Richard Murphy sees in Deepseek a challenge not just to US AI, but to the very foundations of US capitalism...
"US capitalism has three core ideas at its heart. The first is that ownership is king. Protecting whatever is created from replication is the first tenet that it follows... Concentrating the power of ownership in the hands of a relatively few people is all US capitalism is about now.
"Second, as a result, secrecy prevails. The patent lawyer is the architect of business success in these enterprises... Massive barriers to entry for competitors are built and vigorously defended, completely contrary to the ideas of free markets.
"Third, the goal is to maintain this situation for as long as possible, allowing for the maximum extraction of profit from the consumer through extortionate rents. The consequence is that US capitalism is frequently bloated with high costs...
"In summary, then, big US business is inherently anti-competitive by nature, is monopolistic by choice, and is, in most cases, very likely to be grossly inefficient as a consequence... What Deepseek has really done is challenge this model."
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/01/28/is-deepseek-the-start-of-an-assault-on-the-whole-of-us-capitalism/
[#]deepseek #ai #capitalism #business
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from GeofCox@climatejustice.social
@GeofCox this is ironic. Charles Dickens' spoke loudly against the USA and its culture of not accepting intellectual property ownership. If they liked something they copied it. He got very little from his writing over there as the market was flooded with knock offs.
Apparently a very similar approach taken in Japanese and Korean post WW2 tech industries
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from ronanmcd@mastodon.green
@ronanmcd
Dickens' view was the norm in 19th century Britain - it is one of history's ironies that the US went from both the IPR rip-off capital of the world while fiercely protecting its own nascent industries, to fiercely protecting IPR while advocating free markets.
Plus, of course, IPR is the antithesis of free markets !
Trump's return to protectionism might be seen as a return to US dependence on a foreign industry - except of course with Chinese dominance replacing British..
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from GeofCox@climatejustice.social
@GeofCox Are you shitting me? That's every developed capitalist country ever
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from moffintosh@mastodon.cloud
@moffintosh
It's true of course that capitalist businesses tend to strive for monopoly, not competition, that they will try to influence markets' legal etc frameworks to achieve this, and that therefore capital tends to get concentrated - all described by Marx etc 150 years ago.
However, 'capitalism' is only ever one thing in theory - in reality there are many different 'capitalisms', in various forms of mixed economy around the world - and I think this is where we can identify business models that are not unique to the US, but which loom larger in its corporate culture than elsewhere.
Everybody is annoyed by this business model in computer printers: venture capital fund the virtual give away of the printer, but once you have your customer locked in, make monopoly profits from the ink cartridges. I actually first became aware of this business model many years ago with razors - and you might remember huge controversy within that industry over whether the constant patenting of new blade designs was giving people worse and worse shaves (which incidentally I think it is).
It's a particular business model, particularly reliant on VC and IPR, and generating profit from its rents rather than one-off sales, and it is particularly dominant in US corporate culture - but the question Murphy raises is whether it is now being outperformed by the very different 'mix' in China's mixed economy model. That is, I think, a good question.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from GeofCox@climatejustice.social This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini