The US blocked high power graphics cards to specific countries, and then got all shaken up when their money moat was pole-vaulted by an embargo'd country wielding jank cards.
Why is this a big deal, exactly?
Who benefits if the US has the best AI, and who benefits if it's China?
Is this like the Space Race, where it's just an effort to spit on each other, but ultimately no one really loses, and cool shit gets made?
What does AI "supremacy" mean?
Don't believe the hype: LLMs are not AI. Not even close. They are in fact, much closer to pattern recognition models. Fundamentally, our brains are able to 'understand' any query posed to it. Only problem is we don't know what 'understanding' even means. How can we then even judge if some model is capable of understanding, or is the output just something that is statistically most likely?
Second, can AI even know what a human experience is like? We cannot give AI inputs in the exact form we receive them in. In fact, we cannot input the sensations of touch, flavor and smell to AI at all. So, AI as of yet cannot tell you how a freshly baked bread smells like or feels like, for example. Human experience is still our domain. That means our inspirations are intact and AI cannot create works of art that feel truly human.
Finally, AI by default has no concept of truth or false. It takes every statement in it's training data as true, unless, they are labelled individually by hand. Of course, such an approach doesn't scale well for petabytes of text data. So, LLMs tend to hallucinate stuff because again it is only giving out text that is only statistically most likely, given the input.
In short, we still don't have many pieces of puzzle that is true AI. We know it is possible because we exist, but that's about it. Sure, AI is doing better than humans in specific cases, but they nowhere close humans in understanding and reasoning.
That’s all well and good—that LLMs aren’t AGI—but not really what’s being asked.