Empires of AI
China and the United States have assembled empire-like dominions over the large language models, chips, physical infrastructure, and capital that underpin advanced machine cognition, the article argues. It says their control lets them set the terms of future scientific and intellectual progress and makes countries seeking advanced AI beholden to them. The article compares the AI contest to earlier empires and argues the decisive question may be who can bankroll the race rather than who achieves artificial general intelligence first.
Why it matters: The article presents AI as a US-China technology competition in which control of models, chips, and capital, rather than first arrival at artificial general intelligence, determines geoeconomic leverage.