Futurology

January 2025 has seen two significant events for Big Tech. Their moves to further enable authoritarianism, and the neo-nazi far right & their loss of the AI arms race to a tiny Chinese upstart.

Meta embraced the trend of using open-source to weaken its competitors 18 months ago, and since then open-source AI from places as diverse as France and China have been using the same tactic. That culminated in recent weeks in DeepSeek - the open-source AI that has become the world's most powerful.

So it seems the power of AI, or even AGI when it comes, may not be in the hands of a few Silicon Valley billionaires, but instead decentralized and democratized around the world. As those billionaires embrace ever darker and more fascistic visions of the future, maybe we should be relieved they are all hobbling and weakening each other via open-source AI.

I'd guess by the end of 2025, it's almost guaranteed locally run Chinese AI models will become by far the most common and used forms of AI around the world.

So far the Chinese AIs have been using the global corpus of internet scraped data, but they are about to get a new source - Chinese public data. This raises an interesting possibility. First, that Chinese AI starts thinking in a more Chinese way, and second that this form of thinking may become the most dominant form of AI thinking globally.

Here's a Jan 25th 2025 quote on X/Twitter (which his firm helped Musk buy) from Marc Anderessen, head of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz/a16z.

"A world in which human wages crash from AI -- logically, necessarily -- is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero. Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies."

This is the world Big Tech is building for us. Given their hold over the current US administration, barring a political revolution - there's not much to stop them for the next 4 years.

If their power to create that world via AI & robotics is seemingly unstoppable, what about a counter-intuitive idea? Engage them on it seriously. At the very least the transition to this world might need the kind of emergency economic supports the Covid era had.

It seems strange Big Tech is so open about what it intends to do, yet we are still not taking it seriously, despite them saying it all out loud.

Throughout 2024 Open Source AI has been slowly catching up with investor-funded AI, but in the first weeks of 2025 that has dramatically accelerated. Now Open Source isn't just catching up, it is arguably better and superior to investor-funded AI.

Restrictions on chip imports seem to be driving Chinese innovation, not slowing them down. Using lesser chips, they've optimized AI to run cheaper and more efficiently, but be just as powerful. Not only that, they've open-sourced that AI.

Where does that leave the hundreds of billions poured into investor-funded AI? Who knows. But they've no product to sell that people can't get elsewhere way cheaper or for free.

This also means AI will become decentralized and democratized. Many thought it would just be in the hands of Big Tech, but the exact opposite scenario is playing out.

What are the economic implications? AI hype is keeping the US stock market afloat - how long can that last?

Source