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There's AI and there's AI. People detection is a simple matter which you can do on-chip. Anything like
in the next 5-10 years, like automated coding or automated logistics, is going to be heavily relying on a handful of APIs (approx 4 now) provided by a handful of companies. China could shut down LLMs in China tomorrow if it wanted to - firewall OAI and Anthropic, close down Deepseek. Boom, done. America would have a slightly harder time but it's basically straightforward.
Neither wants to, yet. But if the societal disruption starts to become uncomfortable, they can and they may well. I'm not talking about evil AI, I'm talking about obvious and destabilising social disruption. More than immense wealth and power, governments like stability. China and America are quite capable of running private military AI research on things like YOLO whilst mutually deciding that giving public/corporate society access to AGI is too disruptive to tolerate.
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