There are no switching costs for users to move to a new model.

> Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies

This is simply not true?

What's often understated is how much of an advantage the US has because it speaks the language of global commerce and technology, which for the entire 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st has been English. That's huge. It means teenagers reading man pages are reading fluently.

At some point, though, the balance could tip. It's impossible to say, and it'd be irresponsible to try to predict it, but there isn't any reason English is natively superior, any more than French was 150 years ago, or Latin 600 years ago. But it's a major advantage the US has that isn't acknowledged often enough.

The gains are so obvious that nobody can cite a source proving them

The majority of AI revenue is probably VC money sloshing around in a closed system, e.g. a VC funds some AI company and they pay OpenAI/Claude. These startups also pay for other AI startup products and make it mandatory for their employees to use them. I would venture a guess that 50-80% of the AI revenue would dry up if VCs stopped funding AI startups.

It's hard for me to reconcile your post as being authentic. From what I see, current "AI" is simply a geo-political tool, and a tool for governments to maintain power and authority. It is not real AI, since it cannot learn.

Real AI is being suppressed and it seems that it will not be allowed to exist in the mainstream, especially in the US.

I'll push back against most of the points in your comment.

    > The demand for AI is currently overwhelming. As in, can't build data centers and GPUs melting overwhelming, companies growing 3x in a month while already at multi-billion revenues.

    > The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies

    > The productivity gains are, at this point, obvious

    > The best talent works (or wants to work) in America and get compensated obscene amounts, the most capital flows through America, this is still by far the best place to start a technology business in the world

    > I think American technology was on the decline for the past few years before LLMs, but for the foreseeable future as long as American companies control the talent flywheel I think the new world of tech is going to be much more American than before.

He's not denying that there is demand, he just has a different view on what's happening:

When developers say that LLMs make them more productive, you need to keep in mind that this is what they’re automating: dysfunction, tampering as a design strategy, superstition-driven coding, and software whose quality genuinely doesn’t matter, all in an environment where rigour is completely absent.

They are right. LLMs make work that doesn’t matter easier – it’s all monopolies, subscriptions, VCs, and lock-in anyway – in an industry that doesn’t care, where the only thing that’s measured is some bullshit productivity measure that’s completely disconnected from outcomes.

...

One group thinks this will make the world ten times richer. The other thinks it’ll be a catastrophe.

(from an earlier post, https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-two-worlds-of-progr...)

> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming.

Wait until they charge the real pice, if I sold a dollar for 10ct I'd also have a lot of demand.

I'm burning billions of tokens on chatgpt "deepresearch Pro extended" for things I wouldn't even bother googling, the second I have to pay even 2x the price I won't use that anymore

> The models get better and better, Chinese open source is falling further and further behind American companies.

Prior restraint is going to put a damper on American state of the art for the foreseeable future.

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-ai-ad-hoc-prior-restraint-...

In the longer term, companies won’t be able to build AI infrastructure fast enough to keep up. The construction capacity isn’t there. The hardware production capacity isn’t there. Raw materials, energy, water—not enough of any of it. The supply chain is a fragile, grotesque joke.

> as long as American companies control the talent flywheel

The companies are eating their seed corn. Senior devs are going to age out and there won’t be enough juniors coming up the ranks to replace them. The oncoming demographic crisis multiplies this problem.

Americans decided to sabotage their own public education system for generations. They were able to bridge the gap with foreign undergrad/grad students for a while but that well has been poisoned, probably for good.

What are you talking about even. Chinese models are what pretty much every AI company in the US is using now because you can run them on prem and customize them, and because hosted versions cost a fraction of US ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9baDOfwUzHQ

And that's in the US, the rest of the world is all using Chinese models as well. Which means these models get far more collaboration from the global research community being developed in the open. They will set the standards in terms of how APIs work. And they will be what everyone uses going forward.

The closed approach simply can't compete with that. The same way Linux destroyed Windows on servers, open AI models will destroy proprietary solutions as well.