#247 – Anton Leicht on how middle powers avoid losing everything in a post-AI world
About this episode
Anton Leicht discusses the challenges and strategies for middle powers in a post-AI world.
In a post-AGI world, can a country without access to frontier AI even be considered sovereign anymore? Anton Leicht says once frontier AI becomes a core economic input, the countries that own it will pull further and further ahead. Everyone else stays a customer… or worse. Maybe the dominant power wants your land, or a military base, or a resource. Without economic leverage, there’s very little you could do about it. Anton — Carnegie fellow and writer of the blog Threading the Needle — thinks middle powers should band together and build their own frontier models. He’s costed it out : something like $500 billion over four years for a band of allied democracies. That’s not absurd money for the G7 minus the US. The problem is you’d be asking treasuries to take on sovereign debt for a speculative venture with no business case, wide open to US coercion and domestic backlash. So despite its promise, Anton’s verdict is that it probably won’t happen. His backup is for countries to ask themselves: if intelligence becomes abundant, what stays scarce? Upstream, that’s everything that feeds the supply chain: ASML’s lithography machines, chipmaking, exclusive training data — all of it gets…
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