>With due respect, this take is very deluded. US voters have very little to lose if the tech is not available to the rest of the world.
Really? You think the economics of the AI buildout remain viable if US companies cannot export their highest value services?
You think expelling foreign AI researchers doesn't hurt the industry or boost foreign competitors? Half (or whatever) of Google's AI team, including their AI chief are foreign nationals and/or located outside of the US.
You think that other IT exports will not suffer if the US turns out to be an unreliable and even capricious supplier?
This does real damage to the US economy.
I humbly accept it's very difficult to game this out with any degree of confidence, especially as other countries deploy more resources.
But the questions about viability of the labs because of export restrictions is not in my cone of uncertainty. If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked. Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, economy-wide automation would make the US wealthy beyond imagination.
US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP. I am not aware of the international revenue share for OpenAI/Anthropic.
>If you believe the labs' implied/stated objectives, the end goal is eating all human-driven GDP, and the US is still the largest single-market economy in the world, last I checked.
The US is about a quarter of the global economy, but let's use Microsoft's international revenue share of ~50% as a proxy for tech services. It's ~40% for the S&P 500.
I don't know what share of that would be impacted by export bans, but it would certainly affect ROI. It would hurt the competitiveness of the wider US tech industry and create incentives for moving highly paid work overseas.
>US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP.
It's 12% to 13% but this is distorted by the way in which tech services are counted in export statistics and also by tax avoidance. Just look at Ireland's ridiculous GDP numbers.
If the technology is as powerful as these somehwat fantastical "goals" suggest, the incentive to use it everywhere in the world would be enormous. An export ban wouldn't mean that only the US has the capability. The theory behind current models is well known. It's just a matter of optimising them for specific use cases and using them on an industrial scale.
Most AI researchers are not US citizens either. It's completely obvious that this is the US shooting itself in the foot (if it were to last, which I don't believe).
> Keeping the politics of AI-driven unemployment aside, The is doing some very heavy lifting.
> US exports as a whole is only 10% of the GDP and has a deep trade deficit ... maybe there is a connection?