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The CEOs of the AI labs have spent the last two years ominously discussing massive future job losses, and were mostly ignored. As AI becomes more salient, workers and policymakers are going to start taking that kind of talk seriously, with big implications for the industry.
U.S. policies are driving allies away from using American AI technology. This is leading to interest in sovereign AI — a nation’s ability to access AI technology without relying on foreign powers. This weakens U.S. influence, but might lead to increased competition and support for open source. The U.S. invented the transistor, the internet, and the transformer architecture powering modern AI. It has long been a technology powerhouse. I love America, and am working hard towards its success. But its actions over many years, taken by multiple administrations, have made other nations worry about over reliance on it. In 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. sanctions on banks linked to Russian oligarchs resulted in ordinary consumers’ credit cards being shut off. Shortly before leaving office, Biden implemented “AI diffusion” export controls that limited the ability of many nations — including U.S. allies — to buy AI chips. Under Trump, the “America first” approach has significantly accelerated pushing other nations away. There have been broad and chaotic tariffs imposed on both allies and adversaries. Threats to take over Greenland. An unfriendly attitude toward immigration — an overreaction to the chaos at the southern border during Biden’s administration — including atrocious tactics by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) that resulted in agents shooting dead Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and others. Global media has widely disseminated videos of ICE terrorizing American cities, and I have highly skilled, law-abiding friends overseas who now hesitate to travel to the U.S., fearing arbitrary detention. Given AI’s strategic importance, nations want to ensure no foreign power can cut off their access. Hence, sovereign AI. Sovereign AI is still a vague, rather than precisely defined, concept. Complete independence is impractical: There are no good substitutes to AI chips designed in the U.S. and manufactured in Taiwan, and a lot of energy equipment and computer hardware are manufactured in China. But there is a clear desire to have alternatives to the frontier models from leading U.S. companies OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Partly because of this, open-weight Chinese models like DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, and GLM are gaining rapid adoption, especially outside the U.S. When it comes to sovereign AI, fortunately one does not have to build everything. By joining the global open-source community, a nation can secure its own access to AI. The goal isn’t to control everything; rather, it is to make sure no one else can control what you do with it. Indeed, nations use open source software like Linux, Python, and PyTorch. Even though no nation can control this software, no one else can stop anyone from using it as they see fit. This is spurring nations to invest more in open source and open weight models. The UAE (under the leadership of my former grad-school officemate Eric Xing!) just launched K2 Think, an open-source reasoning model. India, France, South Korea, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, and others are developing domestic foundation models, and many more countries are working to ensure access to compute infrastructure under their control or perhaps under trusted allies’ control. Global fragmentation and erosion of trust among democracies is bad. Nonetheless, a silver lining would be if this results in more competition. U.S. search engines Google and Bing came to dominate web search globally, but Baidu (in China) and Yandex (in Russia) did well locally. If nations support domestic champions — a tall order given the giants’ advantages — perhaps we’ll end up with a larger number of thriving companies, which would slow down consolidation and encourage competition. Further, participating in open source is the most inexpensive way for countries to stay at the cutting edge. Last week, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, many business and government leaders spoke about their growing reluctance to rely on U.S. technology providers and desire for alternatives. Ironically, “America first” policies might end up strengthening the world’s access to AI. [Original text: https://deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-…… ]
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Every single day I fight to help make the UK relevant in an insanely competitive world. It is clear now that Keir Starmer knew about Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein when he appointed him Ambassador. This is another unacceptable flaw of a broken regime. You can’t
“The regulatory landscape is fairly scary right now." Marc Andreessen on AI regulation: "We were headed towards extreme overregulation—up to and including possibly full outlawing of the technology, which is very spooky." "The action in the US has now shifted to the states. There are now thousands of AI bills, and many of them are actually quite scary." "The situation in Europe is quite alarming. There are a number of European countries really trying hard to kneecap American technology." Source: @pmarca at Cisco AI Summit
INTEL CEO SAYS KNOWLEDGEABLE PEOPLE TOLD HIM U.S. IS BEHIND CHINA NOW ON OPEN SOURCE AI
a year after DeepSeek shocked everyone, there are now dozens of serious Chinese AI labs racing to release models (Kimi, Qwen, MiniMax, seedance, Kling) the AI competition everyone expected between 2 Silicon Valley companies is actually between 2 countries lol - and meanwhile Europe is picking a fight with Big Tech right as Washington is backing off regulation, and China doubling down on their ecosystem What a world
Balaji Srinivasan on "The Great Firewall": "Digital borders and physical borders are the same thing." "The Great Firewall will be seen in some ways as a very farsighted thing because it is digital hard borders." "People won't be able to script drones on Chinese soil. They won’t be able to script humanoids on Chinese soil." @balajis and @danwwang on Network State Podcast
Matt Mahan was the winner of last night''s California Governor''s race. Mahan: “Our politics has been oversimplified by populists on both sides and you deserve real answers not easy answers.” This is what common sense pragmatism looks like in 2026. garryslist.org Mahan Takes Fire From Both Sides—And Wins From garryslist.org
SF is the ONLY VC hub with positive company formation growth (+24%) while every other city declines—but an 800% gross receipts tax hike and lab bans threaten to destroy what makes the city special. https://garryslist.org/posts/sf-is-winni…
SF Is Winning the AI Race. Politicians Want to Kill It.
America’s Dirty Secret: Safety Under Luxury Beliefs Becomes a Luxury Good If safety is something you purchase—guards, gates, cameras—you’ve already conceded that public order has failed. But it shouldn't be like that. https://garryslist.org/posts/america-s-d…
Countries with 1B+ people: 1. 🇮🇳 India: 1,476,630,000 2. 🇨🇳 China: 1,412,910,000
AI is being adopted faster than any technology in history. The window to get policy right is closing. Today we’re contributing $20m to Public First Action, a new bipartisan org that will mobilize people and politicians who understand what’s at stake. https://anthropic.com/news/donate-public…
Anthropic is donating $20 million to Public First Action
.@pmarca says the winner of the US-China AI race could dictate what all 8 billion people on Earth use — but open source introduces a third possibility: "The stakes are basically: what is the world going to run on?" "In the long run, somebody's gonna win. And the world will either be running on American AI or be running on Chinese AI." "The open source thing is super fascinating because it throws a wrench into all of this. It raises a third possibility that neither the US nor China are going to be the platform — it may just be open source." Marc Andreessen with @jpatel41 at Cisco AI Summit
Keir Starmer is in an impossible position. He has to get rid of Morgan McSweeney. That said, when you remove an aid like this, more often than not, you are weakened not strengthened. Same with Reeves, absolutely useless but again, remove and he is weakened. Instead he is left with two lacklustre people decaying trust and brand by the day for him.
SFUSD’s school lottery was supposed to end segregation. Instead it created more segregation, drove 4,000 families out, is bankrupted the district—and they still won’t repeal it. Wildest discovery: You can trace it to SFUSD racism (excluding Chinese American kids from certain SF schools in 1993)
SFUSD's "Equity" Lottery Backfired Spectacularly