I’m slightly confuse as to how all this works. Do the GPUs just sit there with the models on them when the models are not in use?
I guess I’d assumed this sort of thing would be allocated dynamically. Of course, there’s a benefit to minimizing the number of times you load a model. But surely if a GPU+model is idle for more than a couple minutes it could be freed?
(I’m not an AI guy, though—actually I’m used to asking SLURM for new nodes with every run I do!)
Let's say, then, that it's not so much "dumb and wasteful" as "energy inefficient". In fact, this can be quite wise in a modern world full of surveillance-as-a-business and "us-east-1 disasters"
Can you elaborate the last statement? Don't quite understand why loading local LLM to GPU RAM, using it for the job and then "ejecting" is "dumb and wasteful" idea?
I believe GP means it still to be connected to 'if this kind of latency is unacceptable to you' - i.e. you can't load/use/unload, you have to keep it in RAM all the time.
In that case it's massively increasing your memory requirement not just to the peak the model needs, but to + whatever the other biggest use might be that'll be inherently concurrent with it.
Because as a function of hardware and electricity costs, a “cloud” GPU will be many times more efficient per output token. You aren’t loading/offloading models and don’t have any parts of the GPU waiting for input. Everything is fully saturated always.
> This (along with batching) is why large local models are a dumb and wasteful idea if you're not serving them at enterprise scale.
Local models are never a dumb idea. The only time it's dumb to use them in an enterprise is if the infra is Mac Studio with M3 Ultra because pp time is terrible.
Models take a lot of VRAM which is tightly coupled to the GPU so yeah, it's basically sitting there with the model waiting for use. I'm sure they probably do idle out but a few minutes of idle time is a lot of waste--possibly the full 82% mentioned. In this case they optimized by letting the GPUs load multiple models and sharing the load out by token.
They definitely won't idle out- if they idle out, it'll take on the order of up to 60 seconds to load the model back into VRAM, depending on the model.
That's an eternity for a request. I highly doubt they will timeout any model they serve.
> That's an eternity for a request. I highly doubt they will timeout any model they serve.
That's what easing functions are for.
Let's say 10 GPUs are in use. You keep another 3 with the model loaded. If demand increases slowly you slowly increase your headroom. If demand increases rapidly, you also increase rapidly.
The correct way to do this is more complicated and you should model based on your usage history, but if you have sufficient headroom then very few should be left idle. Remember that these models do requests in batches.
If they don't timeout models, they're throwing money down the drain. Though that wouldn't be uncommon.
That's only if you're expecting 10 GPUs in use. They're dealing with ~1 GPU in use for a model, just sitting there. Alibaba has a very long tail of old models that barely anyone uses anymore, and yet they still serve.
Here's a quote from the paper above:
> Given a list of M models to be served, our goal is to minimize the number of GPU instances N required to meet the SLOs for all models through auto-scaling, thus maximizing resource usage. The strawman strategy, i.e., no auto-scaling at all, reserves at least one dedicated instance for each model, leading to N = O(M)
For example, Qwen2 72b is rarely used these days. And yet it will take up 2 of their H20 gpus (with 96GB VRAM) to serve, at the bare minimum, assuming that they don't quantize the BF16 down to FP8 (and I don't think they would, although other providers probably would). And then there's other older models, like the Qwen 2.5, Qwen 2, Qwen 1.5, and Qwen 1 series models. They all take up VRAM if the endpoint is active!
Alibaba cannot easily just timeout these models from VRAM, even if they only get 1 request per hour.
That's the issue. Their backlog of models take up a large amount of VRAM, and yet get ZERO compute most of the time! You can easily use an easing function to scale up from 2 gpus to 200 gpus, but you cannot ever timeout the last 2 gpus that's serving the model.
If you read the paper linked above, it's actually quite interesting how Alibaba goes and solves this problem.
Meanwhile on the other hand, Deepseek solves the issue by just saying "fuck you, we're serving only our latest model and you can deal with it". They're pretty pragmatic about it at least.
If I had to handle this problem, I'd do some kind of "split on existing loaded GPUs" for new sessions, and then when some cap is hit, spool an additional GPU in the background and the transfer the new session to that GPU as soon as the model is loaded.
I'd have to play with the configuration and load calcs, but I'm sure there's a low param, neat solution to the request/service problem.
> I guess I’d assumed this sort of thing would be allocated dynamically
At the scale of a hyperscaler I think Alibaba is the one that would be doing that. AWS, Azure and I assume Alibaba do lease/rent data centers, but someone has to own the servers / GPU racks. I know there are specialized companies like nscale (and more further down the chain) in the mix, but I always assumed they only lease out fixed capacity.
The paper is about techniques to do that dynamic allocation to maximize utilization without incurring unacceptable latencies. If you let a GPU sit idle for several minutes after serving a single request, you're setting money on fire. So they reuse it for a different model as soon as possible, starting even before the first request is finished, because: If you don't have a dedicated GPU for a model, are you going to wait for a multi-gigabyte transfer before each request? So they have a dedicated GPU (or two, one for prefill, one for decode) for a group of models that are processed in an interleaved fashion, scheduled such that they stay within the latency budget.
>Do the GPUs just sit there with the models on them when the models are not in use
I've assumed that as well. It makes sense to me since loading up a model locally takes a while. I wonder if there is some sort of better way I'm not in the know about. That or too GPU poor to know about.
Not really, Figure 1(a) of the paper says that the 17.7% are relative to a total of 30k GPUs (i.e. 5310 GPUs for handling those 1.35% of requests) and the reduction is measured in a smaller beta deployment with only 47 different models (vs. the 733 "cold" models overall.) Naïve extrapolation by model count suggests they would need 3321 GPUs to serve all cold models, a 37.5% reduction to before. (Or 6.6% reduction of the full 30k-GPU cluster.)
From the SCMP article you might get the impression that the various figures all refer to the same GPU cluster, but in the paper itself it's very clear that this is not the case, i.e. the 213 GPUs in the smaller cluster are not serving 1.35% of the requests in the larger cluster. Then if you want to scale it, you have a choice of different numbers you could scale, and each would get different results. Since they're constrained by the limited number of different models a single GPU can serve, I think scaling by the number of models is the most realistic option.
In the past, software and computer engineers would tackle problems head-on, designing algorithms and finding creative solutions.
thanks to the US restrictions on semiconductor industry (Chinese), Chinese engineers are being forced to innovate and find their own ways to overcome challenges like the old school engineers (What Silicon Valley used to be)
If you're one who sees progress as an end goal unto itself, what you describe is a good thing. When one party is attempting novel solutions to outcompete the competition we will be faster to whatever the next change is.
That said, I'm not sure what the US policies specifically have to do with this. Countries are always in competition with one another, and if one industry or technology is considered a national security threat they will guard it.
> However, a small handful of models such as Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek are most popular for inference, with most other models only sporadically called upon. This leads to resource inefficiency, with 17.7 per cent of GPUs allocated to serve only 1.35 per cent of requests in Alibaba Cloud’s marketplace, the researchers found.
The US attempt to slow down China's technological development succeeds on the basis of preventing China from directly following the same path, but may backfire in the sense it forces innovation by China in a different direction. The overall outcome for us all may be increase efficiency as a result of this forced innovation, especially if Chinese companies continue to open source their advances, so we may in the end have reason to thank the US for their civilisational gate keeping
History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.
In many senses there's hubris in the western* view of China accomplishments: most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.
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* I hate the term "western" because some "westeners" use it to separated what they think are "civilized" from "uncivilized", hence for them LATAM is not "western" even though everything about LATAM countries is western.
> most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.
While I don't disagree with your overall point, it's important to recognize that this is only a phenomenon of the last ~30 years, and to avoid falling into the trapn of Han racial chauvinism. E.g. there were ~no Chinese scientists in Germany in the 70s but they were heavily innovating nevertheless.
Absolutely. China obviously has a longer history with innovation but they like to make it seem everything was invented by them at some point in the past. I'd say newer technology is where China has had a bigger impact.
Consequently newer tech is precisely where global cooperation is most required so no country can really do it by themselves. We could even say no country, western or otherwise, has been doing it on their own for the past 500 years or so but alas...
Ironically, the best way America could have prevented China’s rise in tech was by stapling green cards to diplomas of Chinese citizens who completed their higher education in the U.S. like the plan in the early 2010s.
Massive vector for theft of trade secrets and intellectual property.
It’s notable that China did not adopt the same policy during the period you are associating with their rise. Indeed, they’ve taken the opposite stance in recent years and (now that they have stolen American IP) have moved to seize control of assets and expel the superfluous foreigners.
There is a lesson to be learned there, but it’s contrary to the argument you are trying to make.
Those students would have just gone to other countries, written their PhD dissertations there, advanced another country’s tech sector, and the US would have found the pain of isolationism that much sooner.
It is not possible to keep core IP secret. HN folks, of all people, should know this. Anything that thousands of people know is de facto public knowledge.
How are you going to gain core IP research if you don't have experience or access to leading edge researchers to pass you knowledge in the first place?
Talent is proportional to population, but that only matters if society and state has the infrastructure to raise that talent up. Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.
> Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.
The reason why these statements are not true is because of colonization, delayed industrialization, and Western intervention post-independence. Getting out of this “quicksand” is exceedingly difficult.
China did well to industrialize quickly and keep intervention at bay - in fact, you could argue that it making the rest of the world reliant on its industrial capacity helped address the intervention problem.
This world view is just wrong from top to bottom. Between 1945-1970, China was in a much worser state that any of those 3rd world countries in many aspects. Are you saying post 1970, the reason why these countries did not develop as fast as china is because of colonialism and intervention? You can apply the same arguments to Japan in 45 and Korea in 50. But but but aid? Ok and we send billions to countries all around the world every year.
> They also didn’t face the brunt of European colonialism.
But they faced the brunt of Chinese & Japanese colonialism, and a full-blown civil war after which their GDP per capita was in the same ballpark as Kenya's.
Imperialism (as a system of extracting wealth from poor countries) continues to exist, but China has a working countermeasure. You can see similar with Vietnam.
Sure if you water down the term of imperialism then yes. It is then incumbent on you to prove "imperialism" among the worst performers economically. What imperialism plagues liberia and ethiopia and honduras and papua new guinea
“Those who come with wheat, millet, corn or milk, they are not helping us. Those who really want to help us can give us ploughs, tractors, fertilizers, insecticides, watering cans, drills and dams. That is how we would define food aid.”
― Thomas Sankara
China wasn't beholden to neoliberalism and the World Bank and IMF.
China made the right choice to dump a ton of resources into different industries without the expectation of immediate RoI or any RoI at all. Anyone or anything that got in the way of their goals were dealt with.
>"...The issue is allowing the Chinese to steal IP..."
