Respectfully, @davidsacks, I strongly disagree with your take, and I feel that you reached your conclusions without looking at the data, and…

Respectfully, @davidsacks, I strongly disagree with your take, and I feel that you reached your conclusions without looking at the data, and that your conclusions will give Americans false comfort. - The reality is that except at the very high end of the frontier, Chinese has largely (though I agree not entirely) caught up, esp when price is factored in. The trajectory is clear. We are converging on a Coke vs Pepsi world, with no outright winner. - Blaming the fact that China has mostly (not entirely) closed the gap on regulation is nonsense. If you look at the data, they mainly closed the gap (during the Trump administration*, which was until very recently extremely light on AI regulation. - There is no evidence that regulation has done anything substantive to significantly slow US companies down. More than that, you aren’t really looking at the real issue, which has been clear since I started writing about it in Summer 2023. The real issue is that LLMs are commodities; lots of people know how to make them, and everybody is doing more or the less same thing, training on more or less the same data. That means nobody has a technical moat. Which means you get price wars and low margins and more and more competitors over time. All that is inevitable, and has almost nothing to do with regulation. US AI policy needs to come to terms with that reality, rather than fantasizing about winning a war that will more likely end in rough parity. Secretary @howardlutnick is right. The Kimi Panic needs to stop. — American frontier models are still ahead. When you factor in what’s in the lab, the gap is even larger. As long as we keep releasing, we will stay ahead. Let our horses run. — As Ben Thompson showed, Kimi’s appare…

Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-07-24

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