> The economic sovereignty of any nation, but especially smaller ones like canada and denmark, is harmed by sending our money out of the country when there are options available in country.
I respectfully disagree. I subscribe to the comparative advantage economic principle, so I'm fine with international trade.
What I am saying isn’t inconsistent with comparative advantage. International trade is fine, but only when it’s not a commodity easily obtained inside your own nation. Open model inference is a commodity. There is no real lost opportunity cost from using canadian owned GPUs or chinese owned ones. In fact, as a country with abundant cheap power, and physical space, canada’s probably a better place than many to run inference. That’s what I meant by “when there are options in country”.
I hear you, but as I said, I hope that buying from Deepseek gets more Deepseek. Maybe they get the same amount (or more) from a Canadian provider, and if so I might reconsider.
The 'clean power' would factor in a well, but I haven't really looked in to it. I know China is installing a ton of renewable and has a carbon market while Canada's building a new pipeline and building Alberta data centres running on natural gas, so I'm not willing to take on faith that switching is cleaner.
Fair point. Personally i don’t see value in closed models, be they chinese or american. So, it’s pretty much against my religion to pay the model creator to provide inference. Even a situation where model makers license models to providers seems better than deepseek hosted deepseek provided models.
Also, re: power. I said canada has lots of cheap power, clean was your word.
RE: clean power - China is by far the biggest leader in getting renewables off the ground, but they are also still comfortably the biggest polluter, so it's difficult to compare.
The unfortunate truth behind at least the solar PV boom in China is that it's driven in large part by the exploitation of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. One of the reasons they can sustain the pace they're going at is because while nowadays PV modules exports increasingly gravitate towards offshore fabs (Vietnam, Malaysia), domestically all the biggest PV players make full use of modern slavery within Xinjiang's re-education camps.
more on the topic: https://www.shu.ac.uk/-/media/home/research/helena-kennedy-c...
>International trade is fine, but only when it’s not a commodity easily obtained inside your own nation
It might be a minor nitpick, but that part is just not how the macroeconomic principle works. Abundance of a good/service within a country is irrelevant to the concept of a comparative advantage - this is counter-intuitive but but that was David Ricardo's entire point. It's not about whether production is more efficient domestically, it's whether comparative allocation of resources between multiple countries is more efficient by specialization within the different goods.
Even if you can produce "good 1" cheaper in Country A vs Country B, if Country A can instead produce "good 2" that Country B cannot, it's better for Country A to produce "good 2" domestically and import "good 1".
Now, I still agree with the original notion. It's unnecessarily risky to use services from "democratically-challenged" nations (especially imperialist ones), when safer options are available. But there's no need to twist macro 101 concepts to justify that view. Modern trade policy takes more into account than basic market efficiency.
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