I do not think they need permission. There is no force that could order country to recognize IP. Do you really expect all world forever pay rent to few giant corps?
You're talking about recognizing IP, I am talking about stealing IP AND selling stolen IP in our markets.
1st: yes force can be used to discourage the theft of IP. This is merely an obstacle, not a total blocker
2nd: yes force can be used to block IP from our markets. This is actually incredibly trivial and would have been very easy 40-years ago.
Sorry no. If you can't imagine how one country couldn't use force to stop another country from stealing IP then you are either not intellectually up to this conversation or not arguing in good faith.
>"The issue is allowing the Chinese to steal IP and then compete in our markets with that stolen IP"
That was the original message. My understanding of "our markets" was customers of the US which include the US itself, China and many other countries. Sure the US can prohibit importing of China's goods. It can not control what happens in the rest of the world to the degree that it once could.
The inclusion of China in the WTO is what changed everything.
The elites thought they'd set up shop in a new, gigantic consumer market and reap the rewards. So they got Clinton to spend his last days in office lobbying very aggressively for China's inclusion into the WTO.
China had different plans. Keeping the plunderers out (this time) was one of the smartest moves any nation has made in recorded history. Then the same elites slowly pivoted against China, post realizing they wouldn't be allowed to own China. If we can own you, you're our friend; if we can't own you, you're our enemy. And this is quite obviously not a defense of China's human rights record or anything else, that's not the point. China only mattered (in the enemy sense) when the elites realized they were going to be locked on the outside of the rise.
They didn't keep the foreign corporations out. Having them as on-shore competitors is what keeps their own companies from merely seeking rents. Foreign companies also didn't bring their best products in the beginning out of the fear of getting copied, but that strategy is not sustainable over time as Chinese companies get better at making things.
Eh? They are a country with a culture that values education like a few other asian countries. They were set back by the colonial bullshit of Europe, devastation of WW2 and communist revolutions and so. They would have gotten to the same point as they are today, just longer if anything if any attempt was made to hamper it.
But they didn’t do it, because the current administration can’t get it through their thick skulls that the key advantage the US can have in this world is a monopoly on all the really smart people.
The whole “China copies everything” narrative is becoming less and less true.
It’s funny - it’s at the point with Chinese manufacturing for niche electronic goods (e.g rooftop van air conditioner) where some Chinese brands are more trustworthy - more value for your money and sometimes even better overall quality. With American brands you gotta make sure you’re not overpaying for dated tech that is inefficient. Maybe the same will happen with LLMs.
It's most notable to me in mid level manufacturing equipment. Once upon a time you would never touch a chinese made CNC, lathe, mill etc. Now they're totally fine, and offer significant value for your dollar. Sometimes outperforming other countries offerings while being cheaper to boot. Especially in new industries and processes, suggesting innovation is not the differentiator it used to be.
Enterprises often prefer having US based support and so can prefer US or European machines that have that supply chain setup.
> History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.
It's worked for a very long time for aircraft.
China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline.
If for no technical reasons and purely political, COMAC may still be decades away from being able to fly to most of the world.
Likewise, in ~5 years, China may be able to build Chips that are as good as Nvidia after Nvidia's 90% profit margin - i.e. they are 1/10th as good for the price - but since they can buy them for cost - they're they same price for performance and good enough.
If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.
This statement doesn't make a lot of sense. 40-50% of vehicles are foreign-made already[1]. I would strongly wager it's vastly more likely that these Chinese vehicles do not meet US safety standards - which are quite high.
Yes. The EU focuses on safety of pedestrians, and the US focuses on safety of occupants. That's not to say a vehicle cannot do both well (see the many European vehicles sold in the US), but that is to say Chinese vehicles may not meet the US standards. The US has a lot of vehicle regulations that significantly differ from the EU market.
Because, as a EU citizen, I have never in my life seen any tests that carmarkers are advertising with that focus on pedestrians. I am regularly seeing tests that focus on occupants though, e.g. the Euro NCAP. But I am by no means an expert.
It would be hard to focus on pedestrian safety from a carmaker standpoint except for adding software features that recognize people in front of you and auto-brake or smth, which definitely is not the focus of the tests here. It may be a requirement though. The more I think about it, the more sure I am that you just made this up, sorry.
Pedestrian impact design has been a thing in the European market for a while. One example: the pop-up hood that detects a pedestrian impact, it's a pyrotechnic device that makes the hood pop up to give more of a cushion for the pedestrian to land on. Also I think pedestrian safety is one reason modern BMWs and Audis have the timing chains (very annoyingly for maintenance) fitted at the back of the engine, to give more space for pedestrian impact. Stuff like that. Also the automated emergency braking systems, more recently.
You can look at the Euro NCAP ratings for the 2023 BYD Seal, for example: https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/byd/seal/50012. They break down the rating based on safety for adult occupants, child occupants and pedestrians. These ratings are based on many different crash tests.
> If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.
Note that this happens at the same time the US is breaking up its own alliances, so as of this writing, there's no such thing as certainty about politics.
The question of “can we trust the American government” is now being asked more often. Existing alliances and new potential alliances face that question, whether or not you personally believe that they should trust America.
Even if no concrete actions are being performed with asking that question, the fact that question is even being asked is a major drop from where we were.
From the US perspective, we have been asking ourselves "can we trust Europe's military capacity" for a very long time and the answer (prior to 2025) was: NO.
With Trump on one side and Russia on the other, it seems like the answer has shifted to: MAYBE.
> From the US perspective, we have been asking ourselves "can we trust Europe's military capacity" for a very long time and the answer (prior to 2025) was: NO.
NATO's mutual defense clause has only been activated once: after 9/11, when the United States declared war on the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Out of the 3621 deaths of coalition soldiers, 1160 of them were from nations other than the United States, including 457 from the UK, 159 from Canada, and 90 from France.
Frankly, this sounds like you're repeating propaganda.
When the US called its allies to its wars, NATO responded. Now that the rest of NATO is being threatened, the US is playing neutral, trying to see which side will bid highest for their help.
The US has become unreliable and erratic. Countries aren’t cutting ties or anything, but certainly investing to reduce exposure to capricious US leadership. Much of Europe is increasing domestic military production rather than just buying more from the US precisely because the US has publicly discussed leaving NATO and/or not honoring its guarantees.
Increasing domestic military production is actually a great outcome.
Obviously Wall Street would have preferred purchasing from US-listed/owned arms companies, but from the perspective of a military alliance, having well-armed allies is the main point.
It's really hard to argue with Trump's methods if they led to Europe finally spending on their own defense.
On the contrary, his methods are ridiculous. He could have achieved similar ends without kowtowing to Russia, without squandering the opportunity to further weaken Russia’s military capacity, and so on. Something similar applies to pretty much everything else he’s done. He incurs collateral damage on everything even when it’s completely unnecessary to do so. It’s a definitional example of egregious incompetence.
No one is going to walk away from that kind of alliance tomorrow, sure. Stuff like "we're going to remotely disable military equipment we've sold you" is going to have consequences though. It's not walking away from alliances, it's just focusing on more stable countries.
It's "block everything that depends on US clouds", which is a considerable downgrade (because you can't upload all mission parameters to an airplane without going through the cloud, and you can't use self-diagnosis features), but not entirely a kill switch. Close enough, though.
I observe serious financial commitments towards walking away from US tech:
The EU is pumping money into what they call "digital sovereignty" left and right. Germany just cancelled their Microsoft subscriptions and replaced them with self-funded Open Source for Schleswig-Holstein, which is roughly 5% of all government employees. That's one hell of a trial run. Germany's "OpenDesk" and France’s "La Suite numérique" even made into the new "Franco-German Economic Agenda 2025", which self-describes as "bilateral coordination to full swing for a more sovereign Europe".
I mean, the current administration has repeatedly threatened to invade militarily two of its allies. Also, it has repeatedly threatened to not honor military agreements with most others, and both the current president and vice-president have insulted the leaders of several allied countries to their face.
Oh, and if that weren't sufficient, the current admin has unilaterally broken all trade treaties (alongside most intellectual property treaties) it held with its commercial partners.
The EU is slow at it, but it's no accident that everybody is doing their best to move away from US tech and military dependencies.
But at the same time they are fielding multiple new stealth aircraft and their jets and missiles outperformed western aircraft in the recent Pakistan India flare-up.
Roughly speaking, an aircraft must fulfill a certain amount of economy (cheap, low cost to operate), safety, and performance.
If you compromise on safety, you get something that is still suitable for the military. If you don't care about economics you can participate in the space race.
But for commercial air travel, you don't have the luxury to pick just two; a competitive commercial airliner has to perform exceedingly well in all three regards.
If you're an airline using expensive aircraft you will go bankrupt. If your aircraft is too slow then your competitors will eat your lunch, and if you have a reputation of being unsafe then your customers will run away or the government will pull the plug (likely both).
IMHO affordable commercial air travel is one of the biggest marvels of 20th century engineering.
China currently can't make the high-performance, efficient, long-life jet engines that US & Europe make. The commercial market is heavily cost-sensitive, so they can't compete there currently as a result.
This doesn't matter so much for military purposes: they can easily eat the cost of a higher maintenance and replacement schedule on a smaller number of military jets with fewer hours on them.
This gives them more iteration cycles, speeding their building up of experience.
They're catching up. Industrial espionage will help them along too, but not as much as the experience from engineering their own designs.
It’s would be a result of where the money and resources go, I assume. Apparently they haven’t felt a need to manufacture their own commercial jets but they did for military jets. They definitely feel the need in the case of chips.
> China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline
And both those planes have a strong dependency on "western" components that won't be overcome before the 2030s, and even then, they're around a generation behind.
5 years behind becomes 3 years behind. China is expanding their manufacturing abilities faster than the US. Soon they will surpass the US. Look no further than their generic consumer electronics manufacturing.
It's not 5 years behind, engine tech is more on a ~15 year cycle, or even more.
CFM LEAP, latest short-to-medium-haul airliner engine from CFM (GE+Safran) is from 2013 (first run). Its predecessor, CFM56, is from 1974 (first run) and saw a few evolutions, including as late as 2009.
Re: Western. A similar thing plays out when the term "international community" is used in news. It refers to the US and its major allies which means US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand more or less.
Essentially countries that were developed prior to 1990 or so , although South Korea is a tricky case today going by this definition, as are Taiwan, Hongkong and Singapore
> A similar thing plays out when the term "international community" is used in news. It refers to the US and its major allies which means US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand more or less.
Wait, really? I thought "international community" meant all countries.
There was a particularly memorable use of this sense some time ago, when the UK representative to the UN explained that they abstained from a vote in the General Council that passed with something like 200+ members voting for it because "the international community is still divided on the topic".
