US president Donald Trump has a (self-proclaimed) “Visionary AI Action Plan” that is due to put American government money behind the export of what his administration hopes will be a full AI stack, from chips right through to domain-specific applications, made in the USA.
If you are an enterprise user in South Africa, this is tremendously good news – for now.
Trump explicitly doesn't want countries to become dependent on AI flogged by America's enemies, which in this context are Russia and China. That's a kind of second prize, after stopping anyone else from developing any decent AI, but the US government appears to have accepted that's not going to fly. (Not even if it makes Elon Musk nerf the chips in Teslas because they are too AI-capable.)
So, America does not just want to win AI by building the most compelling models and services. America wants to win in AI by subsidy. Or, if you will, by distorting the market. It wants to artificially lower the cost of its AI offering in the rest of the world.
Which is, you know, an interesting approach when the other side is China, which has to a reasonable approximation never yet lost a price war.
For business users, AI is already coming in at below cost thanks to VC money and a market-grab mentality among the big vendors. That's nothing compared to what happens when governments start pumping in national-strategic-priority type money, though.
So, America does not just want to win AI by building the most compelling models and services.
There is just one catch: American AI can't be woke. US federal buying muscle will be applied to encourage LLMs towards “truth-seeking and ideological neutrality”.
Which, if properly implemented, is not all that bad, if you think about it; cheap AI that tries to be honest and unbiased.
South Africa is not Trump's favourite country, to be sure, but the Cold War taught us that can be a good thing. You spend more money bribing the country that is hard to bribe and that may not stay bribed than you do on countries you can rely on. There may be a dramatic exclusion of SA to make a point, but ultimately, beyond Trump, the US wants to win Africa, and SA is key to that.
But the Cold War also taught us that when the world is divided into Us and Them, the carrot is followed by the stick. If you fail to sign up to America's AI standards and services, you can expect the asking nicely to taper off sharply, to be replaced by a much more threatening approach.
The ICT industry may have the benefit of a precedent by way of de-dollarisation, which has nothing in common with AI other than the way the US government looks at it.
When other countries trade in dollars, it gives the US all kinds of reach, which it would very much like to maintain. Russia is not keen on that, and South Africa is an important part of Russia's plan to de-dollarise BRICS and beyond.
If South Africa folds under US pressure on de-dollarisation, then you had better standardise on US AI, or be ready to transition away from anyone else's tech fast.
If the dollar is ditched, then maybe there is still room for sovereign nations to choose their own AI stacks in this new world.
Share