Why Read: On the issue of global AI/LLM business, it's easy to fall into the trap of following the meme trails common in the mainstream media.

These include the AI race, the China vs. US AI competition, the many Valley memes about AGI (a fraud), human extinction (not going to happen), the end of the bubble, the beginning of the bigger bubble, loss of all jobs (not likely), universal basic income (nope), FOMO of almost any flavor of the moment, and so on.

In case you haven't noticed yet, every time we start to see beyond the emperor's missing clothes, some bespectacled genius in a Valley PR factory invents the next major counter-meme for social media (i.e., the entire world) to chew on instead.

Last week, at a Goldman Sachs forecasting event, I brought up the common conflation of an AI race with a major economic attack; the response suggested that it should be the topic of this week's Global Report. - mra

My friend Jen Hsun Huang posted for his first time last week on X, making the case that all AI (LLMs) worldwide should be open source. Although I consider him very smart, I also know something about his feelings that China is ahead in / is going to win "the AI race." So, I posted a short comment saying I disagreed, and that China was just following, again, what its model has been for 40 years: copy (steal) IP from the innovator nations, subsidize it, dump it on the world market, gain global share, and wipe out the inventors. All of which, I think, is both obvious and true and provides a level of information above and beyond all the more spiritual or democratic ideals orbiting the subject of open sourcing.

But I had already figured out something much more important: even that issue, I believe, was a smoke screen.

Yes, as I have written, China has stumbled on the idea of using the ethical fog of everyone open-sourcing their secrets to the world, so they are able to get the intellectual property of inventor nations without the extra hassle of stealing it. But there is much more involved this time around. This isn't just China's prior Steal / Dump dance with the past world-markets attacks.