love to see the reverse brain drain

That’s an amazing counter point, peak .world intellect on display as always.

Obviously people like Scam Altman are just too principled to stoop to the level of these savage Chinese companies.

It’s worth noting that the whole China is distilling our glorious models narrative is largely nonsense. First of all, everybody distills, so it’s not like it’s unique to Chinese companies. Second, most of actual research that’s published is now coming out of China.

TLDW: American companies spend insane amounts of money and have no path towards profitability, and Chinese companies are spending a tiny fraction of that to deliver a product that’s mostly as good. On top of that, countries and companies are uncomfortable relying on closed models. So, Chinese providers offering open models at far lower rates mean they’re quickly taking over the market. And it turns out that simply having the best model isn’t really the most important thing. If a cheaper model can do the work then there’s no point paying order of magnitude for a more capable one.

I expect it’ll take Chinese companies like a year or so to ramp up capacity, and then prices will start dropping.

cheeto already walked it back https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/14/us-strikes-iran-bahrain-jordan-uae-tankers

To be fair, Taco Bell was already a thing.

Every society is three meals away from chaos. - Lenin

Also, given that electricity costs in China are like a third of what they are in the US, it’s fundamentally cheaper for Chinese companies to operate.

lmao that’s amazing

as shocked as you are by this development

yeah it’s pretty clever and I love the low tech approach

I think the example holds up fine actually. The difference is that in the second example the company decided that AI should be used here, and never consulted the worker about the process. That’s the key part in the whole thing, and this sort of thing has been happening long before AI I might add. Business people decide on some arbitrary timeline they pull out of their ass, and then it gets handed down to the workers who’ve never been consulted about the feasibility, then when the timeline can’t be met or the quality is shoddy, it is the workers who are blamed.

The AI itself is incidental to a more general problem that the worker is put in a situation where it’s basically impossible for them to do a good job with the time and resources available. What makes this case a reverse centaur is that AI is the driving force, and the human is expected to clean up after it, but without even having the proper resources to do so. The whole reason the human was in the loop in the first place was precisely because everybody knew you can’t trust AI, so there needed to be somebody to blame in the loop.

It’s low cost compared to trying to take out these satellites by conventional means.

It does actually matter. While the US isn’t going to go bankrupt as a result of printing money, there is a real consequence within the framework of the way the system actually works. They can issue infinite currency, but the two problems they have are inflation and debt payments. Inflation devalues the currency, while higher debt payments mean that there’s less operational budget available. So, end result ends up being less money available for productive purposes as more and more of the budget ends up being allocated towards interest.

The government doesn’t just print cash and hand it out either. What actually happens is that they issue Treasury bonds instead with the understanding that private interests buy them and the government will pay back later with interest. These bonds are then bought up by pension funds, foreign governments, big financial institutions, etc.

When the government prints too much money or issues too many bonds, the bond holders start getting awful nervous about their investment because they wonder if the dollars they get back in ten years will be worth the paper they’re printed on. So they demand a higher yield to cover the risk. It’s not unlike a credit card company jacking up your rate when you miss a payment.

Rising bond yields, in turn, make the government’s interest payments go up. Bigger and bigger checks need to be paid to the people who lent the money, which further reduces the operational budget. Today, that sum is already sitting at over a trillion dollars a year. It’s money that’s just flowing out of the treasury and straight into the accounts of bondholders.

And of course, as you note, the other problem will be that the rest of the world will start dumping dollar because holding US bonds will mean losing money as the dollar continues to depreciate in value.

what a weird coincidence https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/07/11/8043595/

Sure, there will be an effect on many countries, but it’s also just going to mean that global economy reorients around trade outside the west. China, in particular, has been actively pursuing a strategy of dual circulation ensuring their domestic economy is the primary driver rather than trade. I imagine once there is a financial crisis in the west, countries in BRICS and ASEAN will increasingly focus their trade on China.

That’s not the analogy he’s making. What he’s saying that if it is a human driving the tool and making decisions about when and how to use it, then it becomes a force multiplier for them. However, if you have the reverse situation where the tool is making executive decisions, and the human is subordinated to the tool, then it becomes a problem. What he is pointing out is that a lot of companies mandate using AI tools because it’s a hip thing to do, and then people are forced to use these tools in a way that doesn’t actually help them do their work. Like the example he provides where the person was given an unrealistic amount of work to do, and then AI hallucinated a bunch of shit that person had no hope of actually verifying in the time they had. So, the person just ended up being a scapegoat for a bad process.

lmao