@benitoz: America is about to lose the AI race, and it will not happen at the frontier. It will happen at the floor. Everyone is …

America is about to lose the AI race, and it will not happen at the frontier. It will happen at the floor. Everyone is watching who ships the smartest model. The actual war is over the 80% of tokens nobody posts about: the routine inference that quietly runs the world. On current trajectory, that fight is already lost. Watch what people do, not what they say. Coinbase just defaulted its own engineers off frontier models onto open weights and cut AI spend nearly in half while usage kept climbing. Even NVIDIA runs a closed frontier model as an orchestrator and pushes the volume to its own open weights. The frontier is becoming a router. The volume goes open. That part is settled. Here is the part that should terrify Washington: the only credible open tier today is Chinese. GLM. Kimi. And the US answer is to tighten export controls and freeze its own labs in place, as if you can embargo a file that is already downloaded, or price-match free. So China hands the Global South Huawei hardware and free open models, and a generation in Africa and Southeast Asia learns to reason through a model that will not tell them what happened at Tiananmen Square. That is not a cost story. That is influence through inference. You do not have to win hearts and minds when you supply the mind. Open source is not a nice-to-have for America. It is the whole ballgame for the 80%, and right now the US is barely on the field. We need American open weights. Not eventually. Now.