Sometimes it's used in the expected way, but (more?) often, "international community" euphemistically refers to whomever is currently one of, or an ally of the above mentioned countries.
China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many many other countries that are very active members of the international community are not counted among members of THE "international community". Hell, much of Europe isn't either, including some of the former colonial empires, on some topics.
China, Russia, India are certainly referred to when using this term. Iran and Saudi Arbia may or may not be. Usually not Pakistan, so I really dont know what in the hell you are saying.
It's just straight up low expectations and underestimation derived from racism in the assumption that Americans are smarter and more capable, and Chinese are only good for copying designs and making things we come up with. The idea that they can't do that like we can is pervasive.
It’s absolutely fascinating and mystifying (and dismaying) to see educated and otherwise smart people in engineering in the US hold an opinion that two countries with over a billion people each can’t accomplish anything in engineering or science without “us”.
Despite ample and repeated evidence that they can and, in China’s case, that they’re the best in the world in several areas of manufacturing.
It is an odd category, and Japan is often considered to be "Western" - these days at least. That certainly wasn't the case even a few generations ago.
I think it's ostensibly supposed to be more about shared cultural values, but even that is a pretty weak way to divide countries. Perhaps "an ally of the United States" is a little more accurate?
Any societal dividing line like this is bound to hit on problems once subjected to the real world.
I think Japan likely shares more values culturally with China than USA outside of political systems. In any aspect outside of that Japan is not western.
The leaders of Japan during the Meiji era (starting 1868) will be sad to learn that their attempt to thoroughly Westernize Japanese society failed even though it enabled Japan to dominate China (and most of the Western Pacific) for decades.
Why would I do that tho? If we look at the names of scientists/researchers/engineers/businessmen, the conclusion would be that the US has contributed nothing to the world. Europeans did all the hard work!
this is true for anyone - create challenges, and you optimize efficiency elsewhere.
Also, isn't this the usual path to better computer science? Reducing computation needs by making better/more efficient algorithms? The whole "trillions of dollars of brute force GPU strength" proposed by Altman, Nadella, Musk et al just seems to reinforce that these are business people at heart, not engineers/computer scientists...
western is a cultural term derived from a geographic one. The US is also not 'western' strictly geographically as it is not in western europe, neither is australia. But they both originated from Britain's empire and share in it's cultural ancestry. It means "western europe and it's cultural derivatives". Spain and Portugal's empire fell away long before britain and france's and they don't have similar geopolitical relations like NATO, so it's hard to consider their former colonies/upstarts part of the same sphere of cultural influence.
China for sure will catch up, the question is what they will do with it. They're not ambitious like the US/West. The US wanted influence all over the world as an extension of the cold war and to keep economic interests safeguarded. But China just doesn't operate that way. They're more hands-off. They could be opening up alibaba cloud datacenters all over the US, offering it as an AWS/Azure alternative, funding tons of startups all over europe, the US,etc... to exert their influence, but they won't. They have a more long-term low-and-slow approach to global domination. The "100 year marathon" as they called it, which they'll win for sure.
China's greatest weakness is not just their lack of ambition,but their command-economy. They're doing capitalism but with central control of the economy. It intertwines government policy with corporate policy, making it harder to do business overseas (like with bytedance/tiktok).
Oddly since I got many downvotes with this statement, it's clear the average hacker news reader knows very little about world history or common knowledge
I am not sure exactly to what degree, but "I hate the term 'western' because some 'weste[r]ners' use it to separated what they think are 'civilized' from 'uncivilized'" is definitely a bit of an antiquated perspective at this point; almost like a justification to hold on to other older perspectives about "racism". I have started resorting to using terms like European Cultural Block because of it in certain communities that understand contemporary topics and have an advanced understanding of the world.
Your first statement is not likely unique to China though, even though they have demonstrated that in about the last 40 years, which I don't really think qualifies as "history". What it does demonstrate is that societies that have a certain kind of ethnic self-respect and can cast off the detrimental influences of foreign, hostile, and even enemy elements to pursue their own self-interest and survival will succeed, regardless of hurdles placed before them.
It's really just a story of personal development and either escaping, evading, and avoiding detrimental, toxic people and their behaviors. All of humanity that all has to currently still share a single planet with ZERO save spots, would be better off if we all not just allowed each other to be ourselves in our won places without others subverting, subjugating, infiltrating, dominating, poisoning, or polluting any other people on the planet. Then everyone can decide if we want to be friends or not friends with each other, collaborate and be friendly or simply avoid each other. We do not have to like each other to get along if everyone agrees on a base understanding that no people can parasitize and abuse and manipulate any others.
The whole "western" or "the west" always makes me laugh. Half the time it's a dog whistle for "white". Like many right-wing commentators love saying "Western Values" to avoid saying "white, Euro-centric, Christian values".
Mexico is a modern country, an industrialized country, a country that is exactly as "western" as the US or Canada. They have the same religious beliefs, speak a dialect of a European language. They have European style cities, a long history of cultural contributions. Yet they're not white enough to be part of "The West".
I think at this point we should be honest with ourselves in it's usage. 90% of the time it's a racist dog whistle.
Earlier in your comment you say “half the time” while you end with “90% of the time” the phrase “western” is a racist expression, undermining your argument that is already flawed, emotional, and anti-constructive.
The number of nuclear armed countries with large economies that will get worked up if you call them racists for being ‘the west’ is waaaay larger than zero.
>History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.
I don't think you can really produce a definite counterfactual that they would or wouldn't have taken longer or shorter without it, but certainly they were pushing for self sufficiency long before technology restrictions. But we're not going to be handing our technologies to our competitors on a silver platter, and it's also best for businesses to start weaning themselves off the Chiinese market. Virtually every market reliant on them today is in big trouble.
As for hubris, I think that's more a projection of your part if you want to start bringing up race cards with regards to contributions, that kind of argument would be applicable to everyone. And AI research is highly diverse and international, Chinese names don't dominate the list more than Turks, Greeks, Malaysians, etc.
> History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.
Really? How long has China been attempting to build their own jet engines? How long have they been attempting to build competitive CPUs?
History has shown withholding tech successfully keeps them at least a generation behind the west.
In some fields like CPUs they “make up for it” by just building larger clusters, but ultimately history does not show what you’re claiming. The only thing it shows is that we need to be even more diligent in protecting IP because a large portion of their catching up is a direct result of stealing the tech they were cut off from.
Huh? Did you read your own link? The jet engine that was shown at an aviation show as a non-functioning prototype in 2011, with hopes they'd have a functioning version by 2016, and in service by 2020 (it wasn't in service in 2020). Notice at the very top of your own article it says "still in development".
>CPU since 2000
That isn't remotely competitive, and at least a full generation behind.
What part of "a non-functioning prototype" don't you understand?
Literally anyone can make a prototype jet engine. The metallurgy and process to make a functioning one is several orders of magnitude more difficult. Which is why... China still buys the vast, vast majority of their jet engines from Russia for military use. And their commercial passenger jets use engines from CFM.
It’s helpful to think of westernism as a platonic ideal. Individually derived reason and virtue, superior to state and sometimes ‘gods’ as a tradition to drive up the total survivability, richness, and stability of the community.
Concepts that enable the individual should empower a chosen configuration of society not the other way around.
Contrast this with non westernism where either education of the individual is not valued or the state is the primary goal over the individual.
I’ve worked with states governments and individuals around the world for 20 years and find this very useful definition. What’s confusing is the nations who have half adopted westernism but don’t fully due to either caste systems or government dominated thinking.
It’s an arrow towards rationalism over tradition, individualism over collectivism, flatness over hierarchy, and future over past. But only the limit of the resources any given society has.
I find "western" is often used to disparage "western thought", as in it can't grasp the deep wisdom of those mysterious orientals that transcends normal logic and reason. Declaring such a split is the underpinning of a whole lot of woo-woo beliefs.
I think anti-immigrant rhetoric will have the most impact against the US. A lot of the people innovating on this stuff are being maligned and leaving in droves.
Aside from geography, attracting talent from all over the world is the one edge the US has a nation over countries like China. But now the US is trying to be xenophobic like China, restrict tech import/export like China but compete against 10x population and lack of similar levels of internal strife and fissures.
The world, even Europe is looking for a new country to take on a leader/superpower role. China isn't there yet, but it might get there in a few years after their next-gen fighter jets and catching up to ASML.
But, China's greatest weakness is their lack of ambition and focus on regional matters like Taiwan and south china sea, instead of winning over western europe and india.
> But, China's greatest weakness is their lack of ambition and focus on regional matters like Taiwan and south china sea, instead of winning over western europe and india.
That's a strength. Them not having interest in global domination and regime change other than their backyard is what allows them to easily make partners in Africa and LATAM, the most important regions for raw materials.
if you've been tracking the shark deals they give countries for loans, I think you'd recant what you just said.
"while the CCP accuses the West of predatory interest rates, the average Chinese rescue loan carries an interest rate of about 5 percent, more than double the IMF’s standard 2 percent. As of Oct. 1, 2025, despite higher U.S. interest rates, the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights lending rate stands at only 3.41 percent, still significantly lower than what China charges struggling nations for so-called relief."
These countries paying these loans are the ones least able to pay them back, and at more than double IMF loans, they are really putting them in a vise.
China’s retribution or punishment against loan issues is nowhere close to IMF and the west. Same with them not wanting the state to do what they want.
You did the equivalent of showing some stat showing black and brown people do violence and crimes and saying “see how uncivilized they are” ignoring everything else.
Yeah waiting to see historical examples of contemporary China being interested in global domination and regime change, especially in contrast to the US.
You would think so, but historically that's why they never became more than a regional power. Empires for millennia craved trade with China but only the mongols from that region made it all the way to western europe in their invasions.
It is a strength, if their goal is to have a stable and prosperous country long term, and that seems to be what they want. good for them. But nature abhors a vacuum, so there will always be an empire at the top of the food chain. Such empires want to maximize wealth for their people and secure them against threats, that's why invasions and exploitation of weaker countries happens. That game hasn't changed. Friendly relations work, until you need a lot of resources from a country that doesn't want to give it up. Or, like with the US, when they're opening up military bases next to your borders and you need a buffer state. Or, when naval blockades and sanctions are being enforced against your country for not complying with extra-sovereign demands.
History shows that countries content with what they have collapse or weaken very quickly.
China will have a population crisis in a few decades for example, and it won't have the large manufacturing base and its people will be too used to luxuries to go back to slaving for western countries for pennies. Keep in mind that the current china itself is so great and prosperous because of all the invasions it did against western china and satellite states like Vietnam and north Korea (the US isn't special in this regard).
Yes, it can but those poles are expansionist/influential empires not isolationist states. For example, China wants involvement in African development but they don't want any say or interference in local affairs, they can exert influence but they don't want to.
