✨ Down with American data centers! Up with Chinese AI!
How to lose an AI competition without really trying: moratoriums, NIMBY nonsense, and the alarmingly weak social license for progress. What are we doing here?
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
There might be a way that the Sputnik-flavored Axios headline "China just erased America's AI lead" is sort of, kind of true. Mainly: Kimi K3, a new open-weight model from Chinese startup Moonshot AI, has immediately topped a popular coding benchmark. Developers (at least for now) prefer Kimi K3 over every leading American model for real coding tasks such as building websites and apps in head-to-head testing conducted by AI model evaluator Arena. What’s more, the model is (a) cheaper to use and (b) will soon be freely available for anyone to download and run themselves.
All that said, the best models from OpenAI and Anthropic still hold edges on many broader measures of capability. Yay. So maybe Kimi K3 is at about the level of Anthropic's Opus 4.8—more or less, but likely more—which is still pretty impressive since that was the company's flagship model until Fable 5 arrived last month. I think that gives a broad sense of the current US lead at the frontier.
America versus China, it’s really on!
This is the new normal. Just get used to it. My AEI colleague Ryan Fedasiuk argues that “the race to train the most capable model has reached a sort of equilibrium. Chinese labs will distill, replicate, and then open source frontier capabilities within months of their closed-source American counterparts.”
And given that reality, he continues, “it’s crucial that Washington paying attention to the industrial variables that will determine which AI labs are capable of serving intelligence to global publics. These factors include high-bandwidth memory production, advanced packaging capacity, data center construction timelines, and resilient energy grids with spare capacity and high uptime.”
“Data construction timelines,” you say! Talk about timely as today’s headlines.
