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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21137 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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For others, it is easy to sneer at the idiocy of the proles, as @aqouta does, or believe that the outcome is overdetermined by economic forces, and that the proles will inevitably be swept aside, as @DaseindustriesLtd does.

I find these views to be somewhat shortsighted; a study of history shows clearly that people prioritize their ideological interests over their rational economic interests, and that when ideology and capital clash, ideology often comes out triumphant, at the expense of the interests of capital

To be more precise, I don't think proles will be necessarily swept aside. This is one option, but it's a costly one. I strongly believe that the total DC buildout will reach hundreds of gigawatts within 10 years, and most DCs on the planet in the next years will be built by the US, at scale that's mostly constrained by supply chain bottlenecks and not popular goodwill. Some "proles" will be convinced of your more Chinese vision of the return on this investment, or grow pacified from actually using AI and seeing its utility. Others will be compensated more or less directly. Others still will just be left alone with GPUs going anywhere else, even to the orbit. There's too much money at stake, and too many routes around the problem. It will work out.

By the way, Liang Wenfeng doesn't preach "restraint" as some aesthetic principle. His argument (in that leaked and scrubbed investor call) is more like yours, and it's informed by anxiety about political pressure:

First, there’s the vision. Second, we believe that to make AI commercially successful, open source is beneficial. That sounds a bit contradictory and counterintuitive, because historically open source and commercialization have conflicted. But I think AI is different.

Historically, a software company’s market might be several billion dollars a year. Take away open source, and that market might shrink to tens or hundreds of millions. But AI is big enough that it may eventually account for, say, ten percent of human society’s GDP. That’s an enormous number.

You cannot monopolize something like that. You have to share it with others, or you will definitely not survive. This is different from open-sourcing a piece of software before, because that software’s market was not that big. But AI is simply too large. If we wanted to keep all the benefits for ourselves, history would surely abandon us. I think the main thing is that this is an objective law — it’s a view of history.

It’s not that if I don’t open source, I will monopolize this market. Theoretically, that already goes against objective reality. You will run into tremendous resistance, and there will always be other ways to stop you from reaching that goal. In that situation, I don’t think you should necessarily follow traditional commercial thinking. You need a mechanism that guarantees the benefits you get are limited. Only then can you actually succeed. You need restraint. I think you need restraint.

If we want to make AI happen with our own hands, the first thing is restraint. You can’t think, “This or that percentage of humanity’s GDP is mine,” or “This percentage of China’s GDP is mine.” The more you think that way, the less likely you are to succeed.

… Otherwise, you cannot explain how we succeeded. We had no weapons, a very low starting point, very few resources, and our people are just a random group of ordinary people. I myself am just a university graduate, and not from a top university. This restraint is also part of our vision. AI is too big. The benefits are too big.

I believe Liang is a visionary. He's presciently correct on most issues, and he'll likely be recognized as correct on this one too. Anthropic already faces some political and commercial backlash. So deals will be cut.

Of note, his employees do worry about job replacement:

Asked about DeepSeek's global success and how its open-source approach would encourage the progress of AI, Chen said he believed that AI could be a great aid to humans as it improved over the short term, but that it could threaten job losses in 5-10 years as it becomes good enough to take over some of the work humans perform. AI firms needed to be aware of these risks, he said.
"In the next 10-20 years, AI could take over the rest of work (humans perform) and society could face a massive challenge, so at the time tech companies need to take the role of 'defender'," he said.
"I'm extremely positive about the technology but I view the impact it could have on society negatively."

Deli is often representing DeepSeek publicly so you can consider this a company position, I think. In my opinion this is understated, even taking into account China's compute scarcity and marginally lesser dependence on white collar employment. They'll have to figure out how to not monopolize the benefits, it's not just a pricing or distribution decision.

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