I went to a school that was heavy on immigrants and had lots of 1st gen citizens as students and all they did was advocate against people like me for admissions and for preferential admissions for their own group. So in my opinion, skilled immigration is not a transfer of talent but an expansion of the upper classes who go to war with each other over a small number of seats. Ironically this zero sum game keeps overall skill levels the same. For every immigrant, say, one citizen loses a seat somewhere.
China's greatest weakness is that their working-age population has already peaked and is in the process of plummeting, which will continue over the coming decades.
it's bad for the US, because China has 10x population. the US can't make up in quality, what it lacks in quantity without immigration and attracting foreigners.
I don’t think you realise how many people in China still live in poverty, with not much prospects of improvement. I don’t see how having 100 million poor small scale farmers is a benefit in this equation.
You still can’t become a Chinese citizen. You can come to USA or Europe and build a life for yourself. While some people go to China to make some money for a few years you can’t really build a life. So I think US and Europe will still attract talent long term, and I don’t think you can discount that. China used to have the benefit of low cost labor, but that’s going away. What do they have to offer when that’s gone?
Chinas population isn’t 10x. It’s 4x. If you believe the numbers (the idea that local governments over report is not a fringe theory).
But it’s really only the wealthy coastal regions that matters in this comparison, and in that regard the population sizes are much closer. Yeah they can exploit cheap labor from the poor interior. But the US is doing something similar in some ways with central/southern America. The Hukou system means that China does act like a bunch of separate states in many regards, rather than one truly unified country.
> Foreign nationals may naturalize if they are permanent residents in any part of China
More specifically: I recall living in Hongkong and learning about non-ethnic Chinese people (usually South Asians) who became Chinese citizens to acquire a Hongkong passport. The process required them to denounce all existing citizenships. In the eyes of HK and mainland gov'ts, those people are Chinese citizens with HK PR and carry HK passport. The candidates needed to demonstrate sufficient language skills in either Cantonese or Mandarin. (I'm unsure if other regional languages were allowed.)
> You can come to USA or Europe and build a life for yourself.
There is a tiny minority of foreigners who do this in mainland China, as well as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Usually, they come to teach English, then marry a local and "build a life". Some also come as skilled migrants.
> Yeah they can exploit cheap labor from the poor interior. But the US is doing something similar in some ways with central/southern America.
I don't follow the part about the US exploiting LATAM labour. Can you explain more?
Yeah, and lots more immigration too. I don't know if those are the ones with college degree, but you can see who's writing all the academic papers. Look up stats like the 3rd most popular language by state and you'll be surprised. There has been a huge effort to import doctors from all over for example, due to the shortage in the US. Even in our tech industry, you don't need to look far to see all the H-1B's. I can't think of a single industry requiring skilled and educated workers that isn't relying on immigration significantly. Even our schools are relying heavily on Chinese and other foreign students for revenue lol.
My point was, the non-immigrant birth-rate is very low, so arguably the US should have arrived at the same demographic crisis as japan, china and south korea. Not only that, immigrants attend college at a much higher rate than native-born too.
Your argument was that the U.S. needs immigration to compete with China’s population advantage. But China doesn’t have a population advantage in college educated workers. China has to scale its educated workforce by sending more of its population to college. Which is certainly doable, but they are currently where the U.S. was 60 years ago.
Also, the U.S. has a fertility edge over China, which skilled immigrants do not contribute to. The birth rate of the groups comprising most skilled immigrants (Asians) is very low, much lower than for other Americans.
Skilled immigrants may not contribute to birth rate much, but immigrants as a whole contribute to the workforce across the spectrum. More working age people means less demand for unskilled labor, more demand for skilled labor and more competition for higher achievements to qualify for skilled work.
There are millions of phd's and super-talented engineers, but it is a small percentage of those that actually innovate and invent new things. And for them to do that, you need a corporate/commercial sector funding it. Even someone flipping burgers at mcdonalds is a consumer contributing to economic activity, which in turn contributes to funding competitive R&D and risk taking.
Simply having lots of people and free schools won't do much on its own. You need R&D funded, you need companies and the government itself to invest in risky scientific endeavors. Highly skilled jobs need to pay well. For example, there is a metric crapton of talent in Europe that flocks to the US for the pay alone, even though most of them hate it here. Even Candian pay across the border is dismal. That's why Europe doesn't have Nvidias, Intels, Googles,etc..
This very site alone belongs to US venture capitalists which are a product of capital available, a pipeline of educated labor domestically as well as immigrants. The products and services companies sell is mostly funded by consumers buying things, they can buy those things because they have jobs that pay well. The guy who flips burgers at mcdonalds buys a nintendo switch, the help desk worker nvidia gpus,etc... if your population is too old, those things don't happen, old people conserve money and their economic activity doesn't go as far.
Have you heard of the vitality curve? It's how in virtually everything involving human contribution, 10-20% carry the "thing" 10-20% are detrimental to it and everyone in between is needed to keep it from crumbling. I believe that's why performance reviews are always in quintiles. Either way, I don't know if the top 10% that give the US an advantage are immigrants, but some of them for sure. and a lot of the papers I'm seeing from the US in recent years have not been from US sounding names. But the middle 60% or so, it doesn't matter where they're from, you need enough people that are skilled and competent to keep the ship afloat.
If all the variables are the same, China has more people so it wins by default. The US however can attract talent from all over the world for the top 10% talent and have them compete. I don't know the stats but let's say 95% of educated people are native born. That still doesn't mean the competition for top jobs is adequate. To compete with China, the US's top 10% talent must have more quality to make up for the lack of quantity. Quality isn't measured by numbers and it isn't a product of random lack you can improve by increasing quantity. it's a product of competition and the incentives and rewards at the end, which includes compensation but more than that - the quality of life money affords.
In other words, whether immigrants are smarter or not, they can either contribute to the economy by being good and reliable consumers and laborers that create more economic activity and drive the demand and opportunities for skilled work, or, they can drive up the compeition for skilled work, driving up quality.
What you have in the US, is a lot of educated people are into things like health care these days, because that's where the demand is. Even immigrants. But in east asia, it's much worse, they do needs lots more health care workers and care givers for the elderly, which even there, they're using more and more immigrants.
The bulk importing of immigrants only serves to stabilize the economy. The importing of educated immigrants and workers (Most of YC would collapse without H-1B lol) drives competition and increases quality (innovation,inventiveness,etc..).
You can have more americans, even have more americans attend more college. But you can't kick out americans that refuse to pursue education or are content with mediocrity. You can filter out immigrants by telling them they don't have enough education or money (we've been doing this for a long time in the US), but you can't do that with natural born americans.
If you work in tech, this should be of no surprise to you.
If you go by official figures, China has 4.2 the population of the US, but some experts believe that China's official figure is drastically exaggerated.
The greatest weakness of the US is its utter lack of self awareness and its ambition to dominate others. Nobody is looking for another "leader", people just want to live well without a bully on their neck. So, many countries that are not part of the US closed club are welcoming China as a new business partner.
>But now the US is trying to be xenophobic like China, restrict tech import/export like China but compete against 10x population and lack of similar levels of internal strife and fissures.
Do I infer correctly that you believe that China has less internal strife and fissures than the US has?
> But, China's greatest weakness is their lack of ambition and focus on regional matters like Taiwan and south china sea, instead of winning over western europe and india.
How can they have international hegemony before they clear their regional order? China is more interested in aligning Taiwan than invading; though it’ll probably invade if it can’t align it diplomatically.
China is probably not interested in continuing the current Western-style order but to implement their own sino-stuff. At least with the CCP at the helm.
They've dominated their region for a long time. Vietnam and NK are their sattellites basically. Russia is their close ally. The only regional opposition they have is India. Taiwan is a small bug to them, the only reason they haven't invaded it is because of TSMC and ASML, mainland China hasn't caught up with them and Nvidia yet.
They're all over Africa and south Asia. But unlike the US/West they don't exert political influence. When they build infrastructure for example, they set up worker camps, isolated from the local population. they only employ their own imported people and clean up and leave quietly afterwards.
They're acting like good business partners, instead of a superpower wielding it's might and extending its influence. it's good for business for all involved parties for sure, and smart too. But not having strong influence means for example, the US can come in, outbid them, bail out african loans to China and they lose that source of commerce.
Nobody is anti-immigrant outside of a small pocket of anti-H1B folks in the tech community. People are, however, anti-illegal-immigrant, which is completely different.
A lot of actual racists nazis hijack the anti-illegal-immigrant sentiment. I get that it's illegal, and every US administration has enforced it strictly (despite popular rhetoric).
But, the value illegal immigrants bring to the US economy cannot be understated. Purely from a economic standpoint, illegal immigrants are a huge asset. There are other portions of the population that are largely a liability.
It's not like illegal immigrants are taking skilled work americans could be doing. And let's be honest, even without illegal immigrants, a lot of unskilled work will be replaced by AI/automation.
I personally, have no problem against humane and lawful enforcement of immigration laws. But given that it is a determent to the economy, perhaps more serious and concerning crimes should be enforced? Perhaps the targets should be employers of illegal immigrants? Perhaps zip tying children and locking them in cages and denying them basic hygiene is not the right approach? I think the details is where it gets controversial, most sane people would agree that laws should be enforced.
Only in response to the US banning the export of the high-end GPUs China wanted. The import ban is the Chinese government burning the the landing ships, it clearly communicates to everyone that there is no going back, and total commitment is expected.
The US is certainly slowing down China considerably. China would certainly not have an import ban on Blackwell GPUs if they were made available. And upstream, the ban on EUV and other high end semiconductor production equipment has severely limited china’s capacity to produce logic and DRAM (including HBM).
You severely underestimate what they can do with alternative tech paths. You don't have to chase nanometers for good AI system outcomes. Their current, and very viable, strategy is to build a ton of slower chips and to pump in a humongous amount of power. And to optimize the software stack, e.g. more efficient architectures. Unlike the west, they have a lot of cheap power (think solar panels in the desert) and excellent transmission. It also means they'll have to innovate on powder delivery and cooling systems to handle that sort of scale, but that's still easier than building EUV. Huawei has already done it with their phone from last year: they put in a more power-hungry chip, but they innovated hugely woth passive heat dissipation and bigger batteries, so the end product is still something consumers want. And with these Chinese AI models you're already seeing how they're reducing costs so they can run more on fewer chips.
Tbh this whole situation reminds of how Japan excelled in making a lot more with a lot less after WW2, e.g., fuel-efficient engines, light cars, etc. these constraints were not present in the US (and to some extent in Europe), and resulted in US cars being completely not competitive in non-US markets.
I've been in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica.
