China Morning Missive

So, the proverbial penny has dropped for Sam Altman. After months of publicly ignoring the very issue that was staring the man straight in the face, he has decided to come out and state – openly – that China is a competitive threat in the AI space.

What I found even more surprising is that the decision by OpenAI to release an open weight model last week – which was universally panned by the LLM community – was the outcome of the aggressive Chinese open-source drive throughout this year.

The fact remains. Altman is boxed in, as are all of the American AI models. You can either go for a platform which prioritizes profitability or a platform which seeks to achieve scale. You can’t do both. There is also the issue of applicability. A host of Chinese industries have deployed DeepSeek for the expressed purpose of enhancing productivity. It has been a slower process throughout America.

And all of this has transpired in the span of less than one year. Altman is correct to be concerned. I’ve not even highlighted the issue of hundreds of billions of CAPX being thrown at the AI complex in America. There’s a saying that money can’t buy taste. I’d add that money, too, can’t buy – or build – a competitive moat. Not anymore and especially not in our digital world.