Shipbuilding is but one proxy for China’s dominance in industrialization. A more relevant one for AI is: China has built more energy capacity in the last 4 years than the USA has built in the last 150. AI is increasingly limited by power. For this and other reasons, IMO the US will inevitably be surpassed on AI.
Last I've seen, it was compute and not solar panels that is limiting AI. And the US share of worldwide compute capacity has increased from 40% to 70% over the last 4 years, while China has shrinked to just 15% from 35% over that period.
> The coverage of Chinese companies is particularly poor. Our average coverage of 8 major companies is 15%.
The bigger issue is that if you're interested in frontier training, the national aggregate doesn't tell you much. The question is whether your top labs can get to the chip scale necessary to train a frontier model and China's labs have already demonstrated they can. See https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/deepseek-debates
But it's not even clear that training frontier models is where the real innovation occurs. When it comes to fine-tuning, deploying, and building AI-based products, inference is the name of the game and the chip quality is less important. Huawei's Ascend is already pretty competitive here and then you're also discounting China's open-weight access to good models, a huge base of engineering talent and a massive domestic market to iterate against.
And unless Anthropic, OpenAI et. al. are willing to invest billions of dollars training models that will only be used by a small number of clients (like the government), there's no way to fight distillation. Protecting any model from distillation means forgoing its full revenue potential, improvement via feedback and all the benefits AI is supposed to bring to the broad US economy. And if you restrict your most advanced models, you just push people to Chinese open-weight models, which is what we're already seeing.
Being sarcastic isn't going to solve the problem but you're obviously free to believe that the US is still in a position to call all the shots when it's evident to the rest of the world this isn't the case.
The only thing ridiculous here is thinking that the US government is in control to the level you think it is.
Spending $500+ billion/year (and close to a trillion now) on defense for decades and in ~6 months it has depleted stocks of critical weapons trying unsuccessfully to defeat a third-rate military power of a country that has been under sanctions for almost 50 years. And it can't even replenish them without Chinese raw materials and components.
Your sarcastic refutation of the allegedly ridiculous assertion was devoid of any counterpoints on how the US government can stop China's progress in AI and what you think they are going to do about it. Just repeating it doesn't make it any more or less ridiculous.
