Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow

Summary

AI AND ML Sovereign AI is 'nonsense,' says Doctorow As Trump dismantles the US-led world order, what the rest of the world really needs is sovereign apps and datacenters, argues 'enshittification' coiner OPINION Cory Doctorow, tech gadfly and coiner of the eminently relevant term "enshittification," posted a useful argument on Wednesday related to Trump's dismantling of the US-led world order and the need or lack thereof for other countries to control their own AI destinies. Doctorow has positioned himself as an AI skeptic in his writings, including his recent book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI – the name comes from the visualization of a human body (you and me, humble users) being led by a mindless horse's head (AI) – and this latest post fits into that vein well, calling the need for a sovereign AI "nonsense."The conversation began with a post from Australian writer John Quiggin, who explained how the US president is systematically dismantling all of the sources of the United States' strength over the last century – diplomatic, military, financial, and, most relevant to Reg readers, technological. Quiggin posited that the current American dominance of AI poses a particular risk to the rest of the world, which understandably doesn't want to rely on a chaotic and unpredictable American state, although even he was skeptical that the frontier labs' Vegas binge-spending approach would necessarily pay off: "My optimistic view is that this is a race that will be won by low-energy tortoises rather than hyper-active hares. Second movers like Deepseek and, more recently the French Mistral, running maybe a year behind the US leaders, can replicate their capabilities at a fraction of the cost, and without reliance on massive data centres."Not wrong, in our view, as our systems editor Tobias Mann recently opined. But as Doctorow points out, that is only relevant if you believe AI is relevant. And Doctorow clearly does not. He notes that if Trump were to suddenl...