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That's temporary. They will adapt and find ways to use it to its full potential - just like it happened with every new technological shift in history.

Another way to put it: if training a model cost 72,000 tons of carbon, and it then gets used by 100 million people (typical of major models), the cost per person is 0.00072 tons.

Per the article, the average human uses over 5 tons per year (Americans: 18). Adding 0.00072 to 5 is not really noticeable.

(There is also the cost of inference, of course.)

Yeah it's basically nothing despite the fact that xAI seemed to intentionally crank up the carbon intensity for no reason.

Also, hilarious to select 2 major models from 2025 and they're both Grok, almost certainly the least useful, least used, and least interesting of that year.

Of course they will. Tokens are valuable, you can always spend a finite budget on specialized tokens or fewer and higher quality tokens, size of user base and engagement gives you a flywheel moat that is difficult for newcomers to compete with. The market is complex and easy to oversimplify.

Isn’t capital and momentum a moat? Sure Chinese models use distillation but I don’t see them training models from scratch. At least not today. But maybe as chips get cheaper and they have Chinese made ones?

I agree with you on that metric being not great - I would have definitely swapped it for this:

"Claude Code GitHub Commits Over Time" https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-inf...

Sure - also an imperfect metric. But less imperfect? And more indicative of... something? Not nothing?

"These estimates should be interpreted with caution. In the case of Grok, they rely heavily on inferred inputs drawn from public reporting"

That chart doesn't really pass the sniff test.

That's the lead in industrial robot installed. That lead is understandable because of manufacturing concentration in China. Here are 10 top robot makers, none of them are Chinese (*), and five are Japanese:

https://manufacturingdigital.com/top10/top-10-industrial-rob...

(*) Kuka was a top German maker who got acquired by Chinese company Midea recently

They also lead the world in EV production on paper, but in practice a large portion of those numbers might be driven by government pressure, not actual demand [1].

I’d personally take this data with a big grain of Goodhart’s law.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/

The graph says "new industrial robots installed", which is a bit misleading. For example the newest BYD factories are still stuffed with German/Japanese robots.

China’s manufacturing lead in a graph

It striking, but says nothing about AI.

Don't they have ten times more people than the next highest country (Japan) though?

What's worse is that this the predictable result of a choice that America made decades ago and continues to make.

Outsourcing manufacturing capacity to China and letting domestic manufacturing skills atrophy and institutional knowledge die out was a choice that many people opposed but were ultimately helpless to stop because the people making the decisions ignored them and did it anyways for personal gain is how we got here.

You'd think that the supply chain shocks that we saw during COVID would be a wake up call that would have jolted people into action.

You'd think that Ukraine-Russia war would have been a wake up call that would have jolted people into action.

You'd think that the recent failures by the US military in Iran and the depletion of years of missile stockpiles would have been a wake up call that would have jolted people into action.

I'm at a loss to explain it. It's like the American oligarchs want to weaken America, or at least are willing to do so if it means that they have greater control over it. Maybe they don't care about manufacturing capacity because they know that America is ultimately a nuclear protected island and that even if things continue to decline they'll be safe to rule it like a king?