We "distilled" modern cars from Model-T. You still driving the car that was "first" off an assembly line?
This is normal improvement to manufacture of stuff. Your handwavy "it was first so its winner-winner chicken dinner!" is little more than your personal form of expression.
Since LLMs are a distill of web content, by your poorly defined metric, you must not value LLMs and AI companies? The content already existed! They're just a new indexing tool.
Rhetorical goals about intention do not remake physics which comes with well understood constraints. Doctors intended to use bloodletting to cure illness and killed people instead. Words are not magical spells.
The machines these models run on are well known. They’re not black boxes. The results will be same-y despite the timeline, process, companies took to get there being different.
UPS trucks may carry different sizes and shapes of packages day to day but their upper bounds on total weight and geometry exist too.
A Honda and Ford can look different, but physical reality, whether the measure is user feedback (human biology exists is physical) or physics itself, still results in very same-y 4 wheels, etc etc.
What's strange to me is all the software engineers who ignore physics. All of our applied knowledge that gives rise to software engineering also constrains the outcomes. Our ability to sit down every day and arbitrarily slice up data in various ways is very much constrained by physics like everything else.
The easy money/endless hype era of ZIRP where SWEs failed up thanks to endless employment opportunities has resulted in way too many SWEs believing their efforts on some trivial shit like a JS framework, or some CSS designs is propelling humans into the future.
Nah, it's just physics as usual. You alls sensory memory is just parroting the crap it memorized.
> In any case, they wouldn't exist if not for superior models they were distilled from.
Doesn't matter: if they're good enough and cheaper, they'll sink the US model-makers eventually. The free market demands it.
The US invented solar panels, and led in solar panel tech for a long time. Who leads in solar panel tech now?
China has a playbook for de-industrializing its capitalist rivals. If we leave MBAs and free-marketers in power, China will "come to dominate all technologies, including A.I., and ... America [will] export little more than soybeans and corn" (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/opinion/trump-ai-chips-nv...).
The rate at which the deconstruction of the United States is progressing is very scary. It seems as if they want to make the former USSR look great, and every individual and institution that could do something about it is standing by with their hands in the air saying 'it wasn't me'. Tech dominance will be the least of the problem, that assumes a large variety of good outcomes where bad outcomes are now a real possibility.
> The rate at which the deconstruction of the United States is progressing is very scary. It seems as if they want to make the former USSR look great, and every individual and institution that could do something about it is standing by with their hands in the air saying 'it wasn't me'.
This kinda sounds like you're talking about Trump, but I think the problem predates him and is far deeper. If anything, Trump is a spastic reaction to the deeper problem. He won because his rhetoric gestured in the direction of fixing the problem, but he's too incompetent to pull it off (and the bulk of the competent people don't want to fix the problem for ideological reasons).
Definitely not just talking about Trump. The failure is institutional, the whole thing is just incredible watching from the outside in, you've never had a more 'clear and present danger' to the USA and to the world order and all of the institutions that are supposed to protect against that are failing one after the other.
This is how you go from stability to world wars. A couple of rich guys got together and decided they were going to redraw all of the maps and toss the rulebook overboard, and it is for the most part going their way. People are being executed and the useful idiots are falling over each other to defend it.
If you had told me in 1999 that this would happen by 2026 I would have happily declared you mad, but here we are.
> A couple of rich guys got together and decided they were going to redraw all of the maps and toss the rulebook overboard, and it is for the most part going their way. People are being executed and the useful idiots are falling over each other to defend it.
It's way deeper than that, though. It's stuff like US businessmen choosing to literally move the US's rare-earth magnet production capacity to China, teaching China how make them in the process (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/business/china-rare-earth...). It's the US knowing about it's rare-earth vulnerability for a decade or more but being completely unable to do anything about it. It's the US losing other strategic capabilities like large-scale electronics manufacturing capacity, and people being totally fine with that because "cheaper iPhones, more margins, good deal!"
This short term thinking over long term thinking goes back a long time and is happening in other places as well.
But the singular focus on destruction of what is a cornerstone of the stability of the Western hemisphere is absolutely unprecedented. And to see so many people falling for it, hook line and sinker. They are so blasted with crazy things that they no longer see anything strange at all about each and every day's happenings and they even jump to defend the absolutely indefensible, something that probably would have been - rightly - horrified by less than a decade ago is now perfectly normal.
> This short term thinking over long term thinking goes back a long time and is happening in other places as well.
> But the singular focus on destruction of what is a cornerstone of the stability of the Western hemisphere is absolutely unprecedented. And to see so many people falling for it, hook line and sinker.
IMHO, that short-term thinking over such a long span laid the groundwork for that destruction.
I read this the other day, and I think it's an interesting take that rings true:
> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,
>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.
>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.
>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.
Once China's economy reaches a certain point, will not the same thing happen to them? I'm not sure who will be the next source of cheap/slave labor and lack of concern about negative externalities, maybe Africa?
> Once China's economy reaches a certain point, will not the same thing happen to them?
No, because it's not a problem of economic development, but political ideology.
China's political priority is technological dominance and capability, and it views free markets as a tool subordinate to those goals. The US's political priority is financial wealth, and an extreme ideological attachment to free markets that overrides most other priorities. The US has an ideological vulnerability that China is well-positioned to exploit.
This problem goes well beyond Trump, and has roots that are very deep.
Political priorities can change. As more and more Chinese become middle class or wealthy, they might view things differently from when they just hoped they had enough food for the week.
> Political priorities can change. As more and more Chinese become middle class or wealthy, they might view things differently from when they just hoped they had enough food for the week.
Lest you forget: China is controlled by the CCP and is not a democracy. It will not affect political priorities if "more Chinese become middle class or wealthy" and "view things differently." The Chinese political system does not answer to them, and will only throw them a bone if there's a major threat to stability.
You're echoing the 90s-era hope that free markets would bring political liberalization to China, but history has debunked that idea.
> Many would have said the same thing about the USSR.
What do you mean, exactly?
China isn't the USSR: they're not wedded to central planning. They've figured out how to use capitalism while keeping it squarely under their control. Arguably, they're playing the "capitalism" game more successfully than "capitalist" countries like the US.
When you compare the US to China, it's the US that looks sclerotic, like the USSR once did.
Once of America's big weaknesses is a common lazy assumption we'll always be at the top, so we don't respond to challenges until its too late. Then we tell ourselves some reassuring story and comfort ourselves by gazing at one of the few remaining industries where we're still ahead. I'm pretty sure if the US and China got into a conflict, the US would get its ass kicked like the Nazis and Japanese did during WWII, and for similar reasons.
I'm not saying it's the same situation, but few people in the 1970s would have imagined it possible that the USSR, a superpower nation, would have a complete political collapse and cease to exist within the next 20 years.
Yeah, but it's more likely the US will collapse like the USSR than it is for China to collapse. The big reason the USSR collapsed was its economic output couldn't keep up, and it couldn't afford the competition anymore.
China's mostly caught up technologically to the US. It's ahead or pulling ahead in many areas. It's production capacity is way ahead. Without Chinese production propping up the US, US stores would probably feel a lot like late-Soviet stores, with bare shelves and not enough products to satisfy demand.
> Without Chinese production, we'd simply still be producing stuff here.
No, the US can't anymore. The supply chains have moved to China now, and needed capital equipment and know-how has mostly been lost in the US. It would take a massive investment to get back to "simply ... producing stuff here."
And if anyone tries, the chorus of "muh iPhone expensive!" would be deafening, the politicians would retreat and go back to bickering about the culture war and plotting their next attack ad, and the businessmen would go back to counting their money.
