I’ve actually worked professionally in the field for a couple of years since it was interesting to me originally. I’ve built RAG architecture backends for slef hosted FOSS LLMs, i’ve fine tuned LLMs with new data, And I’ve done even took the opposite approach where I embraced the hallucinations as I thought it could be used for more creative tasks. (I think this area still warrants research)

I’ll admit that the term AI is extremly vauge. It’s like saying you study medicine, it’s a big field. But I keep coming to the conclusion that LLMs and predictive generative models in general simply do not work for the use cases that it’s being marketed to consumers, CEOs, and Governments alike.

This " AI race" happened because Deepseek was able to create a model that was more ore less equivalent to OpenAI and Anthropic models. It should have been seen as a race between capitalism and open source since deep seek is one of the more open models at that performance level. But it became this weird nationalist talking point on both countries instead.

There are a lot of things the US is actually in a race with China in. Many of which are things that would have immediate impact. Like renewable energy, international respect, healthcare advances, military sufficiency, human rights, food supplies, and afordible housing, just to name a few.

The promise of AI is that it can somehow help in the above categories eventually, and that’s cool. But we don’t need AI to make improvements to them right now.

I think AI is a giant distraction, while the the talk of nationalistic races is just being used for investor buy in.