The Race for AI Dominance: A New Era of Competition – Shimmy Says EP3

Hey everyone, it's Talent Show from Techstrong, and welcome to another episode of my LinkedIn live series. I call Shimmy Says, having a lot of fun doing this. You know, we live in interesting times and it's, I'll be honest with you, it's almost therapy for me to get something that's off my chest and talk about it.

So I appreciate you listening in. Um, this week I wanna talk about something I'm calling AI imperialism. You know, it's been a long time since the world powers have set about in such a cutthroat fashion, if you will, to, to try to capture the flag.

You know, I come from the security will capture is a very popular game at security conferences, but we're, we're in a hyper, hyper competitive world right now, and it's around the prizes. Ai AI represents sort of the, the new world that Columbus came to. And so here we are with everybody in the world trying to claim the big ar pri ai prize.

Our first, you know, we spoke about it two or three weeks ago with this deep seek from China. It's kind of a spu Sputnik moment heard around the world where for so long we were used to the American dominated AI world with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Meta and Google spending billions, tens, hundreds of billions of dollars and making steady progress with ai. But let's, what's happened this week is, is just unbelievable.

Um, we saw it as I said, after the Chinese deep seek announcement, you know, vice President Vance was over in Europe at an AI conference and actually stood up in front of the crowd and said that America's AI is gonna be an America first ai, that America's AI is going to be built in America for America, and that other countries will welcome maybe to partner, but only in a junior role. And basically what we're willing to give them, and I, I thought it was a very imperialistic kind of tone. But quite frankly, when you've got an administration that wants to take over great, uh, Greenland and call it red, white and Blueland, and the Gulf of Mexicos, the Gulf of America and, and the Panama Mouse coming back, and we're gonna build hotels in Gaza, throw the Palestinians out.

Well, what do you expect? My, my problem is, is though that's not an America first policy, that's an America or a loan policy. And if that's the way that we want to do it here in the us go it alone, that's fine.

But the response has been some, as one would anticipate our traditional allies in Europe stood up and said, thank you, but no thank you. And they announced their own plans. France announced $112 million, $112 billion.

Project UK said Theirs will follow. Shortly, the EU announced a $200 billion project on top of the French $112 billion project. Of course, the Chinese have been throwing money at this for years and years, more money than we have even perhaps, and they have a different economic scale there.

So what we're seeing here is, is a rush to claim land, to plant their flag on this new world, this new ground of ai we haven't heard yet from Russia or that we know of anyway. We haven't heard a lot about what India's plans are or Israel or some of the other, you know, technologically advanced worlds out there. But it seems like this has quickly become in every man, every country for himself or themselves kind of thing, all going after the AI prize.

And what, what's at stake? What is at stake with this ai? What are we going after?

Is it really so valuable that we're in essence going to step over each other, trying, trying to get there each individually rather than together? Well, at the very height is the, the prize of e of, uh, a, a, uh, I actual artificial intelligence or general artificial intelligence, excuse me, GAI. Um, and this is, you know, some people call it the singularity, right?

There's been movies and books written about this. This is where ai, you know, sky network, Skynet kind of thing. AI becomes almost sentient and, and can do, you know, much more than humans can do, and hopefully it won't destroy us.

Now, I believe to some people say, we'll never reach a GIA actual general intelligence, artificial general intelligence, but other people say we will. And sooner than you think, I think to get there, that's, that's a big money thing. And I think that is something, quite frankly, that the US is probably best suited to achieve.

But I think that's not the only prize in ai. I I think that is the biggest prize, and that is, is world changing. But I think there'll be other ways we use AI and we won't need that level of AI for a lot of the tasks that we're going to use AI and AI agents for.

And I think, quite frankly, you'll look at like deep seek kind of models that the Chinese have done and stripping out what may be used or not used and what was done legally, if you will. Um, there'll be room for cheaper, faster types of ai, even though they may not be better, if they're much less expensive, let's much less resource intensive. There'll be places for it.

There will be places for Europe and other technologically advanced countries to develop their own versions of ai. And quite frankly, you know, when you have that kind of community, which each, with each developing their own technology, it'll be interesting to see all the variations that come out of it. It's almost like evolution itself, right?

Given a a Petri dish. Let's see what grows, who knows what will grow and the competition will spur the best out of everyone. But I question, you know, it, it, it's almost a, a substitute for, it's like a cold war kind of thing versus a hot war.

And what will happen when someone loses this AI race? What will their, you know, what will their stance be? Do they take it by might or force if they, what they can't get by innovation and brains.

Um, what does it mean for worldwide alliances? You know, our world's been relatively peaceful for the last 75 years post World War ii, as the new world order as we called it came into place. This AI imperialism can really set off the end of the new world order.

One other thing I wanted to talk about, and you know, again, uh, vice President Vance talked about it. He had, he told Europe that this isn't the time for regulation on ai, that this is a time for innovation in its full speed ahead. The EU has, the EU has been the leader in, in regulation all these times.

Um, but surprisingly a day or two after this speech, the EU said they were, they were holding back on some new regulations they were gonna put in. I think we're seeing the EU say, you know what? He may have a point there.

We're not going to enforce regulations to the point where it stifles innovation. You know, we have a LinkedIn user put in here, cheaper, faster AI optimize efficiency, smarter scalability. Yes, there'll be a place for that.

Yes, it might be that deep seek model, but it may not be what we need to get to the ultimate prize, as I, as I mentioned a GI. Um, but back to regulation. So now Europe's pulled back on regulation.

The US has never shown a will here to put in some AI privacy and regulations. What I find really both hypocritical and interesting is, you know, when gen AI generative AI first burst on the scene two, two years ago, and over the last year, we've all seen the letter by the top 100 scientists and experts in AI saying, Hey, we've gotta put the brakes on this. We can't go full speed ahead on AI because there's potential dangers.

There's dangers to humanity's existence itself, and we've gotta make sure we understand those before we go full speed on ai. Interestingly, in the, in the, in the style of John Hancock, in the Declaration of Independence, one of the biggest signatures on that page in the guy making the most noise was Elon Musk. We've gotta go slow.

It's why he claims he pulled out of OpenAI, which was a not-for-profit and was supposed to be worried about the security and safety of humanity. Well, what do we see this week? Elon Musk leads a consortium trying to buy OpenAI for $97 billion so that he could develop it commercially.

You think he's going to go slow? I, you know, you wanna say hypocritical, you wanna say times have changed, so he's changed. Say what you want.

But what I do say is, where are those hundred people who signed the, the letter saying, go slow. No one's saying go slow, it's full speed ahead. Damn, the torpedoes is that good for all of us?

I don't know. Or maybe there wasn't, maybe there wasn't such a big scare to begin with that we didn't, there wasn't a need to go slow, unfortunately, one way or the other, or fortunately, one way or the other, we're gonna find out really soon because no matter what the threats of ai, no matter what the threats of AI are, and someone in the audience says, AI will be used to make AI that will sabotage ai. That's the, I know that you know that, I know that you know, theory, but no matter what the threats are of ai, we are not gonna stop the trains left the station.

The the chase is on, everybody, you know, has their flags out, ready to claim their land. And this is as close to imperialism that we've seen probably in the last 150 years. So it's gonna be an interesting time.

I'm gonna keep reporting on it. Thanks for joining me today. I'm shimmy and you just watched Shimmy says, Shimmy says.