Executive Summary
Ben Horowitz drops a bombshell that most investors are missing: America already lost the AI culture war. While the Biden administration played Manhattan Project with closed models, Chinese developers captured the open-source heartbeat through DeepSeek—now running inside every major US company and university. The kicker: Google and OpenAI employ so many Chinese nationals that keeping secrets was always delusional. Market Consensus: AI leadership is about model performance and compute power. Variant Perception: AI dominance is about cultural control through open-source weights that encode values into billions of devices. The policy failure creates infrastructure opportunities as open-source adoption accelerates, particularly in robotics where the entire supply chain is Chinese-controlled. This isn't about picking winners in AI models—it's about betting on the infrastructure that benefits from open-source proliferation while positioning for the inevitable supply chain reshoring.
Key Insights
what Ben Horowitz said“Right now, so kind of a combination of things happened at the beginning of AI. One, just the way the US companies evolved in conjunction with the US policy. So the US policy under the Biden administration was very anti-open source, and so the US companies ended up being all closed source. And the dominant open source models are now from China, DeepSeek being the one that I would say most, not only US companies use, but also basically everyone in academia uses DeepSeek in Chinese open source models, not US open source models.”
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