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Why China is Hedging Against America's Trillion Dollar AI Buildout
(dialecticaldispatches.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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China's also masterfully playing the optimal strategy for 2nd place in AI (also stealing is cool). Qwen and deepseek could replace OpenAI and Claude for everything I use AI for and it would be one of the smallest set backs imaginable. LLMs are basically version 2 of your phone's predictive text, and it's not clear to me that a meaningful V3 is on the horizon or is generally possible.
So on one hand, is China going to race ahead of US AI tech in the next 5 years? It's not clear to me that they should even try. Stealing the US tech (specifically, copying high quality outputs that the US companies built via mass copyright infringement) may prove to continue to be the 2nd mover's optimal strategy for the next 5 years.
China could actually be better off taking advantage of the marginally weaker LLMs they have already created, but primarily focus on the rest of their economy and infrastructure. IMO the result of this will essentially be the V2 of that one time Nixon generously donated all the US manufacturing capability to China. The US will be a dead hollow economy, and we'll have nothing to show for it, while China will have a beautiful wonderful county and AI tech.