Ever since facts have been replaced by ideologies, the obvious has increasingly become a mystery.

Because digital sovereignty isn’t a job title, it’s a procurement strategy: The hiring shows up as cloud engineers, cybersecurity, Linux, semiconductor, networking, public sector IT and compliance roles. The money is real, but it mostly flows through existing industries rather than creating a shiny new profession.

Absolutely. Trust isn’t binary, and it isn’t unique to Chinese models either. Every (frontier) model reflects the incentives, values and constraints of whoever built it. That’s exactly why competition matters.

Unfortunately, based on many years of experience, I have to agree. However, I also see a light at the end of the tunnel, particularly in Europe, where there is a growing desire to break free from the US SaaS stranglehold, using open source software.

Regarding OWAI I see a fundamental difference: Slack isn’t just software, it’s a hosted service with identity, storage and network effects.

An open weight model is more like a compiler: once downloaded, nobody can revoke it. You may still pay for inference, but pricing power drops when anyone can host the same model.

Funny how »open is dangerous« only became the dominant narrative once Chinese models caught up: If your competitive moat depends on governments blocking free alternatives instead of building better products, maybe your moat isn’t technology at all.

Exactly. It’s much easier to regulate an API than software people can download and run on their own hardware. Once Since capable open weight AI models exist, they spread much like Linux or other open source software: mirrors appear, forks emerge, and improvements compound. Governments can make access less convenient, but preventing global distribution altogether is a far harder problem than restricting a hosted service.

AI companies keep promising productivity gains, but one of the first guaranteed outcomes is that everyone else helps pay the electricity bill. If the grid is upgraded for a few hyperscalers while the costs are spread across millions of customers, that’s not a free market. It’s a subsidy with extra steps.

The weird part is that everyone keeps calling it public infrastructure, but if the primary beneficiary is a handful of private AI companies, that argument starts looking pretty thin. Reliable grids benefit everyone. Dedicated power corridors for hyperscalers are a much harder sell, especially when locals bear the costs.

The awkward part is that software has a habit of racing toward free once it becomes good enough. If an open weight model delivers 95 percent of the value without recurring API costs, plenty of companies will choose that and spend the savings on integration instead. History keeps rhyming, even if investors hate the tune.

Have you finished school?

Are you still interested in Closed AI?

That’s not necessary: as the Open Weight AI models from the US are rather poor, nobody wants them anyway. 🤷