Eric Schmidt says America's 'chaotic, confusing' style is its greatest strength in the AI race (www.businessinsider.com)

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argued at the All‑In Summit that America’s “chaotic, confusing, loud” innovation ecosystem — a mix of venture capital, deep financial markets, world‑class universities and scrappy entrepreneurs — is actually its competitive advantage in the global AI race. He urged the U.S. to lean into and accelerate that decentralized style rather than imitate more centralized approaches overseas. Schmidt warned that China’s emphasis on consumer apps and the growing trend of open‑weight large language models could give Chinese systems outsized global reach, describing open models as a kind of “Belt and Road” for technology. The comments matter because who controls open model weights, standards and deployment practices will shape global AI norms and downstream systems. U.S. policymakers are already pushing an “AI Action Plan” to promote open models aligned with Western values, while industry moves — OpenAI’s GPT‑oss, NVIDIA’s chip competition, and calls from tech leaders to boost research and energy policy — underscore the technical stakes: compute, model openness, standards, and infrastructure. If the U.S. doubles down on its decentralized capital + research engine, proponents say it can protect value frameworks and retain leadership; otherwise, model proliferation from other jurisdictions could set the de facto standards for research, deployment and governance.