Intelligence is everything. These things are intelligent- already superhuman in speed and a few limited domains, soon they're going to exceed humans in almost every respect. The advantage they give to the country that owns them is nuclear-weapons like.

LLMs aren't the only kind of AI.

Having hardware and software suppliers all together makes it more likely even if you assume (like I do) that we're at least one paradigm shift away from the right architecture, despite how impressively general Transformers have been.

But software is easy to exfiltrate, so I think anyone with hardware alone can catch up extremely fast.

It looks like neural network based software is to surpass humans in intelligence in every task in the forseeable future.

If one country moves along this direction faster than the others, no country will stand a chance to compete with them militarily or economically.