🟢 China and the US are chasing AI supremacy in very different ways
Two fundamentally different bets on how artificial intelligence creates value, and why the American model may be winning the technology race while losing the market one.
There is a pattern in American technology strategy that goes back at least to Amazon in the mid-1990s. Announce an enormous vision, grow at any cost, drain every competitor of oxygen, establish a de facto monopoly, and only then begin the serious work of figuring out what problems you are actually solving and at what price. And China? China's approach to tech revolutions is structurally different. It's not smarter per se, but it's way more practical: they chase immediate problems to solve and market scale first.
America's zero-to-one model
Peter Thiel formulated the zero-to-one logic decades ago as the canonical articulation of Silicon Valley strategy. Create something that did not exist and then protect it until it cannot be competed away. This is remarkable logic that has produced Amazon Web Services, Apple's App Store, Uber, and, more recently, Nvidia's near-total grip on AI infrastructure. In the US, for wannabe tech giants, the business model is explicitly secondary to securing a monopoly position.
