So what if it is more profitable or valuable? It is still not better. Something being more profitable/valuable does not make it better, just like something being better does not make it more profitable/valuable. Sometimes, in some pursuits, for some outputs under some circumstances, the two are correlated. In others, the two are anti-correlated.
Lean has dependant types. Wouldn't something like Haskell or Idris, that are trying to be general purpose dependantly typed languages--wouldn't they be a better start than versus?
Versus appears to just be a formal verification tool. Perhaps I misunderstand?
You want the formal verification built into the language because the tooling can start to get really crazy good. Agda is the dependantly typed language I've used the most (long ago), and the tooling was interactive in a helpful way I've never experienced with other languages.
You don't want a separate language used to verify a base language, because then everyone ends up having to know two languages. Looking at the history of computing though, I wouldn't be surprised if this happens.
The actual programming language and the verification language can be the same language though, if we want.
I don't see why it would be particularly difficult beyond not already having a lot of IO libraries (like Kafka connectors or whatever). Pure functional programming in Scala with IO monads is quite pleasant.
The actual way to do this is run a few fine-tuning passes on some pro-America nationalistic freedom loving anti-China propaganda, and then you can tell the judge with a straight face that it's a new model.
Won't EU companies just announce they've "developed" a new model named Komo, and then we can just use that? Or is the US just going to straight up prosecute plebs for using any model not owned by one of the 5 Americans?
I've said before that I think red team security researchers should be able to investigate the security of government and corporate systems without needing permission.
Currently companies say "you cannot investigate the security of our systems without our permission, because it is our system and we are responsible--also, if there's a data breach, we aren't responsible." See how that works? As a society we seem fine with this.
We are sacrificing national security for the convenience of companies.
So... to answer your question:
Probably, again, we will sacrifice national security, and even our national competitiveness in this important new AI industry--we will sacrifice it all for the convenience of companies and so they can make a few bucks.
It's more important than ever that the good guys actively monitor government and corporate systems for security flaws. These open-weight models are going to be in the hands of the bad guys; the hackers are coming whether the company is ready or not. Ideally a good hacker will find and disclose the vulnerabilities before a bad hacker pwns half the nation's personal data for the 3rd time this month--or worse.
This will require that we stop bullying security researchers. Things like the State Governor personally pushing for felony charges because somebody pressed "view source" on an HTML page shouldn't happen.
I have several thoughts about this, which I'll just iterate:
1) US export bans have made it so that Chinese companies have to compete using less-than-state-of-the-art hardware. This has forced Chinese companies to build more cost efficient models. Whereas, US companies have moreso tried to be state of the art by spending more money than anyone else on state-of-the-art hardware.
2) Xi Jinping has called for more open AI models (not to be confused with the closed models of OpenAI), and I'm happy to see a powerful world leader advocating for open-weight AI models. Whereas, the US seems likely to just ban models.
3) My impression is that, if China surpasses the US in AI development, there will basically be nothing that the US does better than the rest of the world--except for military spending--we spend a lot, but we don't necessarily spend well (something something Iran). I mean, if the US is no longer a tech leader in the world, like... what are we a leader at? Manufacturing? Healthcare? LOL. Are we a leader in any industry or by any metric? I wonder if China is attempting to remove the last jewel in the USA's crown with these AI releases.
4) It must be refreshing for companies to have access to a new model that isn't going to get pulled because the government bans it 2 days after release. And it's open-weight so it wont go away--amazing--what a shift in the market.
5) If it becomes clear that open-weight models are the future of AI, will that pop a huge bubble in the US economy? Maybe. But, on the other hand, these companies aren't just training AIs, they are also building data centers which will remain valuable no matter what happens.
I wouldn’t say “literally” every industry: stuff like clothing, shipbuilding, consumer electronics assembly, certain rare earth raw materials, all we have pretty little participation in. But these are as you point out the exceptions that prove the rule.
Finance mostly true, space launch also true, cancer survival broadly true (with qualifications), oil and natural gas also true.
> (exports nearly 2x the second largest exporter)
Can you provide the source? In the WTO's broader medical goods category, Germany actually exported slightly more than the US in 2022 ($202.6 billion versus $189.6 billion), so such a huge difference in a few years?
> and pharmaceutical research
China accounted for approximately 44.2% of the 104 new molecules in 2025, compared with 26.9% for the U.S. and 15.4% for Europe.
The 2024 shares were approximately 34.6% for China, 30.9% for the U.S., and 22.2% for Europe.
> there is literally not a single major industry where the US is not a leading player.
I will just give 3 examples: China completed roughly 91% of the world’s shipbuilding tonnage in 2025, holds more than 80% of solar module manufacturing capacity and produces more than three quarters of global batteries.
> Can you provide the source? In the WTO's broader medical goods category, Germany actually exported slightly more than the US in 2022 ($202.6 billion versus $189.6 billion), so such a huge difference in a few years?
> Findings from Citeline’s latest report, Pharma R&D Annual Review 2026, highlight the continued U.S. leadership in the life sciences ecosystem... The U.S. leads all other countries, currently advancing over 11,600 medicines – more than half of medicines in development worldwide.
