alt Hacker Newsvery few people comprehend - how much of an asteroid level event for western AI labs this is.
china has cheap abundant power, now they can make their own inference chips (which was supposed to be a chokepoint), their models yeah can be 6 months behind the frontier - but most people don't need frontier models - small models r more than enough.
my only wish was labs like Mistral would make their own inference chips or partner up eg with established / new chip makers or companies like Oxide.
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While the North American models say 'No', the chinese models say 'Go Go Go'. I guess we'll see whether the anti-consumer wins over the pro-consumer.
After AI agents get good enough the real bottleneck will be power generation and political systems.
There is one player who might have a trump card up their sleeve: free power, in orbit. It isn’t over yet for the US.
Also, don’t underestimate data retention and such. Big Corp will never send their LLM traffic to China.
For non residential consumers electricity is actually more expensive in China than in the US https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2026/prices