China treats AI as industrial policy. Our labs treat it as theology, a race to birth a machine god. Beijing's play: commoditize the complement. All that frontier lab market cap gets transmuted into demand signal to scale the stack below the models: power, chips, minerals, etc. American can and must win the full stack.

you are in business, in competition with another business: would you prefer that your competitor were using the most performant intelligence to try to win share in the head-to-head, or would you feel more vulnerable if they were economizing on their AI spend? To me it's fairly obvious that you would rather they economize. One almost inarguable byproduct of the AI capability explosion: business dynamism is going to increase. Steady state cash-flowy businesses will become harder to maintain because that cash-flow will beckon a competitive hoard that enjoys a lower upfront cost to launch and accelerate its piratical skiffs at the business's exposed broadside. If the framework for AI optimization is to use the frontier intelligence to unlock the hardest business patterns and then transmute those into less intelligence-expensive repeatable cashflows, most of the economic spend still sits at the frontier as those repeatable cashflows come under continual threat.