Quitters?

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American AI developers are all up in arms over the successes of People’s Republic of China AI models, especially those that are being released as open source. The American executives’ beef centers on how good those models are and how cheaply produced they are.

OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China, suggesting they will lead to a “dystopian” AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation.

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The emergence of highly capable, open autonomous AI systems—including Moonshot AI‘s Kimi K3 model and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 Max, which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users—has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 also was competitive with US models on some benchmarks.
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“One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure,'” Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, said in an X post Friday.

The general thrust of these bleats and cries to Mommy Government is that these personages think that the PRC’s scientists and programmers are smarter than American scientists and programmers, and they want to cower inside a truly dystopian regulatory moat that would stifle American innovation in AI altogether.

That’s as unacceptable as it is despicable. AI development—American AI development, especially—enormously benefits from open competition. Competition is what drives at an accelerating rate the quality of any product class, and especially AI. Especially AI, too, is a competition we must win—where winning isn’t across the finish line first, since with all product development, there is no finish line. Winning here means maintaining a significant (not just by a nose) lead.

Thus, American AI development must proceed apace, without regulatory restriction. We have enough laws on the books to handle its misuse, just as we have for any tool. American execs need to stop bleating and get competitive, on quality, on price, on rate of improvement.

The sole exception to largely unfettered competition should be AI models from companies domiciled in, or associated with companies domiciled in, the People’s Republic of China.

That exception, though, has nothing to do with those models’ costs or capabilities or open source availability or nearly anything else. This exception is driven solely by the national and corporate security threat those companies and their models represent. Those companies, via the PRC’s 2017 intelligence law, are entirely beholden to the PRC intelligence community for conducting espionage on any subject, in any venue, and against any potential source that the intelligence arm of the PRC government wishes. These companies should be barred from the US, and other nations wishing to remain free from PRC…influence…should do the same.

And this central truth: American scientists and programmers are every bit as good as, if not better than, PRC scientists and programmers. As are the scientists and programmers of other nations wishing to remain free.

An Alternative Extinguishment

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Federal District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has ordered Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery to halt their merger process for two weeks—ostensibly, the judge claimed—to give States challenging the deal more time to see their case through in court. The silliness of that order is in the claim that two whole weeks is enough time for such a complex case to wend its way. Any Federal judge worthy of his black robe is well aware of the implications of such a short time frame. This is nothing more than judicial interference in a business decision.

The States’ argument also is risible. The merger would “extinguish competition” in Hollywood and reduce choices for consumers. This can be rendered irrelevant in a straightforward manner. Paramount and WB should move their operations out of Hollywood, out of California altogether. Then there would be no concern about Hollywood at all. There also would be no reduction in consumer choice from the move.

Likely locations for the two companies include Virginia, New Mexico, Texas, and Alabama, each of which has an environment favorable to making movies and television shows. Any of those environments also would lower the costs of production, which could only enhance consumer choice by making movies and TV shows easier and faster to bring off.

“Harassment of the Press”

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In their house editorial, the worthies of The Wall Street Journal let loose this remark regarding the leak of President Donald Trump’s (R) decision, on the advice of his Secret Service, to change his Air Force One ride out of Turkey to Great Britain:

Notably, the Justice Department has subpoenaed New York Times writers who reported the story to disclose their sources. That’s harassment against the press that won’t make the US safer.

This is the self-serving preciousness of our routinely mendacious press. The information the NYT‘s news writers received for their story was illegally transferred by a leaker who leaked classified information to those writers.

It isn’t harassment of the press to demand that pressmen reveal the sources of their illegally transferred and illegally received by them goods. Anyone but a pressman convicted of receiving stolen goods would be jailed for the felony. The august press guildsmen cannot even be charged under current practice.

Aside from that, there is nothing in our Constitution, especially in our First Amendment, that contains any reference, any hint, of journalist-source confidentiality. The journalist is not a doctor or a priest, neither is the source a patient or supplicant.

At bottom, whether a journalist should or should not be put on trial for receiving stolen goods, there is no threat to press freedom from requiring a journalist to provide the name of his source when that source has potentially committed a crime by an illegal transfer.

It’s Time

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When an enemy nation comes for another nation’s children, it’s long past time for honorable nations and honorable politicians to respond.

The People’s Republic of China now is targeting the Republic of China’s children in the former’s effort to isolate and suffocate the RoC into abject submission.

Last month, organizers of an August global choral music symposium in the Chinese territory of Macau blocked the National Taiwan Hakka Children’s Choir from performing under its name, objecting to the suggestion that Taiwan was a separate nation.
Organizers of the World Latte Art Championship in San Diego similarly changed the winner’s home affiliation from “Taiwan” to “Chinese Taipei,” adopting Beijing’s preferred nomenclature for the democratic self-governing island of Taiwan.

It’s time for participants in the next World Latte Art Championship contest and future such contests to decline further participation in response to the WLAC organizers’ cowardice and complicity in the PRC’s attack on those youths.

It’s time for the United States government and especially our Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland Security to start referring to the RoC by its correct name: the Republic of China. It’s time, also, for nations and their politicians wanting to be friends or allies to do the same.

Those words, that appellation, is important in itself, but it’s insufficient. That step needs to be followed in short order by formal recognition of the Republic of China and an exchange of Embassies with it.

What DSA Wants for the United States

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The Democratic Socialists of America has published its Program. The categorizations are mine.

  • Government-owned means of production—land, labor, capital and general infrastructure and capital goods
    • publicly-owned social housing
    • strictly regulated investment properties
    • universal rent control
    • publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure
    • phase out the use of fossil fuels
    • earth’s resources for all
    • public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries
  • National security
    • disempower police unions [there’s a pro-worker move]
    • abolish the police and prison system
    • defund the Department of War
    • end economic warfare against [enemy] countries…such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran
    • end ICE detention and deportations
    • legalize migration
    • grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status
  • Government—national—structure
    • replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy
    • expand the House of Representatives
    • abolish the Senate
  • Economy
    • reparations
    • aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations
    • Protect, expand, and enforce the rights of all workers to form, join, and strike with their unions, regardless of industry [except for those Evil Police, which are being eliminated, anyway]

This also is what the Progressive-Democratic Party is absorbing into its own core with its enthusiastic embrace of the DSA, the objections of the small right wing Establishment of Party notwithstanding.