The streets are flooded with cheap Chinese cars and I see more BYD than American cars. If the car wasn't made in Japan or Korea which probably account for most of the cars, it was likely made in China. Moreover, I haven't been in countries with the closest ties to China.
> The streets are flooded with cheap Chinese cars and I see more BYD than American cars
This isn't surprising in any way, American "cars" (quotes because the vast majority of what American manufacturers pump out isn't cars, it's trucks) haven't been competitive in decades. The only globally competitive vehicles were developed in Europe by GM Europe (Opel, since sold to PSA now Stellantis) or Ford Europe (which axed all models bar the Puma). The rest is too big, expensive and inefficient from the vast majority of uses. Tariffs and good marketing keep American car manufacturers in business in the US, but those don't work in most other markets.
The more appropriate comparison is with European automakers such as VW Group, Stellantis (Peugeot, Citroën, DS, Fiat, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram), Renault. And there too BYD is winning as well in mosy countries, but at least there's a comparison possible.
Cars are relatively advanced and more importantly, seen as a status symbol by many. There is, IMO, plenty of space for not-the-cheapest, quality cars.
Take Renault for example, their Renault 5 and 4 EVs are good looking, not luxury but definitely premium, and the 5 sedan starts at 30k€; the 4 crossover starts at 29k€. This is before a 5k€ government subsidy. Their boring, fewer bells and whistles, low cost model, the Dacia Spring, starts at 17k€. The Renault 5 and 4 are made almost entirely in France, while the Dacia is made in Romania - a lower cost country, but still an EU member state.
The comparable in size and autonomy BYD Dolphin starts at 20k€. Both for cheapness and quality/design, Renault are competitive.
Agreed, I'm not a car person and too young to remember the original 5, but it's really good and fun and modern and slightly retro looking. It's almost making me want to buy it, and I have absolutely no use for it.
If you haven't already (which seems unlikely), look into the Renault 5 Turbo.
Bit of an absurd car, but the modern (non-turbo) 5's slight bumps over the rear wheels are such a good callback to the Turbo (the original Renault 5 were basically all flat).
I like your point but I think it's a little too harsh to call it premature. Sometimes you're forced into that position and it makes sense to do so. But it's a good take if you're busying yourself with optimizations of old tech you'll never innovate or be a leader. It's still a good preoccupation in many constrained situations.
it's now 2025, and from china, we have deepseek, qwen, kimi, glm, ernie and many more capable models keeping up with western labs. there are actually now more chinese labs releasing sota models than western labs.
They are lauded for the ability to cost ratio, or their ability to parameter ratio, but virtually everyone using LLMs for productive work are using ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude.
They are kind of like Huffy bicycles. Good value, work well, but if you go to any serious event, no one will be riding one.
they are keeping up. i have been using just chinese models for the last 2 years. chatgpt/gemini/claude have marketing. there's nothing that you can do with those models that can't be done with deepseek, glm or kimi. if there is, do let us know.
The downside of their efficiency and cost-ratio is that they undermine the circular economy of massive data centers, GPU sales, and VC money that is constructing an extremely wasteful bubble.
while qwen, deepseek and kimi are opensourced and good, they are preferred because of their insane token ratio, they use a lot less for more, but a by product is that they are less accurate
it is amazing progress by the chinese companies, but they definitely can improve a lot more
Have you tried using those models? qwen for example cant even do something as basic as clustering analysis on a list of integers, hell it goes off the rails when just reading said integers from a file - starts babbling about determining number of digits, indexes, tries concatenating numbers together into one big string, no idea wtf is going on with that model.
too early to call a winner, though it is disappointing to see US withdrawal from open source. Still the main outcome of open source is distribution / diffusion of the idea, so it will inevitably mean US open source will come back, hopefully via some grass roots maniac, there will be a Linus-like character emerge at some point
i'm not calling a winner, i'm just saying that the chinese have caught up despite the embargo. google, openai & anthrophic have phenomenal models. i stopped using openai & anthropic after they called for open weight/source regulation. i use google because they offer gemma and i got a year gemini-pro subscription for free, use openai gpt-oss-120b since i can run it at home, and the only model i currently pay for is a chinese model.
Fingers crossed for convergence rather than divergence in the technical standards.Although the way hings are going it looks like the 2 stacks will diverge sooner rather than later , with the US+ banning the use of CHN models while simultaneosly banning the export of it quasi-open models.
We may very well end up in a situation like the old PAL vs NTSC video standard where the PAL(EU/Asia/AFrica) and NTSC(America's/Japan) gradually converged with the adoption of digital formats. Instead here would be a divergence based on geopolitical considerations.
positive take: a bifurcated tech tree might give us (humanity) a better chance of faster advancement, as it would be a persistent A/B test in live environment. Where I would join you in the crossing of fingers is to ensure such A/B testing is competitive but not destructive. We may even evolve to a situation of complementarity, an American Ying vs the Chinese Yang. Lets hope so!
Their are signs that China is not open sourcing their SOTA models anymore. Both Huawei and Qwen (Qwen-Max, WAN 2.5) and have launched flagship models which are yet to be opensourced.
Qwen's max series had always been closed weight, it's not a policy change like you are alluding.
What exactly is Huawei's flagship series anyway? Because their PanGu line is open-weight, but Huawei is as of yet not in the LLM making business, their models are only meant to signal that it's possible to do training and inference on their hardware, that's all. No one actually uses those models.
Small counterpoint but there are also 2 new players putting out SOTA open source models (Moonshots Kimi and zhipus GLM) so we're still seeing the same number of models overall, just via newer entrants.
China's innovation relies on the stolen western IP, without it, China is nothing. Also USSR/Russia is no longer a scientific powerhouse that can supply China with some military innovation. A dictatorship combined with cheap labour it 100% guarantees that the country's innovation is stunted, no matter what the Chinese propaganda claims.
Nowadays, China produces about the same amount of high-quality R&D as the US does.
Your view of China is several decades out of date. Chinese labor isn't even that cheap any more. China is moving up the value chain and outsourcing production that needs cheap labor to poorer countries (or replacing workers with robots altogether).
Corporate espionage is ever present but it is criminalized. The only time US as a country did that you can say "stole IP" was after WII when it took Nazi rocket scientists and technology.
China is the opposite; stealing tech is done by the state apparatus (same was done by USSR and reverse engineering computers for example).
Frankly I'm not surprised that this is done, probably if US was so behind it would have done the same to reduce the gap. Everyone is trying to survive and outsmart and outwit the other, instead of collaborating.
Also during World War I the American government seized German chemical patents thereby launching the American chemical industry. So that is an example of theft by the state apparatus.
After it took over and solidified itself as the world leader at it of course there was no need to steal IP anymore, most of it is registered there already and to the benefit of their nation. I'm sure people a hundred years from now will be having similar conversations if china or someone else takes the us's place and naturally starts caring about IP(and the runner ups stop caring).
I want China to release GPUs with a ton of VRAM, 128gb - 256gb. It doesn’t matter if they are half as fast as Nvidia because having a big model at a reasonable speed is better than not being to run them at all. AMD could have done this and have had a massive impact on nvidia’s market share but they choose not to because reasons.
I was doing this in the 70-80s with electronics from Hong Kong and Japan. The nice cheap stuff ( I was very young ) was all sheets in things I basically had to pattern match against notes of others on BBS and meetups.
It's much easier to copy what others are doing instead of spending the time and money for research and engineering. It's also much easier if you steal the tech. I could never have invented a bicycle but I can sure make a copy of one.
China is a nation of engineers...The US has been relying in on H-1B immigrants. Science is under attack. The truth is the US already lost: https://youtu.be/whVlI6H4d-4
I believe this is an Pollyanna take on AI. There is nothing about humans that tells us humans will bring AI to fruition for the other humans and a mountain of evidence showing how it will be used to abuse humans instead....for profits/power/whatever horse shit the masters of the universe have decided upon.
Does someone know if there's some equivalent of those engineering/research blogs for Chinese companies?
I used to follow the ones from Western companies, but honestly, after some point in time, I would like to see some cases from what I consider is a good benchmark for everyone that does not work in FAANG in terms of engineering.
The company blogs of Chinese companies will often do articles like this[1] talking about a new innovation or optimization that they did, but this will be often just mixed in with marketing articles too.
I would also assume there's a lot of content in the native Chinese forums, which unfortunately, as an English-speaking person, I wouldn't be able to easily refer to :(
> Distributed executor: Inference engines support model parallelism via distributed executors (e.g., Ray [32] and NCCL [9]), whose initialization takes tens of seconds.
I mean, it really shouldn't take tens of seconds for those initialization(s) to occur. There's no good fundamental reason that it should take that long. It's just bloat.
Its easy enough for a a well resourced entity to take a pre trained model and deploy it on new hardware to save on the NVDA tax. It's far less likely for research and model training to happen outside the mature NVDA ecosystem.
From the abstract, this seems to be a scheduling mechanism for datacenters that serve multiple models. I have no idea whether this applies to Anthropic.
This is such a popular coping tactic from Americans when it comes to facing actual competition, especially from China. Everything they do must either be a lie or just stolen American technology, as if there's something inherently special about Americans that no one else has.
It's easy to guess that an opponent that is focusing on information control and theatre above all else is doing so for reasons.
> Everything they do must either be a lie or just stolen American technology
as an aviation enthusiast for 30+ years this claim , while deliberately blunt, is not far from the truth -- the truth being that half of their hardware was stolen Russian design, too.
Let's consider : The KJ-600, the J-31, J-10, H-6, Z-20, J-7, J-15, J-11.
If it isn't a direct shape-to-shape knockoff like the J-31 it's either a licensed reproduction from Russia or something derived from a reverse engineering effort like the Su-33 prototype they got from Ukraine. Similar story with their Ghost Bat knockoffs.
There are very few novel designs. I'm not faulting the methodology -- the shape of the thing w.r.t. aircraft is half (if not more) of the struggle.
It's a tremendous advantage to start from a known good shape and go from there. If I were the boss I would do exactly the same thing when trying to bootstrap an aerospace industry.
>as if there's something inherently special about Americans that no one else has.
the US has proven numerous times that this is exactly the case.
It comes from what people are taught in schools and from their own self perception. When those beliefs about American exceptionalism are challenged, cognitive dissonance kicks in.
It's a response to the most obvious motive for you saying it. Why are you bringing up the possibility, in such an inflammatory manner (in particular, making reference to "state media"), otherwise?
Interesting. So, we're going to deny that most of the IP theft from China up to this moment? Do you even think China is this advanced just because of chinese innovation? C'mon man.
The comment I replied to was dismissing a research paper describing innovation from a chinese company wrt more effective use of their hardware, by insinuating that it must be propaganda with no supporting reasoning.
