Food fight about AI

Dean W. Ball @deanwball · August 6, 2026 ↗no macro-technology birthed by the bay area tech industry has been met with more hatred by bay area tech industry elites than frontier ai. many of those elites looked at the technology landscape of 2020/1, scoffed at the labs and their weird little hopes of ‘agi,’ and concluded…

Another example of why Twitter, for all its flaws, is still one of the best places to follow thoughtful discussions about important issues. They can be raucous, messy, and often contentious, but that’s also part of what makes the place interesting.
This thread, and the various threads branching off from it, with Dean Ball, Philippe Lemoine, Rohit Krishnan, Paul Novosad among others, debating the attitudes of U.S. elites towards AI is a good example. It’s the kind of intellectually rich discussion that’s hard to find elsewhere.

Dean W. Ball @deanwball · August 7, 2026 ↗a whole ass tweet founded on a sloppy conflation of “industrial strategy” (what I said) versus “industrial policy” (what you read). I’m aware of no evidence that China’s national government subsidizes their labs (local governments may, idk), but they do have industrial strategy. Philippe Lemoine @phl43 · August 7, 2026 ↗If that’s not what you meant, it’s definitely what a lot of people mean whenever you push them on the kind of arguments you’ve been making about open-weight models, then your argument about the threat to capital expenditures by US companies makes even less sense. rohit @krishnanrohit · August 7, 2026 ↗I think the labs are a shining example of incredible technical and scientific achievement and they should keep the lead by being the best, and that's the way to counter the threat of commodification from both foreign and domestic competitors.