Governments are always at least a decade behind when it comes to technology. Just don't complain when they have massive data breaches weekly, because they decided their principals were more important.
Big corporations are only big because they provide what customers want. They don't get to extract money from people's work, the way politicians can.
This is, however, one of the reasons Germany is hit so hard by the current spike, I'll give you that.
Big corporations are big because they purchased all competitors. I recommend that you read the book Enshitification.
It's also so easy to astroturf to manipulate public opinion. If I were China, I'd post so much anti-datacenter content everywhere in the West to gain a leg up in the race to superintelligence, because we are dumb enough to let our citizenry influence these decisions.
Imagine if we did the same thing for the nuclear race. ASI is winner-take-all, the first one to ASI can just lock everyone else out.
The recent growth of LLMs is a black swan. Any future prediction you attempt to make has massive error bars.
Europe is in a very precarious position. If LLMs actually play out and lead to economic booms (I'm not saying for individuals, note that), the EU as a whole will get absolutely trounced economically and likely experience a shrinking economy for the next 20+ years along with a shrinking population in most of the member countries. They are so far behind on power and compute of the US and China there is not any current path to catching up.
The US itself is in a precarious position with the amount of debt it has accrued, it could be right that LLMs are what leads to future economic booms, but be so far in the hole it takes decades to recover.
China is really in the best place at the moment. Trying to build up power and compute as fast as it can, copying American innovation at the cheap, and having a mountain of US and EU money to spend on it.
It’s time to decide your stand. But if you want to make an informed decision, you probably want to:
- Read up on the possible dangers until you get it,
- Learn about the advantages and breakthroughs already happening, and,
- Do some extensive work on a real project with at least an Opus-level LLM, so you really understand what an astounding new thing it is in our world.
So our technoverlords should decide for us? All these arguments to go back to the middle ages and feudal systems are based on the idea that we should be oppressed and our opinion should not count. That thinking destroys enlighten societies and bring inequality and poverty.
That is called democracy. Where the good of citizens is valued above what big corporations want. To push up pollution and power prices so big American tech companies can play with AI seems something that only a mad king would do.