> I will just give 3 examples
In general, I was referring to "major industries" in the sense of economic categories, as defined by (for example) the UN: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/publication/seriesm/seriesm_4rev... Here shipbuilding is considered to be part of "manufacture of other transport equipment." I admit my wording was a bit imprecise; if you are going down to the level of specific products like ships or solar panels, clearly it will be easy to find examples of things that the US does not produce on any significant scale. Nevertheless, a few comments on your examples:
> China completed roughly 91% of the world’s shipbuilding tonnage in 2025
Source on this? 91% is a lot and I can't find anyone else making this claim. However I'll concede that the US is far behind China, South Korea, and Japan in shipbuilding.
> [China] holds more than 80% of solar module manufacturing capacity
EFPIA, using Citeline’s Pharma R&D Annual Review data, says that among the 104 new active substances launched for the first time on the world market in 2025, 46 came from Chinese headquartered companies, 28 from US companies and 16 from European companies.
China currently leads in this particular output measure of newly launched active substances.
Your clinical trials claim also remains unsupported as worded. Citeline’s figure of more than 11,600 medicines being advanced in the US refers to the drug development pipeline. It is not a count of active clinical trials being conducted in the United States. One medicine can involve multiple trials, and pipeline geography may be assigned through the developer's headquarters rather than the location of trial sites.
Citeline itself describes this as the number of drugs in the active R&D pipeline:
The most relevant peer reviewed international comparison I can find points in the opposite direction for new trial registrations. A 2025 study found that China registered 16,612 trials in 2023, including 7,798 randomized trials, compared with 9,100 trials and 4,619 randomized trials in the United States:
That does not by itself prove that China has a larger stock of trials currently classified as active. It does show that "the US has more active clinical trials than any other country" requires a specific global dataset + status definition + date + deduplication method etc. A count taken only from ClinicalTrials.gov is not a neutral worldwide comparison, because US law requires many FDA regulated trials to be registered there, whereas studies outside its legal and policy scope may be submitted voluntarily:
For global comparisons, the WHO's ICTRP is more appropriate because it provides access to ongoing and completed trial records supplied by registries around the world and groups multiple records referring to the same trial:
IQVIA's latest result does support a narrower US leadership claim: trial starts became increasingly concentrated among US headquartered sponsors in 2025. But that measures the headquarters of the sponsor (not necessarily the country where the trials took place) and it does not measure the total number of currently active trials:
So the fair conclusion is that the US remains one of the world's largest clinical rial and drug development centres and may lead certain sponsor based or industry sponsored measures. The categorical claim that it has more active clinical trials than every other country has not been demonstrated by your sources.
> In general, I was referring to "major industries" ....
I also do not think the UN classification resolves the "every major industry" question. ISIC is a statistical classification system, not a rule for what ordinary speakers must regard as a single competitive industry.
ISIC Division 30 combines:
shipbuilding
railway equipment
aircraft and spacecraft
military vehicles
motorcycles and bicycles
Under that aggregation, US aerospace strength can be used to declare the US a "leading player" in the division even though its commercial shipbuilding industry is negligible by global standards. Likewise, ISIC Division 27 combines batteries with motors, generators, wiring, lighting and domestic appliances.
Whenever the US is weak in one globally important industry, it can be bundled with another industry in which the US is strong. Almost any large, diversified economy could be described as a "leading player" in every sufficiently broad category using that method.
> You are correct that the US has "only" 60 GW of domestic solar module production capacity...
The solar comparison also switches metrics. China having more than 80% of global solar module manufacturing capacity is a manufacturing claim. The US being second in solar electricity generation is a deployment/generation claim. Operating solar panels (many of which depend on an overwhelmingly Asian supply chain) does not establish leadership in manufacturing them. The IEA says China has over 80% of module capacity and 95% of wafer capacity.
> True but the US was the 2nd largest producer. In battery cells, we have an estimated capacity of 96 GWh in 2026....
The same issue applies to batteries. The 96 GWh number in your source is projected for 2026, not actual 2025 production.
Specifically US energy storage cell capacity, not all lithium ion batteries and
capacity, not output.
Your source says US ESS cell capacity was "essentially zero" in 2024 and projects 96 GWh in 2026.
Meanwhile, the IEA estimates that China manufactured well over 80% of all batteries in 2025. It says the US and EU each supplied a similar share of the relatively small remainder, while US and European factories remain heavily dependent on imported components. For grid storage LFP batteries specifically, supply is almost entirely Chinese.
"there is literally not a single major industry where the US is not a leading player."
Oof you were doing so strong until you threw this one out.
Easy counterexample (and there are so many more than this). Clothing. Unfortunately, most people aren't buying MIUSA Selvedge Denim, PNW boots. I'm pretty sure that MIUSA clothing is like, 3% or less of all clothing sold in the USA.
The US is the second largest textile exporter in the world. Sources: https://ncto.org/facts-figures/us-textile-industry/ and https://www.trade.gov/selectusa-textiles-industry It's true that a significant amount of that is fabric and fibers, and most of the clothes sold in the US are not actually sewed here. But on the other hand, US companies also show up in other places in the clothing supply chain as well - American fashion design and marketing contribute a lot of the final value of many clothing items sold here and overseas.
Before we would find an intriguing post on the internet from years ago, and you have to verify it with additional research--it's easy to skip that additional research.
With a LLM when you're skeptical you can interogate it. One thing we know for sure is LLMs are quick to admit mistakes were made when interrogated, comically so. A LLM might not always recognize its own mistake, but at least it is available for easy interogation, unlike the forum posts of old.
Manual research from reputable sources remains an option.
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