The experience of crossing the Berlin wall back and forth from 1st world to 2nd world, has stayed with me forever since I traveled to Germany as a little kid with my parents back in the late 80s.
The difference was so stark, and a large part of this was all the technology and products.
Cars really stood out, but anything technological, really, felt like it was from another world – and indeed a 2nd world that was clearly behind.
The Trabant was ever present as the most popular car. And while it had its odd charm and quirkiness, it was clearly a car that could never make it in the 1st world in competition with modern western cars.
Visiting the TV tower in East Berlin together with the locals, that were never allowed to cross the wall, but could gaze over from there and see the wild contrast of East and West, the buzzing, colorful, chaos of West Berlin against the drab grey we were standing amidst, left an unforgettable impression on me.
The Soviet Union and East Germany with it were by no account 3rd world. They were developed technological societies and a serious competitor to the western world, but being there, seeing it first hand, there was also no question that it was a 2nd world with a parallel tech tree that was clearly behind the west, and with walls that never permitted the inhabitants the luxury of Western technology.
Our 2nd world risk
Today in San Francisco, I see no Chinese cars on the streets. When visiting home in Denmark or when traveling in Mexico recently, they were clearly present, and it seems clear that we could be at a point where the electric cars from China start surpassing the cars we have access to here, while being unavailable to all of us living in the states.
This is the first time I’ve ever started experiencing some of that 2nd world experience. Suddenly being in a place where the state of the art of a technology is not actually available.
We’re clearly not there at this point, I drive around in Waymos in San Francisco, our company is building on Google, Anthropic and OpenAI’s frontier models that are still the ones pushing the boundaries of AI, the USA is a leader in innovation and the western world in general is dominant at most technological frontiers. But for the first time that could start to change.
The recent hints that we could see restrictions or bans on US companies’ abilities to use open models from China, feels like one of those critical moments that could delineate a real shift to suddenly ending up moving from 1st world to 2nd world without relocating.
AI is at the frontier of technology in general. It’s a meta technology that will in itself allow us all to create, build and invent fast. And while all current true frontier models are American models, GLM 5.2 and Kimi 3 started marking a real new phase where we shouldn’t be surprised if that starts shifting.
A ban or restrictions on open weights, would then suddenly lead to a situation, where we in the US have no access to the state of the art, where a large other part of the world has. Where we can look over a digital wall to a world of free model usage across a much larger landscape of derived and individualized models with less controls and broader capabilities.
Today I signed the “Open Weights and American AI Leadership” document that’s been circulating across the tech ecosystem. Netlify’s participation is an obvious one. We believe in choice and openness, we’ve long championed the open web and access to a wide variety of open weight models are a continuation of the same ethos. Stay tuned for more open weight announcements from us coming soon.
Let’s not move towards a world where we’re suddenly behind a self-imposed wall of technology access, but stay in a world where we compete with confidence and believe that a free open system of innovation and competition will always win.
