Whether the US or China (or now the Middle East) reaches the poorly-defined end state of AGI first is really not that consequential and by no means a human extinction level event. Because if you invert the situation, and AGI is an end state of extinction level significance, then why would you ever sell the secret to that future (aka billions worth of NVIDIA GPUs) to any other country? After all, even the Trump administration, which wants and respects hard power above everything else, wouldn’t be so careless and naive as to let this ultimate power rest somewhere else…right?
First, it does matter. And getting to AGI is not/not about extinction, but about one side gaining a clear and decisive strategic advantage. The way this would be wielded and why is crucial, as this in fact could lead to an extinction level of significance. The secret to AGI is NOT/NOT just GPUs, but the capacity to develop models, integrated multiple models, deploy virtual software engineers at scale to develop artificial superintelligence (ASI), etc. This is highly unlikely to happen in the Middle East. Only a few companies have this ability, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, Alibaba, Bytedance. But, more importantly, the real issue is how to avoid an AI arms race to AGI/ASI, because of the unpredictability of timing, and how governments could choose to use this capability. The ME will not really be important in this dynamic, IMHO, and the entire premise for doming this, keeping advanced GPUs from Chinese companies/researchers, is highly misguided in my view, see my Substack for more on this...
This competition could eventually roll into Huawei’s chip and data center solutions versus NVIDIA’s data center solution. Currently, Huawei’s chip performance lags behind NVIDIA in both compute and energy efficiency. However, if I’m someone Beijing, I will offer Middle East a bundle deal, Buy a Huawei AI Data Center and You get a Nuclear Reactor for Free (could be part of one belt one road project). I’m not joking, https://klynwuuxyz.montaigne.io/dream-small/china-s-true-and-only-ai-competitive-advantage I wrote an analysis on analyzing the possibility, that the ultimate decisive factor will be on the “energy supply” if scaling law applies before we hit the wall to reach AGI.
Good piece, couple of quibbles
Whether the US or China (or now the Middle East) reaches the poorly-defined end state of AGI first is really not that consequential and by no means a human extinction level event. Because if you invert the situation, and AGI is an end state of extinction level significance, then why would you ever sell the secret to that future (aka billions worth of NVIDIA GPUs) to any other country? After all, even the Trump administration, which wants and respects hard power above everything else, wouldn’t be so careless and naive as to let this ultimate power rest somewhere else…right?
First, it does matter. And getting to AGI is not/not about extinction, but about one side gaining a clear and decisive strategic advantage. The way this would be wielded and why is crucial, as this in fact could lead to an extinction level of significance. The secret to AGI is NOT/NOT just GPUs, but the capacity to develop models, integrated multiple models, deploy virtual software engineers at scale to develop artificial superintelligence (ASI), etc. This is highly unlikely to happen in the Middle East. Only a few companies have this ability, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, Alibaba, Bytedance. But, more importantly, the real issue is how to avoid an AI arms race to AGI/ASI, because of the unpredictability of timing, and how governments could choose to use this capability. The ME will not really be important in this dynamic, IMHO, and the entire premise for doming this, keeping advanced GPUs from Chinese companies/researchers, is highly misguided in my view, see my Substack for more on this...
This competition could eventually roll into Huawei’s chip and data center solutions versus NVIDIA’s data center solution. Currently, Huawei’s chip performance lags behind NVIDIA in both compute and energy efficiency. However, if I’m someone Beijing, I will offer Middle East a bundle deal, Buy a Huawei AI Data Center and You get a Nuclear Reactor for Free (could be part of one belt one road project). I’m not joking, https://klynwuuxyz.montaigne.io/dream-small/china-s-true-and-only-ai-competitive-advantage I wrote an analysis on analyzing the possibility, that the ultimate decisive factor will be on the “energy supply” if scaling law applies before we hit the wall to reach AGI.