It matters from the perspective of tech dependency.

If a medium/small country deemed it a threat to rely on US/China for AI capabilities, they can get 95% of the utility by banning all American and Chinese models and just using local ones.

This contrasts to something like oil or nukes, where if you're not one of the countries blessed with them, you have a serious power imbalance.

Seems to me that from an investor perspective, the AI models built into the cars and TVs and other things are likely to be open source. I think long term, due to the high cost of training these models, there is going to be a "Linux of AI". I.e. some model that lots of companies collaborate on and then use for free.

The economic logic is the same as that of operating systems. AI models are very expensive for one company to make, but lots of companies need them. So companies are better off collaborating on that side of things and competing on something else.

Economically, the AI models that require big servers with lots of GPUs in data centers should likely be more interesting to investors than the AI models that can run on local hardware.

And then a random sun flare like in 1859 wipes it all out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

Ah, the True Scotsman of 'hobby labs'.