Post by Bitcoin Dictionary

I am completely convinced that the Chinese are going to win the AI war. In this Cold War that nobody seems inclined to discuss, they are already pulling miles ahead, while everyone stands around the American machine congratulating it on how convincingly it asks about their feelings.

Everyone is fascinated by the American vision: a vast, expensive, centralised, 1960s-style IBM establishment, now furnished with conversational manners. Apparently, the future is the mainframe again, except this time it would like to know whether you’ve had a difficult day.

Meanwhile, they overlook the many small agents. A small model you can run on your own machine. Something affordable that performs a particular job. Not a personality. Not a relationship. A fucking tool.

The distinction is almost embarrassingly simple. The American ambition is to make something that sounds like a person, presumably so it can become another social-media business with a chatbot girlfriend attached. A collection of incels has mistaken its romantic difficulties for a problem in computer science, and the rest of us are expected to applaud the resulting infrastructure.

There is something magnificently absurd about constructing an enormous machine to secure the affection of someone who does not exist.

The alternative is to make something useful. Small models that people can possess rather than perpetually rent access to. Agents that run locally, perform defined tasks, and become more capable as the hardware improves. Give me better GPUs and better tools—not an increasingly expensive simulation of someone being pleased to hear from me.

The Chinese are pursuing the make-it-useful approach. The Americans are pursuing big iron with a charming bedside manner. One ambition puts capability into people’s hands; the other puts a personality behind a subscription.

We have seen the big-iron story before. We already know which approach loses.

Giving the mainframe a girlfriend’s voice does not make it a new idea. It merely makes the old mistake embarrassing.