Futurology

January 2025 has seen two significant events for Big Tech. Their moves to further enable authoritarianism, and the neo-nazi far right & their loss of the AI arms race to a tiny Chinese upstart.

Meta embraced the trend of using open-source to weaken its competitors 18 months ago, and since then open-source AI from places as diverse as France and China have been using the same tactic. That culminated in recent weeks in DeepSeek - the open-source AI that has become the world's most powerful.

So it seems the power of AI, or even AGI when it comes, may not be in the hands of a few Silicon Valley billionaires, but instead decentralized and democratized around the world. As those billionaires embrace ever darker and more fascistic visions of the future, maybe we should be relieved they are all hobbling and weakening each other via open-source AI.

I'd guess by the end of 2025, it's almost guaranteed locally run Chinese AI models will become by far the most common and used forms of AI around the world.

So far the Chinese AIs have been using the global corpus of internet scraped data, but they are about to get a new source - Chinese public data. This raises an interesting possibility. First, that Chinese AI starts thinking in a more Chinese way, and second that this form of thinking may become the most dominant form of AI thinking globally.