This whole idea that the US and China are turning AI into another Cold War actually tells you more about how people in tech see power than how the technology really works. When Marc Andreessen (co founder of Mosaic, the first web browser with graphical user interface) compares the competition over artificial intelligence to the US and Soviet Union rivalry, he is saying whoever sets the rules for AI is setting the rules for how everything else works, literally from government to business and to basically our daily lifes.
Silicon Valley shares this same view of whoever “wins” gets to shape the way the whole world works.
Andreessen says if AI is built on American values, that is obviously the better choice compared to a system led by the Chinese Communist Party. What he is really pointing at is that AI is not a neutral thing. The people who build it pick what data to train it on, decide what the output should look like and that means any tool is always shaped by whoever is funding it and setting the rules.
If two governments with totally different ideas about what’s acceptable each control these massive AI networks, then every country has to decide whose rules they want to follow.
He also talks about AI as a “control layer” for society. If you don’t work in tech that sounds abstract, but he’s just saying AI is quickly becoming the invisible thing that sits between you and everything important (healthcare, transportation, law, the economy, education).
If the US makes the rules, you get one version of all those things and if China sets the standard it’s a different outcome. The part that is not said but matters just as much is that regular people rarely get any say in what those rules look like. The public mostly gets told which side to root for.
People are actually worried about how the things they depend on might end up controlled by something they don’t understand and can’t vote on.
The whole thing isn’t just a technical race or a debate about who has more money to throw at research, it’s who gets to decide what the future looks like for everyone else.
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My thumbnail image was generated with Chatgpt 4.1 model.