IMO US vs Chinese data vacuuming is a false choice. One of the main benefits of these open weights models is that you can get the privacy and cost savings by hosting your own model in cloud infrastructure.
Open weights models are only 4.5 months behind closed weight ones.
The fact that US considers propping its flagship technology by blacklisting competitors demonstrates how small the US competitive advantage really is.
The poor capitalists with all the money and power, making the decisions at the highest levels, guiding society's direction... can you imagine they might be responsible for the shittier and shittier turns our world is taking?
Class is the shape of power and exploitation under capitalism. Some own, others work to enrich those that own. That's all class is. Being frank about the real power differences in our society and our world isn't an ism.
Georgia acceding to NATO was viewed no differently than Ukraine by Russia and Russia clearly stated that this would cause a war, which it did. It's strange to me that you think that the US had nothing to do with expanding NATO to these countries despite Russia's threats of war if this happened. What do you think the US' role was?
Regarding Asia, look at US' vying to have unfettered access for its Air Force over the Strait of Malacca, despite popular disfavor by Indonesians, after a $15 billion energy deal with their government. The US having command over the South Korean military - in what world is that in South Korea's interest? Vietnam's new dependence on US LNG as a result of the attack on Iran. Look at the disputes in the South China Sea despite the disputants having China as their biggest trading partner, and the disputes rising exactly at the time of the US' pivot to Asia. Same pattern with Taiwan - a plan that has been in place for decades but which has become a political token coinciding with the pivot to Asia.
Japan and Korea vs China sounds absurd doesn't it? Why would they pick a fight with their biggest trading partner, who also appears much stronger than them militarily? Surely it's not in their interest right? Yet that's exactly what we've been seeing (belligerence from Japan's PM over Taiwan is a case in point). Does rising belligerence against a key trading partner/US geopolitical rival sound familiar?
Meanwhile Russia can't defeat Ukraine but Europe is convinced it has to arm itself and join the proxy war. This aligns with the 2026 National Defense Strategy - feeding proxies into wars against US rivals, what the US euphemistically refers to as "'burden sharing".
It also harms US' Asian allies, which makes them more dependent on US energy, increasing US leverage to push them toward proxy war with China. Very similar to the situation in Europe!
In fact the commenter’s point is quite relevant. A central characteristic of the information war is to dismiss the “other side”’s POV as propaganda. This works to prop up one’s own propaganda.
The article makes this quite clear:
> Those words — foreign digital interference — are very important.
> The West has neglected to fight on the battlefield that has been right in front of them the entire time — the internet.
It’s remarkable that the author thinks this is true. The issue is the foreign source of the propaganda, not the propaganda itself, and in fact the solution is more propaganda, according to them.
By limiting our focus to pro-Russia edits, and refusing to acknowledge the larger context, we let ourselves become unwitting dupes, casualties in this information war.
The US installs dictatorships, overthrows democracies, supports genocide, mass targets civilians in its bombing campaigns. It doesn't care about human rights or democracy except as an excuse to start new wars which only harm the people it claims to want to help with its wars.
Human rights are a pretext of US controlled media to advocate for expanding US imperial interests. Notice how US support of Israel, Gulf state dictatorships, South American dictatorships are glossed over whenever warmongering toward China or Iran is advocated with the thin excuse being human rights.
Anyone who claims a one sided information war has let themself become a casualty of that war.
There is a giant capital outlay required to produce a competitive model. Joe Schmo can’t jump into this market. Best he could do would be to ingratiate himself to an existing funding cartel. The moat surrounding a handful of market participants is billions of dollars wide.
There’s competition now among the American companies (who have a head start in this space) as always happens as the professional oligopolists try to manufacture their footholds in the new market.
Nor is it cynical to objectively appraise the interests and economics at play. People aren’t playing circular financing games out of the goodness of their hearts.
The tech industry goes through investment phases to produce oligopolies it turns around and enshittifies, parasitizing income off what it has built. Venture capital, acquisitions, acquihires, circular investments - It’s been incestuous for years. The question is whether competition from China’s sophisticated tech sector, which already surpasses the US in many areas, will put a pin in these plans this time round.
CPI is an aggregate measure which munges a bunch of things together under a single statistic.
In fact, the cost of necessities has overall risen faster than the cost of discretionary goods. This has been generally true since the mid-1990s; prior to that, inflation differences were much smaller across income groups despite lower income groups spending more of their income on necessities. In some periods like the post-COVID housing and energy price shocks, the differential effect of real inflation on basic necessities has been even greater.
Even "small" effects compound over time. For example, when someone in a low bracket loses 10% purchasing power after many years, the net economic stress they experience is much greater than for someone at a high bracket. Differential inflation of necessities vs discretionary goods magnifies this.
> inflation adjusted wages are actually up over the long term
Inflation is a tool for monetary policy. It doesn't track cost of living. For example, if luxury items become more affordable, but housing prices rise, inflation-adjusted pay doesn't capture this kind of negative effect on the working class.
I clearly said he deserves expropriation not violence. Reread my comment.
The US defense industry profits off the mass murder of civilians including literally burning families alive as we bomb their homes. That’s mass murder at scale, not a single Molotov cocktail bouncing ineffectually off someone’s house. This is precisely the double standard I’m talking about.
The oligarchs control our political process and our laws. They bend it to their will for profit. What’s legal is not moral - they own the lawmakers and have endless budgets for the courts.
The only way to put an end to this is to expropriate them. Their extreme and disproportionate wealth gives them extreme and disproportionate power. Oligarchy is not some alternate/flawed form of democracy; these two systems are antithetical.
Friend, they choose our legislators. They control the political process. They own the mass media and the social media companies. Denial isn’t a strategy.
Who is going to lobby to make it illegal? Our system is broken and won’t fix itself.
Inequality is going to continue to increase until society collapses. If we want a better world we need to prepare for this eventuality by building avenues of popular action to return power to the people. Once the oligarchs have fucked up enough people’s lives, popular action becomes a realistic way out of this mess.
As I see it the underlying issue for many ITT is the hypocrisy of condemning violence against Altman while while looking the other way from his role as an oligarch and as a Defense contractor. This is a human being with an awful destructive effect on the world he shares with us. Such people don't deserve violence but expropriation.