Church and Science Warn the World that Chinese AI Just Changed All the Rules in the Race to Artificial Intelligence

An electronic black swan swooped down, casting its shadow over the US stock market, frying circuit boards everywhere. It plunged the most powerful components of the artificial intelligence nanosphere, such as Nvidia, deep into a black hole. When China revealed AI at a fraction of the cost of everything the US billionaire intelligentsia had been developing, it crashed US tech stocks into an unexpected abyss, reminding everyone—even if briefly—how quickly a stock bubble that is floating out over nothing, because the companies remain profitless, can be deflated.

Over a trillion dollars of billionaire wealth evaporated in one day. Nvidia took the biggest plunge in stock history, but it is back up half the distance that it fell. China’s DeepSeek AI search engine or answer machine—whatever you want to classify AI as—soared to the top of Apple’s App Store in the US and the UK, denting the image Trump had been pushing of the US being the nation that will dominate the world in a headlong AI rush because we have billions to do it, free of regulations that were slowing the billionaires down.

The blistering popularity has rattled tech experts and free-speech advocates and was branded "AI's Sputnik moment" by Donald Trump's adviser Marc Andreessen. Andreessen warned: “Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen."

There it was. Suddenly out of nowhere. No one apparently saw it coming. The Chinese rocketed ahead in the race to the AI moon. In just one day, international companies around the world began looking to the Chinese for a cheap entrance into the AI future — showing not the tiniest bit of Trumpian loyalty toward the far more expensive American electronic internet gurus.

That was with the US doing a lot to stunt China’s progress in AI by depriving them of access to US chips. That just forced the Chinese to try novel approaches, and the new approaches worked better. Necessity, due to intervention, became the mother of invention.

President Trump had just proudly announced, last week, the formation of a new AI initiative in the US called Stargate, set to make sure the US leads the new moon race, and already people are pointing out that China has an unrestrained lead:

Alexandr Wang, CEO of San Francisco-based Scale AI, said the breakthrough must be a "wake-up call for America".

He bought a whole page advert in The Washington Post last week imploring the president to “win the AI war”.

The race is on, and that is certain to funnel more desperate US taxpayer dollars (or credits) into the pockets of AI billionaires to try to give them an edge over their Chinese-funded counterparts in Fascist economics.

Vey-Sern, a technology adviser, told the BBC that DeepSeek could "potentially derail the investment case for the entire AI supply chain, which is driven by high spending from a small handful of hyper-scalers.”

Other Chinese competitors are also pushing hard:

Alibaba launched its own QwQ model in November and is making fast progress.

Companies including Huawei are working to produce Chinese-made chips so that the country is not reliant on the US supply.

And, of course, the US will be afraid (or will, at least, claim) that Chinese AI, far more than meager TikTok, will report back to the Chinese government everything it learns about US citizens in doing all of its knowledge searches for them—what interests them, what drives them, what they are most afraid of….

Suddenly up for grabs is the entire Trump-size aspiration that believes throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at creating a new AI infrastructure that is second-to-none will result in AI that is second-to-none.

Elvis Saravia, an AI researcher and co-founder of UK-based tech consulting firm DAIR.AI (corr), wrote on X: "This is wild and totally unexpected.’’

The brakes are off, and time is nearly up

It almost goes without saying that the headlong race to excel the quickest and the highest in AI development means the brakes are now completely off on AI’s development. Trump already removed the restraints put on the development of artificial intelligence by the Biden administration, a feeble attempt made by Biden, at Elon’s beckoning, to provide some guardrails that would keep AI from dominating its mere human creators for whom it will soon have no remaining use.

With the sudden realization that the AI brakes are off—disabled even—the nuclear scientists who set the time of the doomsday clock pushed the hands of the ill-tempered clock forward a notch closer to midnight. It’s now 89 seconds to midnight. Although the sudden leap in AI and removal of “failsafes” that never are what they claim to be anyway was only one factor among the wars, wildfires, belief in climate change, and other drivers that moved the timekeepers ticking hearts, AI was finally listed as one of the new risks in this brave new world of non-human intelligence.

“In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster….”

Those moving the hands of the clock noted,

“Increasing chaos, disorder, and dysfunction in the world’s information ecosystem threaten society’s capacity to address difficult challenges, and it is clear that AI has great potential to accelerate these processes of information corruption. AI-enabled distortion of the information environment may be an important factor in preventing the world from dealing effectively with urgent major threats like nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change.

This continuing problem took on extra significance for the United States in 2024, when, according to numerous reports, Chinese and Russian disinformation campaigns attempted to subvert the 2024 US national elections. Advances in LLM technologies and dramatic improvements in the phony video depictions known as deepfakes could have consequential future effects….”

The juncture where the Church and Science agree

It is not just scientists forecasting the increasing peril of global doom under the pall of AI. The Church also joined in with the Pope sounding the AI alarm, stating that AI could undermine the very foundations of human society by destroying the trust on which societies are built—a claim matching that of the scientists. Pope Francis gave much the same warning that the scientists had given.

"AI-generated fake media can gradually undermine the foundations of society," read the text, written by two Vatican departments and approved by the 88-year-old pontiff.

"As deepfakes cause people to question everything and AI-generated false content erodes trust in what they see and hear, polarisation and conflict will only grow…."

The Vatican group that wrote the document on behalf of the Pope warned of a "shadow of evil" looming over AI, stating that …

"… the concentration of the power over mainstream AI applications in the hands of a few powerful companies raises significant ethical concerns."

… It could also "de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance, and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks" and risks being "used to replace human workers rather than complement them.”

Demonstrating the truth of that concern on his own, one of AI’s big investor billionaires on Team Trump, stated without equivocation or shame that the top goal he sees for AI is to destroy human wages.

Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the massive venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — which has its fingers in pretty much every pie in tech — has revealed an eyebrow-raising detail in his "techno-optimist" vision of the future….

In a recent tweet, the American billionaire investor casually proclaimed that AI must "crash" everyone's wages before it can deliver us an economic utopia — one that'll definitely happen….

"A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero," Andreessen wrote. "Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies."

Never trust a utopian visionary. They always care very little for the humans who will be inside or outside of their utopia. With no paying jobs, who is going to be able to afford the items in that cornucopia at any price? My concern is that utopias never turn out to be the pure good envisioned by their often maniacal visionaries. Elon’s colony on Mars, for example, will probably be the seed of hell. Why doesn’t Elon dedicate his billions to protecting the blue gem of a terrarium of life we have, rather than littering its high atmosphere with drifting rocket parts and eternal clouds of rocket smog and star-obscuring satellites, instead of spreading our cancer to a barren, red, utterly frigid, desert rock?

So fret not, lowly laborer: you may be destined for financial ruin, but paradise is right around the corner. Pinky promise.

Don’t worry: it’s all failsafe. (That is the one word that should worry anyone more than any other word because its use with conviction always precedes our worst failures. Actually thinking something is failsafe causes us to stop looking out for unanticipated risks, just as US AI developers got blindsided this week by cheap AI out of China. And what do you want to bet their own unrestrained AI will find their blind spots far better than they ever will?)