Despite Stargate, China pulls ahead in the AI race. An executive order against transexual treatments for minors. And building an Iron Dome over America.
Despite Stargate, China Pulls Ahead in the AI Race
Soon after President Trump announced a $500 billion infrastructure plan for Artificial Intelligence, China released its own AI program, which seems to work better than U.S. technology, requires little energy to operate, and cost only $5 million to develop.
The Stargate Project was announced to great fanfare. The plan is to build 20 huge data centers, plus provide the vast amount of energy necessary to run them, in order to supercharge the capacity of AI, with the goal ultimately to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which would emulate the human mind. According to the OpenAI announcement,
This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
Though the Stargate Project was made public in a speech by President Trump from the White House, this is not being funded by the federal government, unlike President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. The project, which is already underway, is being privately funded, with the Japanese investment company SoftBank taking the lead.
It’s not really “Trump’s AI plan,” as it’s being called, though he is easing the regulations that have made the launch of Stargate more difficult. At the White House announcement, the CEO of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, said that this initiative will create an “artificial superintelligence” that will usher in Trump’s aspiration of America’s “golden age.”
Elon Musk, for whom OpenAI’s Sam Altman is a rival, expressed skepticism that SoftBank has enough money to pull this off, leading the media to jump to the conclusion that since Musk opposes “Trump’s plan,” he will soon be kicked out of the Maga world.
But that speculation was soon overshadowed by a new development. China released its counterpart to OpenAI called DeepSeek. Because of American restrictions on exporting technology, particularly the specialized Nividia chips that AI relies on, to China, a Chinese engineer, Liang Wenfeng, found a way to do without them. This led to DeepSeek, which meets or exceeds the capabilities of OpenAI without the need for a massive amount of energy that the American technology needs.
In fact, according to tech reporter Saloni Goel, “Reportedly, DeepSeek cost just $5.6 million to develop, challenging the narratives by many Silicon Valley-based companies of the need for massive capital spending to develop the strongest models.”
So much for Stargate. At least that was the reaction of the stock market, as tech stocks–especially Nividia–plummeted, with investors losing billions.
Liang is offering licensing opportunities to Western companies. So much for America’s leadership in AI and our competition with China, which ironically made DeepSeek possible. Open AI is floating the claim that the DeepSeek engineers relied on an unauthorized tapping in to OpenAI to develop their technology. Maybe so.
But tech mogul Marc Andreesen is surely right when he calls this our “Sputnik moment.” That’s a reference to the space race, when Russia’s Sputnik became the first satellite in outer space, a show of technological superiority that panicked the United States into catching up.
An Executive Order Against Transexual Treatments for Minors
President Trump issued an executive order entitled Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation. It’s worth reading. Here is the summary:
Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.
Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.
Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.
In related news, Trump’s new Department of Justice dropped charges against Houston doctor Eithan Haim, who blew the whistle on a hospital that was secretly performing sex-change procedures on minors in defiance of a Texas law against them. Incredibly, the Biden Department of Justice prosecuted not the hospital but Dr. Haim for violating patient confidentiality–even though he had redacted all names and photos in the documents he released–and was charging him for crimes that could have imprisoned him for 10 years. In fact, the judge was on the verge of putting him in jail for violating a gag order against his talking about the case when the order came for the charges to be dismissed.
Building an Iron Dome over America.
Israel has an “Iron Dome,” a system that can shoot down missiles, rockets, and even artillery shells that has protected the country from the countless attacks it has been subject to.
The anti-missile defense system, which consists of batteries of radar-guided interceptor missiles, is a collaboration of Israeli and American technology. Though the United States has missile defense systems on ships and to protect military units, we have nothing comparable that can protect the nation as a whole from long-range ballistic missiles.
We do have some capability for that. We reportedly have 44 ground-based anti-missile missiles in Alaska and California, plus 56 anti-ballistic missiles on ships. But that’s no iron dome. And they wouldn’t last long in an all-out attack from China or Russia.
Another of President Trump’s executive orders calls for the development of an iron dome system for the United States. The problem is that Israel is a small country, with a landmass of just 8,000 square miles. The U.S. has a landmass of 3.8 million square miles. That is a much greater area to defend. Just protecting the cities would be unfathomably expensive. One 20-missile battery in Israel costs $37-$50 million, and each guided missile costs $50,000.
Jim Geraghty discusses all of this in his National Review piece What It Will Take to Create an ‘Iron Dome for America’. The prospects sound bleak, but technology has come a long way since 1999 when Israel’s systems were first deployed. Miniaturization can make the components cheaper, and spaced-based detection and launch capabilities can increase a system’s coverage.
Most intriguing, though, is shooting down incoming ordinance with lasers. An Israeli company has already developed what it calls the “Iron Beam,” which will be deployed as a component of the existing Iron Dome possibly as early as this year. Says the developers, “Engaging at the speed of light, IRON BEAM has an unlimited magazine, with almost zero cost per interception, and causes minimal collateral damage.”
UPDATE: See this American laser at work. (HT: Bob Foote)