ALFA Field Notes

Another AI Breakthrough in China

Yesterday, one of China’s top technology companies, Alibaba, released its own AI model and it is reported that it performs equal to the DeepSeek model that sent shock waves across the industry. But the model, Qwen QWQ-32B, might not just be an extension of the status quo as the company said it only needed a fraction of the computing power used for DeepSeek.

This is the race we are in — with advancements happening at a seemingly weekly clip. And it is a race China is determined to win. The Trump administration, though, is committed to staying ahead. As we argued on Monday, a key component of that strategy should be to revoke the Biden-era AI Diffusion rule, which “provides CCP-backed companies like Huawei and Tencent with a critical opening to capture vast new market share from South America to Southern Europe, surpass the United States as the world’s leading provider of AI infrastructure, and gain key geopolitical influence in the process.”

No longer one-off anomalies, China’s AI advancements need to be addressed with smart policy. As these models and others continue forward, not only could it reduce the competitive delta America enjoys today, it could just as easily expand the technological influence the CCP seeks around the world.

Commerce Department Revamps Broadband Program

Earlier this week, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced the department “is ripping out the Biden Administration’s pointless requirements” attached to a 2021 broadband program that was launched to connect Americans to the internet.

• Congress approved $42 billion dollars through the “Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment” program.

• The Biden-led Commerce Department then imposed regulations such as price fixing, labor requirements, and technology biases which have established the program as a poster-child for government inefficiency and incompetence.

• To date, not a single American has been connected to the internet from the program. In fact, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie noted this week, “not an inch of fiber has been built”.

Sensibly, Secretary Lutnick declared Commerce will now take a “tech-neutral approach that is rigorously driven by outcomes” — eliciting screams from Democrats that the potential incorporation of Starklink amounts to “conflicts of interest”. Actually, the only interest that should drive government decision-making is the interest of its constituents. And if a company that already has over 7,000 internet satellites in orbit wants to provide internet service to Americans living in rural America, than by all means they should be able to.

Lunar Landings at Scale

More than fifty years ago, a human footprint on lunar soil captivated the entire planet. Today, an American company landing flawlessly on the Moon barely registers as the week's top story — a definitive sign of America’s accelerating technological dominance.

On Sunday, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace stuck the moon landing with its Blue Ghost spacecraft, putting the first-ever perfect commercial lunar touchdown in the books. "We got some moon dust on our boots," announced Firefly CEO Jason Kim with quintessential Western understatement.

Just a decade ago this feat would have required the resources of major global powers, thus proving NASA's commercial partnership model drives results. For a mere $101 million (pocket change in the context of Apollo's hundreds of billions in today's dollars), NASA delivered critical equipment to the lunar surface. We are now in the midst of an entirely new economic frontier.

While Firefly's team was celebrating in Texas, Intuitive Machines was preparing another lunar lander. While IM’s Athena landed on the moon, it appears it might have tipped over. Nonetheless, the pace is quickening. The blueprint is working. When lunar landings become routine achievements in American innovation's weekly highlight reel, it signals that the golden age we've been building toward is already taking shape.

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