This sounds very cliche, but even if the entire story ends up as another TACO; we are in historical infection point of official government AI race.

It is hard to count how many “red lines” were crossed last night. Government shutting down AI model it doesn’t like? Government shoots into barely profitable 1T startup, whose entire trajectory and, in essence, survival depends on commercial success of that model? Access to AI model being governed by citizenship, likely verified through rigor ID checks?

Very little doubt that China will follow this suit. Next US will pass their bills to ban Chinese open source and local models. Chinese will follow.

It doesn’t matter: US did just a vendetta; felt into “marketing hype” or there are legit security concerns of national security level. In the precedent-ish world of post-truth “whataboutism” we just crossed a big milestone mark which will hunt us for years.