Ben Horowitz: Why Open Source AI Will Determine America's Future

Ben Horowitz reveals why the US already lost the AI culture war to China—and it wasn't the technology that failed. While Biden's team played Manhattan Project with closed models, Chinese developers quietly captured the open-source heartbeat of global AI through DeepSeek, now running inside every major US company and university lab. The kicker: Google and OpenAI employ so many Chinese nationals that keeping secrets was always a delusion, but the policy locked American innovation behind walls while handing cultural dominance to Beijing's weights—the encoded values that will shape how billions of devices interpret everything from Tiananmen Square to free speech.

 

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