away from US Big Tech. The EU has been explicit in its speech and actions in rejecting US AI.
Where does this leave the trillions pouring into US AI? Who knows, but it seems hard to imagine them making their money back, let alone making any globe-spanning unicorns.
OpenAI agrees to stagger rollout of its most powerful model to only Trump-approved customers
EU Commission picks EUROPA consortium led by Domyn to build open frontier AI model
This is what years of arrogance does to the brain. Empires new clothes and all.
It also kind of sucks for labor, and most people labor.
Maybe you produce more good stuff and get paid the same. Feels bad.
More likely you produce more slop infused stuff, and you have the much less enjoyable task of fixing it. Cory doctorow wrote a whole metaphor about that with reverse centaurs.
