Michael Power, the former global strategist of the investment firm Ninety One, reckons the US is making a “catastrophic strategic error” in betting so heavily on giant closed AI models. “China’s model is turning out to be far more effective in terms of usable compute in the real world,” Power tells me, especially considering the country’s lower energy costs. Even Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has expressed his personal concern that “we have been on the wrong side of history here”.