Of course China has copied foreign technologies, I didn't say they haven't. My point is that you guys love to hang on to that as an excuse to dismiss everything from China even when they're obviously plenty capable of doing R&D in many fields, even with it having gotten its start off "stolen" IP.
America "stole" plenty of rocket technology from Germany, yet it's well understood that they eventually innovated on it and made it their own. But somehow whenever China's involved, you guys come out with your unsubtle bigotry.
I do. I don't know what gave people the impression that I was born an American and went to their schools. In "open societies" like the US, the form information control are rather sophisticated, but they are there. However, I grew up in a one TV channel country. I learned to never trust the news. This immunizes me from state propaganda a little bit.
I think I was more referring to general abundance of credulity that is thrown at all AI stories at HN. There are a lot of skeptics when an Ed Zitron blog is shared. But every time a "ChatGPT was worried about being shut down" story is shared, it gets hundreds of upvotes. This story is just as ridiculous. AliBaba claims to reduce usage of equipment from a business that is being banned by their government. Magically. And during a trade war.
> I don't know what gave people the impression that I was born an American and went to their schools.
The fact that your comment appears to defend the US position, by virtue of attacking a press release from a major non-US competitor by questioning its source.
> This story is just as ridiculous. AliBaba claims to reduce usage of equipment from a business that is being banned by their government. Magically. And during a trade war.
When you have a nuanced argument, it is good to speak plainly (without snark) and proactively bring that evidence. That is, start out with "I doubt the veracity of this story because XYZ involved people have ABC motivation to fabricate it", and actively try to make a case that would convince someone who doesn't already see things your way.
> The fact that your comment appears to defend the US position, by virtue of attacking a press release from a major non-US competitor by questioning its source.
It only appears that way because you see the world through a simplistic bipolar lens.
Alibaba Cloud claims to reduce Nvidia GPU used for serving unpopular models by 82% (emphasis mine)
> 17.7 per cent of GPUs allocated to serve only 1.35 per cent of requests in Alibaba Cloud’s marketplace, the researchers found
Instead of 1192 GPUs they now use 213 for serving those requests.
I’m slightly confuse as to how all this works. Do the GPUs just sit there with the models on them when the models are not in use?
I guess I’d assumed this sort of thing would be allocated dynamically. Of course, there’s a benefit to minimizing the number of times you load a model. But surely if a GPU+model is idle for more than a couple minutes it could be freed?
(I’m not an AI guy, though—actually I’m used to asking SLURM for new nodes with every run I do!)
Loading a model takes at least a few seconds, usually more, depending on model size, disk / network speed and a bunch of other factors.
If you're using an efficient inference engine like VLLM, you're adding compilation into the mix, and not all of that is fully cached yet.
If that kind of latency isn't acceptable to you, you have to keep the models loaded.
This (along with batching) is why large local models are a dumb and wasteful idea if you're not serving them at enterprise scale.
Let's say, then, that it's not so much "dumb and wasteful" as "energy inefficient". In fact, this can be quite wise in a modern world full of surveillance-as-a-business and "us-east-1 disasters"
Can you elaborate the last statement? Don't quite understand why loading local LLM to GPU RAM, using it for the job and then "ejecting" is "dumb and wasteful" idea?
I believe GP means it still to be connected to 'if this kind of latency is unacceptable to you' - i.e. you can't load/use/unload, you have to keep it in RAM all the time.
In that case it's massively increasing your memory requirement not just to the peak the model needs, but to + whatever the other biggest use might be that'll be inherently concurrent with it.
Layman understanding:
Because as a function of hardware and electricity costs, a “cloud” GPU will be many times more efficient per output token. You aren’t loading/offloading models and don’t have any parts of the GPU waiting for input. Everything is fully saturated always.
> This (along with batching) is why large local models are a dumb and wasteful idea if you're not serving them at enterprise scale.
Local models are never a dumb idea. The only time it's dumb to use them in an enterprise is if the infra is Mac Studio with M3 Ultra because pp time is terrible.
Models take a lot of VRAM which is tightly coupled to the GPU so yeah, it's basically sitting there with the model waiting for use. I'm sure they probably do idle out but a few minutes of idle time is a lot of waste--possibly the full 82% mentioned. In this case they optimized by letting the GPUs load multiple models and sharing the load out by token.
They definitely won't idle out- if they idle out, it'll take on the order of up to 60 seconds to load the model back into VRAM, depending on the model.
That's an eternity for a request. I highly doubt they will timeout any model they serve.
Why does it take 60 seconds to load data from RAM to VRAM? Shouldn't the PCIE bandwidth allow it to fully load it in a few seconds?
Let's say 10 GPUs are in use. You keep another 3 with the model loaded. If demand increases slowly you slowly increase your headroom. If demand increases rapidly, you also increase rapidly.
The correct way to do this is more complicated and you should model based on your usage history, but if you have sufficient headroom then very few should be left idle. Remember that these models do requests in batches.
If they don't timeout models, they're throwing money down the drain. Though that wouldn't be uncommon.
That's only if you're expecting 10 GPUs in use. They're dealing with ~1 GPU in use for a model, just sitting there. Alibaba has a very long tail of old models that barely anyone uses anymore, and yet they still serve.
Here's a quote from the paper above:
> Given a list of M models to be served, our goal is to minimize the number of GPU instances N required to meet the SLOs for all models through auto-scaling, thus maximizing resource usage. The strawman strategy, i.e., no auto-scaling at all, reserves at least one dedicated instance for each model, leading to N = O(M)
For example, Qwen2 72b is rarely used these days. And yet it will take up 2 of their H20 gpus (with 96GB VRAM) to serve, at the bare minimum, assuming that they don't quantize the BF16 down to FP8 (and I don't think they would, although other providers probably would). And then there's other older models, like the Qwen 2.5, Qwen 2, Qwen 1.5, and Qwen 1 series models. They all take up VRAM if the endpoint is active!
Alibaba cannot easily just timeout these models from VRAM, even if they only get 1 request per hour.
That's the issue. Their backlog of models take up a large amount of VRAM, and yet get ZERO compute most of the time! You can easily use an easing function to scale up from 2 gpus to 200 gpus, but you cannot ever timeout the last 2 gpus that's serving the model.
If you read the paper linked above, it's actually quite interesting how Alibaba goes and solves this problem.
Meanwhile on the other hand, Deepseek solves the issue by just saying "fuck you, we're serving only our latest model and you can deal with it". They're pretty pragmatic about it at least.
The thundering herd breaks this scheme.
If I had to handle this problem, I'd do some kind of "split on existing loaded GPUs" for new sessions, and then when some cap is hit, spool an additional GPU in the background and the transfer the new session to that GPU as soon as the model is loaded.
I'd have to play with the configuration and load calcs, but I'm sure there's a low param, neat solution to the request/service problem.
That's why deepseek only serves two models
How does this work with anything but trivially small context sizes!?
Tensor parallelism, so you only need to store a fraction of kv cache per gpu.
> I guess I’d assumed this sort of thing would be allocated dynamically
At the scale of a hyperscaler I think Alibaba is the one that would be doing that. AWS, Azure and I assume Alibaba do lease/rent data centers, but someone has to own the servers / GPU racks. I know there are specialized companies like nscale (and more further down the chain) in the mix, but I always assumed they only lease out fixed capacity.
The paper is about techniques to do that dynamic allocation to maximize utilization without incurring unacceptable latencies. If you let a GPU sit idle for several minutes after serving a single request, you're setting money on fire. So they reuse it for a different model as soon as possible, starting even before the first request is finished, because: If you don't have a dedicated GPU for a model, are you going to wait for a multi-gigabyte transfer before each request? So they have a dedicated GPU (or two, one for prefill, one for decode) for a group of models that are processed in an interleaved fashion, scheduled such that they stay within the latency budget.
>Do the GPUs just sit there with the models on them when the models are not in use
I've assumed that as well. It makes sense to me since loading up a model locally takes a while. I wonder if there is some sort of better way I'm not in the know about. That or too GPU poor to know about.
the models are huge, so not a single (latest gen) one can fit on a single GPU.
It's likely that these are small unpopular (non flagship) models, or that they only pack eg one layer of each model.
Per the very short article, the solution was to pack multiple models per GPU.
yes but that could mean a layer per model
So 82% of 17.7%?
14.5% is worth a raise at least. But it’s still misleading.
Not really, Figure 1(a) of the paper says that the 17.7% are relative to a total of 30k GPUs (i.e. 5310 GPUs for handling those 1.35% of requests) and the reduction is measured in a smaller beta deployment with only 47 different models (vs. the 733 "cold" models overall.) Naïve extrapolation by model count suggests they would need 3321 GPUs to serve all cold models, a 37.5% reduction to before. (Or 6.6% reduction of the full 30k-GPU cluster.)
Really:
"A paper presented at SOSP 2025 details how token-level scheduling helped one GPU serve multiple LLMs, reducing demand from 1,192 to 213 H20s."
Which, if you scale it, matches the GPs statement.
From the SCMP article you might get the impression that the various figures all refer to the same GPU cluster, but in the paper itself it's very clear that this is not the case, i.e. the 213 GPUs in the smaller cluster are not serving 1.35% of the requests in the larger cluster. Then if you want to scale it, you have a choice of different numbers you could scale, and each would get different results. Since they're constrained by the limited number of different models a single GPU can serve, I think scaling by the number of models is the most realistic option.
Doesnt sound right
In the past, software and computer engineers would tackle problems head-on, designing algorithms and finding creative solutions.
thanks to the US restrictions on semiconductor industry (Chinese), Chinese engineers are being forced to innovate and find their own ways to overcome challenges like the old school engineers (What Silicon Valley used to be)
If you're one who sees progress as an end goal unto itself, what you describe is a good thing. When one party is attempting novel solutions to outcompete the competition we will be faster to whatever the next change is.
That said, I'm not sure what the US policies specifically have to do with this. Countries are always in competition with one another, and if one industry or technology is considered a national security threat they will guard it.
If AI is a threat to other nations, why is anyone even supporting this? Are we really trying to annihilate the planet as quickly as possible?
Key paragraph:
> However, a small handful of models such as Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek are most popular for inference, with most other models only sporadically called upon. This leads to resource inefficiency, with 17.7 per cent of GPUs allocated to serve only 1.35 per cent of requests in Alibaba Cloud’s marketplace, the researchers found.
these other models are likely much smaller
better link https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/al...
paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3731569.3764815
Ok, we've changed the URL above (from https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3329450/alibaba-cloud-...), and will put the link to the paper in the top text. Thanks!
