> Most countries will never have frontier AI. They’re the ones who should be worrying.

Is the author nuts? Every country has access to Kimi K3, which is a true frontier model and legitimately best-in-class for a number of applications. And the best small models -- Qwen and Deepseek V4 Flash -- are also open-weights models.

What does it matter if they weren't developed in France or the UK if the average French or English person can download and run them locally? And if countries need a big AI of their own, for whatever odd reason, they can work out a deal with Moonshot and run audited instances of K3 on their .gov networks.

When China too stops publishing weights you'll never have anything better than K3 / the current SOTA. Your choices for future frontier models will be: use USA API or use China API.

Even now open weights are perpetually 6-12 months behind.

If China stops publishing weights, that would suggest the US has been knocked down to 2nd place and it is likely that they will rediscover the "Open" in OpenAI for strategic reasons, or something like.

It's reasonably safe bet that there will always be someone on the planet with the means and interest to commodify the models. They don't seem very hard to make; we're swimming in options.

> When China too stops publishing weights you'll never have anything better than K3 / the current SOTA.

Hasn't happened yet. Might not happen at all. Also, there's a lot that can be done with K3.

> Even now open weights are perpetually 6-12 months behind.

This is a very commonplace opinion yet I don't believe it's genuinely true. K3 is hardly much worse than Fable and can surpass it on certain tasks; they read as different, not as one that's 12 months behind the other. And don't forget that access to Fable is highly constrained.

As for small/local models: The leading edge is open by definition, and hardly much worse -- if worse at all -- than small models like Luna or Haiku (lol).

So these countries will be able to use AI from multiple providers, which means they'll benefit from competition?

Is this “swelling AI tax revenue” and “wealth redistribution” in the room with us right now?

I see wealth redistribution alright. Not in the direction you’re thinking!

Well at the moment AI hasn't made anyone any money. It's redistributed investors money (typically wealthy although some pension plans have been caught up too) to tradespeople, to Nvidia, SK Hynix, Micron and other specialised vendors with pricing power.

After that it's like... Who is making money? "we're doing 100x the things we're doing before" people can't really point to anything. Maybe it's in use everywhere all the time, and they've been pumping out twice the amount of features that no one uses or asked for as before, in which case this is classic value destruction

There are problems with this analysis.

First it discounts the debt and financial load on the frontier labs to 0. The costs of developing this technology may well not be borne by those who reap the benefits. This is not like the Amazon distribution network.

Second it assumes that, like nuclear weapons, the technologies of frontier AI will not proliferate. I would argue that we have seen orders of magnitude reduction in compute requirements enabling sub linear improvement of scale driven AI in the last 24 months. Meanwhile 27bn param models do what trillion model parameters couldn't 12 mths ago. I think we're seeing a diversification of approach now, and it's not clear that the winners will be scale driven.

Third, and the most fatal, it assumes that AI will be the driver of power in the future geopolitical landscape. But frankly if I nuke you what will your clever machines do then?

This is not 1945 and this essay is essentially a note from a USA in the middle of an existential crisis channelling the 1950's.

Let's not kid each other that the benefits of AI will flow to everyone in the US. The existing underclass will be come even bigger, and that will threaten stability and welfare for everyone.

Sure, maybe it's even worse in countries that have no AI at all - but does it really make a difference if 90% of the population is protesting in the streets instead of 70%?

Isn't it more likely that countries without native frontier models will use open-weights models that will let them be 70% as productive as countries that do?

> Isn't it more likely that countries without native frontier models will use open-weights models that will let them be 70% as productive of counties that do?

Possibly, but sometimes being marginally better lets you win all the games. It can be difficult to guess what matters and how.

Also, may depend where the compute is physically located, which may depend on the cost of energy.

The biggest impact I think will be when it comes to starting a career. Young people will be forced to live with parents for years while they are an unpaid "apprentice".

In that sense, there is no need for college anymore - just spend the four years learning on the job (at least you won't have to pay for it even more).

As an alternative viewpoint, countries who use 'good-enough' AI much more unrestrained than say in the US can get a real leg up. Just requires fewer scruples.

AI Inevitability with a left-liberal lexicon.

> An honest appraisal of the situation, however, should suggest the opposite response: It’s the employees of the labs, rich in equity and embedded in the most dynamic labor market there ever was, that should feel the least apprehension.

Of course no shit. Materially they have the least to fear. Their fears are ideological and spiritual; we have created something so powerful that even we are scared plus outright supramundane silicon faith.