America Is Winning the Wrong AI Race
‘General intelligence’ is an ever-receding goal. We should focus on practical implementation instead.

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/america...2e?st=gkcdZH&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink
“… Experts shift the goal post for AGI, or “true intelligence” such as you’d see in a person, with each AI advance. Mastering chess and writing a coherent essay were once held out as AGI benchmarks. AI can now do both, but clear, obvious gaps with human capabilities persist. AGI is a philosophical goal—a perpetually receding horizon—rather than a practical target for strategic victory.
… Model capabilities increase logarithmically with the hardware resources used to train them. In effect, this means you can make a model 90% as good as the model on the current frontier of AI performance with only 10% of the hardware. This is why limiting access to graphics processing units won’t stop America’s competition. Foreign companies and governments, even those with a fraction of the resources, will still be able to push neck-and-neck with U.S. companies. It was inevitable that a Chinese model like DeepSeek—open-source, cheaply trained—would come along to challenge American pre-eminence in AI, regardless of how tightly Washington controlled chip exports.
Moreover, key AI hardware and software are rapidly becoming more efficient. Something like Moore’s Law—the observation that CPUs double in capacity about every two years—has proved roughly true for GPUs, too. At the same time, algorithmic improvements are driving model efficiency hard enough that smaller models can quickly catch up to those on the cutting edge of AI capability. The sort of advanced AI that today requires historic data-center investments will become accessible to more global players with moderate infrastructure tomorrow.
While America can’t stop global AI model competition, what we can do is lead the race for AI implementation. What will determine if a nation is ahead on AI isn’t if it has the best models first, but if it is translating AI into widespread benefits for society. This means bringing the best models into organizations’ core missions and processes, from the factory floor to the operating room to the battlefield. …”