Feel like I've made it
The US attempt to slow down China's technological development succeeds on the basis of preventing China from directly following the same path, but may backfire in the sense it forces innovation by China in a different direction. The overall outcome for us all may be increase efficiency as a result of this forced innovation, especially if Chinese companies continue to open source their advances, so we may in the end have reason to thank the US for their civilisational gate keeping
History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.
In many senses there's hubris in the western* view of China accomplishments: most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.
---
* I hate the term "western" because some "westeners" use it to separated what they think are "civilized" from "uncivilized", hence for them LATAM is not "western" even though everything about LATAM countries is western.
> most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.
While I don't disagree with your overall point, it's important to recognize that this is only a phenomenon of the last ~30 years, and to avoid falling into the trapn of Han racial chauvinism. E.g. there were ~no Chinese scientists in Germany in the 70s but they were heavily innovating nevertheless.
Absolutely. China obviously has a longer history with innovation but they like to make it seem everything was invented by them at some point in the past. I'd say newer technology is where China has had a bigger impact.
Consequently newer tech is precisely where global cooperation is most required so no country can really do it by themselves. We could even say no country, western or otherwise, has been doing it on their own for the past 500 years or so but alas...
It’s more helpful to think of China as an accelerant rather than an innovator in this position.
Ironically, the best way America could have prevented China’s rise in tech was by stapling green cards to diplomas of Chinese citizens who completed their higher education in the U.S. like the plan in the early 2010s.
Massive vector for theft of trade secrets and intellectual property.
It’s notable that China did not adopt the same policy during the period you are associating with their rise. Indeed, they’ve taken the opposite stance in recent years and (now that they have stolen American IP) have moved to seize control of assets and expel the superfluous foreigners.
There is a lesson to be learned there, but it’s contrary to the argument you are trying to make.
Is that the best way? China's rise had already happened by the 2010s
Preventing that could have been prevented in the 70s, 80s, 90s by stopping offshoring, blocking student visas, and prosecuting IP theft.
Those students would have just gone to other countries, written their PhD dissertations there, advanced another country’s tech sector, and the US would have found the pain of isolationism that much sooner.
It is not possible to keep core IP secret. HN folks, of all people, should know this. Anything that thousands of people know is de facto public knowledge.
How are you going to gain core IP research if you don't have experience or access to leading edge researchers to pass you knowledge in the first place?
Talent is proportional to population, but that only matters if society and state has the infrastructure to raise that talent up. Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.
> Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.
The reason why these statements are not true is because of colonization, delayed industrialization, and Western intervention post-independence. Getting out of this “quicksand” is exceedingly difficult.
China did well to industrialize quickly and keep intervention at bay - in fact, you could argue that it making the rest of the world reliant on its industrial capacity helped address the intervention problem.
This world view is just wrong from top to bottom. Between 1945-1970, China was in a much worser state that any of those 3rd world countries in many aspects. Are you saying post 1970, the reason why these countries did not develop as fast as china is because of colonialism and intervention? You can apply the same arguments to Japan in 45 and Korea in 50. But but but aid? Ok and we send billions to countries all around the world every year.
But I just pointed out that China is an exception? Also, China had access to human capital at a scale that no African country had.
Japan pre-45 was a world power, and had industrialized by the early 1900s. WW2 was a mere setback.
Korea is more of a “miracle” than Japan was, but they also did well to industrialize ASAP. They also didn’t face the brunt of European colonialism.
Lots of miracles and exceptions in a working theory
> They also didn’t face the brunt of European colonialism.
But they faced the brunt of Chinese & Japanese colonialism, and a full-blown civil war after which their GDP per capita was in the same ballpark as Kenya's.
Yes.
Imperialism (as a system of extracting wealth from poor countries) continues to exist, but China has a working countermeasure. You can see similar with Vietnam.
Sure if you water down the term of imperialism then yes. It is then incumbent on you to prove "imperialism" among the worst performers economically. What imperialism plagues liberia and ethiopia and honduras and papua new guinea
Aid is the single largest barrier to development and progress over the long term.
“Those who come with wheat, millet, corn or milk, they are not helping us. Those who really want to help us can give us ploughs, tractors, fertilizers, insecticides, watering cans, drills and dams. That is how we would define food aid.” ― Thomas Sankara
China wasn't beholden to neoliberalism and the World Bank and IMF.
China made the right choice to dump a ton of resources into different industries without the expectation of immediate RoI or any RoI at all. Anyone or anything that got in the way of their goals were dealt with.
Keeping core IP secret is not the issue. The issue is allowing the Chinese to steal IP and then compete in our markets with that stolen IP.
>students would have just gone to other countries, written their PhD dissertations there, advanced another country’s tech sector,
which other countries specifically? No other country has a tech sector. It's the US hegemony or the China hegemony.
>"...The issue is allowing the Chinese to steal IP..."
I do not think they need permission. There is no force that could order country to recognize IP. Do you really expect all world forever pay rent to few giant corps?
Bad reading comprehension.
You're talking about recognizing IP, I am talking about stealing IP AND selling stolen IP in our markets.
1st: yes force can be used to discourage the theft of IP. This is merely an obstacle, not a total blocker 2nd: yes force can be used to block IP from our markets. This is actually incredibly trivial and would have been very easy 40-years ago.
>You're talking about recognizing IP, I am talking about stealing IP ..."
If country does not recognize IP then "stealing" is not a theft in their eyes.
As for using force to prevent "theft": what force? Military? You might get burned really bad.
Sorry no. If you can't imagine how one country couldn't use force to stop another country from stealing IP then you are either not intellectually up to this conversation or not arguing in good faith.
A military controlling the flow of goods into its own borders isn't going to "burn bad", it's called customs controls.
>"The issue is allowing the Chinese to steal IP and then compete in our markets with that stolen IP"
That was the original message. My understanding of "our markets" was customers of the US which include the US itself, China and many other countries. Sure the US can prohibit importing of China's goods. It can not control what happens in the rest of the world to the degree that it once could.
I did specify the 70s 80s and 90s.
The inclusion of China in the WTO is what changed everything.
The elites thought they'd set up shop in a new, gigantic consumer market and reap the rewards. So they got Clinton to spend his last days in office lobbying very aggressively for China's inclusion into the WTO.
China had different plans. Keeping the plunderers out (this time) was one of the smartest moves any nation has made in recorded history. Then the same elites slowly pivoted against China, post realizing they wouldn't be allowed to own China. If we can own you, you're our friend; if we can't own you, you're our enemy. And this is quite obviously not a defense of China's human rights record or anything else, that's not the point. China only mattered (in the enemy sense) when the elites realized they were going to be locked on the outside of the rise.
They didn't keep the foreign corporations out. Having them as on-shore competitors is what keeps their own companies from merely seeking rents. Foreign companies also didn't bring their best products in the beginning out of the fear of getting copied, but that strategy is not sustainable over time as Chinese companies get better at making things.
> The elites thought they'd set up shop in a new, gigantic consumer market and reap the rewards.
So... Seems that's exactly what they are getting.
Eh? They are a country with a culture that values education like a few other asian countries. They were set back by the colonial bullshit of Europe, devastation of WW2 and communist revolutions and so. They would have gotten to the same point as they are today, just longer if anything if any attempt was made to hamper it.
You're 100% correct. "Prevented" is too strong of a word (that I borrowed from GP).
I would characterize my recommendations as things that could have been done for the US to not fund or encourage the re-rise of China.
Traditional Confucian Exams were more of elite dispute resolution mechanisms. The idea of practical education is largely introduced by the West.
Which reminds me of this article about the origin of the research university by the Germans:
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research...
But they didn’t do it, because the current administration can’t get it through their thick skulls that the key advantage the US can have in this world is a monopoly on all the really smart people.
> [T]he key advantage the US can have in this world is a monopoly on all the really smart people.
Dream on ...
The whole “China copies everything” narrative is becoming less and less true.
It’s funny - it’s at the point with Chinese manufacturing for niche electronic goods (e.g rooftop van air conditioner) where some Chinese brands are more trustworthy - more value for your money and sometimes even better overall quality. With American brands you gotta make sure you’re not overpaying for dated tech that is inefficient. Maybe the same will happen with LLMs.
It's most notable to me in mid level manufacturing equipment. Once upon a time you would never touch a chinese made CNC, lathe, mill etc. Now they're totally fine, and offer significant value for your dollar. Sometimes outperforming other countries offerings while being cheaper to boot. Especially in new industries and processes, suggesting innovation is not the differentiator it used to be.
Enterprises often prefer having US based support and so can prefer US or European machines that have that supply chain setup.
It is less exclusively true.
> History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.
It's worked for a very long time for aircraft.
China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline.
If for no technical reasons and purely political, COMAC may still be decades away from being able to fly to most of the world.
Likewise, in ~5 years, China may be able to build Chips that are as good as Nvidia after Nvidia's 90% profit margin - i.e. they are 1/10th as good for the price - but since they can buy them for cost - they're they same price for performance and good enough.
If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.
> China may never be able to export these chips
While you type this, the rest of the world is already using Chinese cars, something that was unthinkable a year or two ago.
The US has closed the market off from this for its auto industry to survive.
This statement doesn't make a lot of sense. 40-50% of vehicles are foreign-made already[1]. I would strongly wager it's vastly more likely that these Chinese vehicles do not meet US safety standards - which are quite high.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...
Much higher standards than European ones? Because the cars do sell there as well.
Yes. The EU focuses on safety of pedestrians, and the US focuses on safety of occupants. That's not to say a vehicle cannot do both well (see the many European vehicles sold in the US), but that is to say Chinese vehicles may not meet the US standards. The US has a lot of vehicle regulations that significantly differ from the EU market.
Do you mind providing sources for that?
Because, as a EU citizen, I have never in my life seen any tests that carmarkers are advertising with that focus on pedestrians. I am regularly seeing tests that focus on occupants though, e.g. the Euro NCAP. But I am by no means an expert.
It would be hard to focus on pedestrian safety from a carmaker standpoint except for adding software features that recognize people in front of you and auto-brake or smth, which definitely is not the focus of the tests here. It may be a requirement though. The more I think about it, the more sure I am that you just made this up, sorry.
Pedestrian impact design has been a thing in the European market for a while. One example: the pop-up hood that detects a pedestrian impact, it's a pyrotechnic device that makes the hood pop up to give more of a cushion for the pedestrian to land on. Also I think pedestrian safety is one reason modern BMWs and Audis have the timing chains (very annoyingly for maintenance) fitted at the back of the engine, to give more space for pedestrian impact. Stuff like that. Also the automated emergency braking systems, more recently.
https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained...
That's not true, it's just that the Chinese NCAP is modeled after the EU one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-NCAP
> Yes. The EU focuses on safety of pedestrians, and the US focuses on safety of occupants.
How can a car focus on the safety of pedestrian? Does it detect a pedestrian and fly away like a drone?
