The West's AI Compute Moat Is Overestimated
joshua_saxe · x · 2026-07-20
Arguing from first principles and the "Bitter Lesson," the author contends that the AI moat built by the West through Nvidia's training hardware isn't as deep as imagined. Outside major labs, numerous methods bypass existing path dependencies to update model weights, and academia has already produced many innovative solutions for training large models on weaker hardware. Furthermore, the evolution of AI coding agents will further erode the technological barriers of the CUDA ecosystem.
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