In recent months, many people have been asking Elon Musk the same question through gritted teeth: "Why can't the US build new power plants like China?" This seems odd. Musk is already busy enough with assembling cars, building rockets, and developing AI; why would he also have to be a "power generation expert"? The reason is simple: it is projected that by the end of 2026, the growth rate of electricity supply in the US will not keep up with the production rate of AI chips. In other words, no matter how many new chips are produced, there won't be enough electricity to power them. Well, it's kind of funny: The US has plenty of chips, but no electricity; China has plenty of electricity, but the US won't give it chips. The world is like a giant kindergarten playing house; one child holds a toy that's out of power, another child clutches the batteries, and nobody can play.
You can imagine that there is a ring of towering mountains around us. Outside the mountains, there is abundant water and grass, but inside the mountains, opportunities are scarce.
EBRO, the Ebro River, is the largest river in Spain.
In this case, Chery is the operating system, and EBRO is the application.
"The Renaissance" is all yours, I only make money with tears in my eyes.
"The Renaissance" is all yours, I only make money with tears in my eyes.
In fact, operating systems can be further layered internally: Take a car as an example. Tier 1 is a module like shock absorbers. Tier 2 is a sub-component of modules like springs. Tier 3 is a steel processing plant. Tier 4 is a steel mill. Tier 5 is a mining company. The lower the Tier level, the more basic the components supplied. The more basic the components, the lower the cultural connotations, and the stronger the efficiency and scale attributes, thus falling more towards the "operating system." This "operating system + application" division of labor is not only suitable for physical products but also applies to the fields of AI and software. Recently, Zhipu and Minimax went public, and together they experienced a phenomenal surge, doubling in value within a week, with their market capitalization approaching that of JD.com and Baidu. The reason for this surge is clear: their latest models achieve 90% of the performance of their American counterparts, yet the price per million tokens is only one-tenth of theirs. Such high cost-effectiveness is, in a way, thanks to the US sanctions. In the US, Nvidia has a surplus of computing cards, and everyone's competitive strategy is to activate more cards. In China, however, cards are scarce, and engineers are constantly grappling with how to squeeze every last drop of computing power from them. The lithography machine bottleneck prevents China from developing its own high-end training chips, resulting in a concentration of research efforts on inference chips, leading to their rapid maturation. Looking further down, abundant power drives meticulously planned data centers, processing data from all directions. This is also a complete operating system that can be subdivided into many layers. With its support, tokens become a kind of "AI oil," with performance standards and continuously decreasing costs. If you were an entrepreneur creating an AI product in the US, faced with tokens priced ten times higher, from whom would you buy them? In the future, it might not be surprising at all that a product with an American-style interface, solving American problems, and imbued with the American spirit is being calculated using Chinese tokens. Moreover, software is not as easy to subject to tariffs as industrial products. In the past, China's supply chain was a relatively closed "closed-source system," but now it is rapidly evolving towards "open source." For example, many of Mexico's outsourcing partners, while not appearing to be made in China, are actually heavily modified versions of the core code of Chinese manufacturing. In other words, as long as the Chinese supply chain can continuously reduce costs using "AI + robots" and become the most user-friendly industrial operating system, how the world uses it is ultimately just a matter of strategy. Mexico's industrial layout in the fields of complete vehicles and Chinese parts. The US's gamble with fate carries a hint of being "forced into a corner." China's foray into developing an "operating system" is also a compromise resulting from being surrounded and blocked. However, precisely because everyone faces the same "risk wall," no one can remain unaffected. Therefore, the repulsive force of competition is always pulled back by invisible forces, leading to a larger-scale division of labor and cooperation. (V) A Victory Related to You Economist Robin Hansen once proposed the "Great Filter Theory." It attempts to explain the "Fermi Paradox": Why is the universe so quiet? The theory posits that there exists an extremely rare and almost insurmountable barrier between the evolution from "dead matter" to "an advanced civilization capable of colonizing the entire observable universe." Only a very few civilizations capable of devising schemes can cross this red line; there are hardly any lucky ones in the entire universe. The silence in the universe may be the remains of countless civilizations. We cannot determine whether this red line truly exists, nor do we know how far away we are from it. But we know that if humanity successfully takes its first step towards the "Age of Interstellar Exploration," the "clash of civilizations" that stands before us like a mountain today will ultimately be as naive and insignificant as ancient tribal wars, compressed into a few dozen bytes in history books. The truly important thing is to constantly remind yourself: This may be the hidden meaning of a chaotic life. Evolution is a cruel selection process, but this cruelty is presented in a gentle way: Once your mind tires and you go around in circles, life becomes a prison, and the "advanced civilization" above you can shut you down at any time. Once you start running again, pursuing your inner curiosity, every fleeting moment will be magnified into eternity. So, you don't need to physically reach the next stop; victory is already destined for you.
Brian
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