Have you been following the big tech scenario lately? It’s becoming pretty clear that there’s a cold war climate (as if it ever really left us…), and, like all cold wars, it’s a game of who has the biggest toy. Between a patchy West and an unidentified UFO Eastern pole, the game is being played under the direction of the big multinationals, especially in the AI field.

OpenAI has decided to bring out the heavy artillery and launch new tools for developers, with the declared intention of simplifying the integration of artificial intelligence into applications. A gesture that seems almost altruistic, if it weren’t for the fact that behind every such initiative is a global-scale chess game, where the moves are never random and every piece has a very specific strategic weight. And in this game, the main opponent doesn’t seem to be another Western giant, but rather a large group of Chinese startups that are growing at a dizzying pace, with the blessing of the Beijing government.

Just look at names like Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek to realize that China is definitely not sitting on the sidelines. On the contrary, it’s sharpening its algorithms and flooding the market with increasingly sophisticated language models, capable of competing with Western ones. Naturally, these startups aren’t doing it all on their own: government support is evident and strategic, just as it is for OpenAI and other American companies that, despite their Silicon Valley independent narrative, receive funding and protection from the very system that denies technological development to those who aren’t in the chosen club. The competition is not just industrial but a full-blown geopolitical battle disguised as technological progress.

OpenAI’s response to this advance translates into increasingly accessible tools that lower the entry barriers for anyone wanting to integrate AI into their products. A gesture that seems like technological generosity, but is more likely a strategy to consolidate its dominance before the competition becomes too cumbersome. 

And while big tech companies and their respective governments fight for control over these technologies, it is the independent developers and the open-source community that risk being crushed in the middle. For years, free software has been the silent engine of digital innovation, offering accessible alternatives for those who didn’t want (or couldn’t) rely on the giants of Silicon Valley or Beijing. Projects like Stable Diffusion for image generation and other open-source models prove that there is another way, but this road becomes increasingly difficult as multinationals monopolize resources and infrastructure.

The problem is that, while OpenAI and Chinese startups fight their war for market dominance, the resources available to the independent community are infinitely smaller. Open-source models often cannot compete with the computational power of big tech, and those working outside these circuits risk being left on the margins of innovation. The dominant narrative tells us that without the big companies, there would be no progress, but the truth is that without fair access to tools and knowledge, progress will only belong to the few.

So, what can we do? Flipping the table seems like a titanic task, but we can at least start with a simple yet revolutionary gesture: knowing and mastering these tools. We shouldn’t passively accept that only big companies decide how and when we can use artificial intelligence. Let’s learn to use it with a critical and analytical spirit, support open alternatives, and not be seduced by the rhetoric of progress at any cost. Because in this war between titans, the only real weapon we have is awareness.