146
American Tech Companies Are Suddenly Sweating Bullets as China Catches Up on AI
(finance.yahoo.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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Technology
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Meh, that idea is as old as Compute itself. In the early days, basically the 50's into the 80's, you had dumb terminals that only provided a connection to the actually powerful centralized hardware. Think mainframe although it went by different terms at different times.
Every decade or so someone like Altman regurgitates the concept and to date no one has been able to make it widely successful. For example Microsoft has been chasing it since the NT4 days when they licensed multi-session technology from Citrix and rebranded it as "Remote Desktop Services". It's still in use today by corporations but outside of particular industries with high demands for secure remote access you'll almost never see it.
So the idea and actual implementations of it have been around for decades but it never catches on because it's always more expensive, less performant, and less flexible than hoped for.
With that said if you cock your head and squint we kinda sorta reached it with all the browser and app based online services like e-mail, listening to music, etc. Kinda. It breaks down though in the exact place that it always has...when you want to create something more involved than a text document. Suddenly it's back to it being more expensive, less performant, and less flexible than doing it on local hardware.
Missing the key point though... your general concept is absolutely right... it's failed over and over again because it can't keep up with the fact that it's cheaper and better performance with what you can buy locally, on top of bandwidth access etc... But there's 2 ways to make one product a more common option, option A, try to make the one you want them to use better, but with AI they've done something different, they are working towards making local systems worse.
Key point is, the direction of attack. Instead of making remote compute better, cheaper, faster etc... what if the attack is make local hardware, more expensive, harder to get, less reliable, or even illegal.
Right now, all of that is happening, on top of course of windows being more bloated, hardware costs are multiplying at a rate never seen before, even for outdated hardware. Netflix and spotify have already adapted the public into no longer buying physical medium for movies and music, and as people are also noting, governments making more and more regulations come in place on say OS's needing age gates, 3d printers needing to report to the government etc... It's literally an orchestrated perfect storm to be pushing people away from owning computers.
The point is they aren't trying to "catch up" to local hardware, they are trying to hinder the ability to obtain local hardware.