The tests include tests for the safety of the people hit by the car vs just for people inside the car.
The EU focuses on both aspects of safety.
You can look at the Euro NCAP ratings for the 2023 BYD Seal, for example: https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/byd/seal/50012. They break down the rating based on safety for adult occupants, child occupants and pedestrians. These ratings are based on many different crash tests.
Chinese companies make cars with 5-star European crash ratings. They are perfectly capable of meeting US safety standards.
> If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.
Note that this happens at the same time the US is breaking up its own alliances, so as of this writing, there's no such thing as certainty about politics.
>the same time the US is breaking up its own alliances
This isn't happening. The US is driving a harder bargain with our allies. No one serious thinks anyone is walking away from alliances with the US.
Why the framing of alliances like it’s a boolean?
The question of “can we trust the American government” is now being asked more often. Existing alliances and new potential alliances face that question, whether or not you personally believe that they should trust America.
Even if no concrete actions are being performed with asking that question, the fact that question is even being asked is a major drop from where we were.
You're right, alliances are not boolean.
From the US perspective, we have been asking ourselves "can we trust Europe's military capacity" for a very long time and the answer (prior to 2025) was: NO.
With Trump on one side and Russia on the other, it seems like the answer has shifted to: MAYBE.
> From the US perspective, we have been asking ourselves "can we trust Europe's military capacity" for a very long time and the answer (prior to 2025) was: NO.
NATO's mutual defense clause has only been activated once: after 9/11, when the United States declared war on the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Out of the 3621 deaths of coalition soldiers, 1160 of them were from nations other than the United States, including 457 from the UK, 159 from Canada, and 90 from France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_casualties_in_Afghan...
Yes I served with those people so I am not denigrating their sacrifice when I say:
2001 was 24 years ago. A lot has changed since then. Europe's militaries are much degraded and the threats are much enhanced.
Frankly, this sounds like you're repeating propaganda.
When the US called its allies to its wars, NATO responded. Now that the rest of NATO is being threatened, the US is playing neutral, trying to see which side will bid highest for their help.
Which NATO ally is being threatened?
Poland[1, 3], Latvia [2], Lithuania [3]
1. https://apnews.com/article/russia-nato-members-borders-airsp...
2. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-drone-that-cras...
3. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/lithuania-says-russian-...
Among other events, like drones being spotted near commercial airports.
Are you suggesting repeated airspace intrusions and acts against civilians are merely acts of innocence?
The US has become unreliable and erratic. Countries aren’t cutting ties or anything, but certainly investing to reduce exposure to capricious US leadership. Much of Europe is increasing domestic military production rather than just buying more from the US precisely because the US has publicly discussed leaving NATO and/or not honoring its guarantees.
Increasing domestic military production is actually a great outcome.
Obviously Wall Street would have preferred purchasing from US-listed/owned arms companies, but from the perspective of a military alliance, having well-armed allies is the main point.
It's really hard to argue with Trump's methods if they led to Europe finally spending on their own defense.
> It's really hard to argue with Trump's methods
On the contrary, his methods are ridiculous. He could have achieved similar ends without kowtowing to Russia, without squandering the opportunity to further weaken Russia’s military capacity, and so on. Something similar applies to pretty much everything else he’s done. He incurs collateral damage on everything even when it’s completely unnecessary to do so. It’s a definitional example of egregious incompetence.
You've moved the goalposts
No one is going to walk away from that kind of alliance tomorrow, sure. Stuff like "we're going to remotely disable military equipment we've sold you" is going to have consequences though. It's not walking away from alliances, it's just focusing on more stable countries.
To clarify: it's not exactly "remotely disable".
It's "block everything that depends on US clouds", which is a considerable downgrade (because you can't upload all mission parameters to an airplane without going through the cloud, and you can't use self-diagnosis features), but not entirely a kill switch. Close enough, though.
> Stuff like "we're going to remotely disable military equipment we've sold you" is going to have consequences though.
Proof of this happening or even having the capability of happening? There is none.
I observe serious financial commitments towards walking away from US tech:
The EU is pumping money into what they call "digital sovereignty" left and right. Germany just cancelled their Microsoft subscriptions and replaced them with self-funded Open Source for Schleswig-Holstein, which is roughly 5% of all government employees. That's one hell of a trial run. Germany's "OpenDesk" and France’s "La Suite numérique" even made into the new "Franco-German Economic Agenda 2025", which self-describes as "bilateral coordination to full swing for a more sovereign Europe".
You think our alliances are Microsoft Office licenses?
lol this is a joke right? Ask any Canadian if they think America is driving a hard bargain or pushing away its closest ally.
Are you sure?
I mean, the current administration has repeatedly threatened to invade militarily two of its allies. Also, it has repeatedly threatened to not honor military agreements with most others, and both the current president and vice-president have insulted the leaders of several allied countries to their face.
Oh, and if that weren't sufficient, the current admin has unilaterally broken all trade treaties (alongside most intellectual property treaties) it held with its commercial partners.
The EU is slow at it, but it's no accident that everybody is doing their best to move away from US tech and military dependencies.
But at the same time they are fielding multiple new stealth aircraft and their jets and missiles outperformed western aircraft in the recent Pakistan India flare-up.
So you'd think they'd be able to build a commercial jet liner, no?
Roughly speaking, an aircraft must fulfill a certain amount of economy (cheap, low cost to operate), safety, and performance.
If you compromise on safety, you get something that is still suitable for the military. If you don't care about economics you can participate in the space race.
But for commercial air travel, you don't have the luxury to pick just two; a competitive commercial airliner has to perform exceedingly well in all three regards.
If you're an airline using expensive aircraft you will go bankrupt. If your aircraft is too slow then your competitors will eat your lunch, and if you have a reputation of being unsafe then your customers will run away or the government will pull the plug (likely both).
IMHO affordable commercial air travel is one of the biggest marvels of 20th century engineering.
China currently can't make the high-performance, efficient, long-life jet engines that US & Europe make. The commercial market is heavily cost-sensitive, so they can't compete there currently as a result.
This doesn't matter so much for military purposes: they can easily eat the cost of a higher maintenance and replacement schedule on a smaller number of military jets with fewer hours on them.
This gives them more iteration cycles, speeding their building up of experience. They're catching up. Industrial espionage will help them along too, but not as much as the experience from engineering their own designs.
But commercial jet liners aren't as important to China for security. They have high speed railroads for that.
So… you'd think the USA would be able to built a nationwide, high-speed rail network?
See what I did there?
It’s would be a result of where the money and resources go, I assume. Apparently they haven’t felt a need to manufacture their own commercial jets but they did for military jets. They definitely feel the need in the case of chips.
C919
> China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline
And both those planes have a strong dependency on "western" components that won't be overcome before the 2030s, and even then, they're around a generation behind.
5 years behind becomes 3 years behind. China is expanding their manufacturing abilities faster than the US. Soon they will surpass the US. Look no further than their generic consumer electronics manufacturing.
It's not 5 years behind, engine tech is more on a ~15 year cycle, or even more.
CFM LEAP, latest short-to-medium-haul airliner engine from CFM (GE+Safran) is from 2013 (first run). Its predecessor, CFM56, is from 1974 (first run) and saw a few evolutions, including as late as 2009.
Re: Western. A similar thing plays out when the term "international community" is used in news. It refers to the US and its major allies which means US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand more or less.
Essentially countries that were developed prior to 1990 or so , although South Korea is a tricky case today going by this definition, as are Taiwan, Hongkong and Singapore
> A similar thing plays out when the term "international community" is used in news. It refers to the US and its major allies which means US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand more or less.
Wait, really? I thought "international community" meant all countries.
There was a particularly memorable use of this sense some time ago, when the UK representative to the UN explained that they abstained from a vote in the General Council that passed with something like 200+ members voting for it because "the international community is still divided on the topic".
That's because you're reasonable.
Sometimes it's used in the expected way, but (more?) often, "international community" euphemistically refers to whomever is currently one of, or an ally of the above mentioned countries.
Yes community refers to whose who participate in community.
How is this hard to understand?
Broadly speaking coast de ivory and the like is not a participant in the international community.
China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many many other countries that are very active members of the international community are not counted among members of THE "international community". Hell, much of Europe isn't either, including some of the former colonial empires, on some topics.
China, Russia, India are certainly referred to when using this term. Iran and Saudi Arbia may or may not be. Usually not Pakistan, so I really dont know what in the hell you are saying.
It's just straight up low expectations and underestimation derived from racism in the assumption that Americans are smarter and more capable, and Chinese are only good for copying designs and making things we come up with. The idea that they can't do that like we can is pervasive.
It’s absolutely fascinating and mystifying (and dismaying) to see educated and otherwise smart people in engineering in the US hold an opinion that two countries with over a billion people each can’t accomplish anything in engineering or science without “us”.
Despite ample and repeated evidence that they can and, in China’s case, that they’re the best in the world in several areas of manufacturing.
Nobody thinks the Japanese aren’t “civilized.” “Western” is just a euphemism for “rich and orderly.”
It is an odd category, and Japan is often considered to be "Western" - these days at least. That certainly wasn't the case even a few generations ago.
I think it's ostensibly supposed to be more about shared cultural values, but even that is a pretty weak way to divide countries. Perhaps "an ally of the United States" is a little more accurate?
Any societal dividing line like this is bound to hit on problems once subjected to the real world.
I think Japan likely shares more values culturally with China than USA outside of political systems. In any aspect outside of that Japan is not western.
The leaders of Japan during the Meiji era (starting 1868) will be sad to learn that their attempt to thoroughly Westernize Japanese society failed even though it enabled Japan to dominate China (and most of the Western Pacific) for decades.
Its more about democracy and adhering to the global (set up by America post WW2) system of laws and trade.
I think most people considered Spain a "western" country even in 1970 when it was controlled by Franco.
> look at the names
Why would I do that tho? If we look at the names of scientists/researchers/engineers/businessmen, the conclusion would be that the US has contributed nothing to the world. Europeans did all the hard work!
Another equivalent way to look at that:
Historically, top scientists/researchers/engineers/businessmen migrate from rest of the world to the US rather than to Europe or China.
Imagine if Europe or China were a bit more open with immigration and equally attractive, we would see the same pattern there too.
this is true for anyone - create challenges, and you optimize efficiency elsewhere.
Also, isn't this the usual path to better computer science? Reducing computation needs by making better/more efficient algorithms? The whole "trillions of dollars of brute force GPU strength" proposed by Altman, Nadella, Musk et al just seems to reinforce that these are business people at heart, not engineers/computer scientists...
western is a cultural term derived from a geographic one. The US is also not 'western' strictly geographically as it is not in western europe, neither is australia. But they both originated from Britain's empire and share in it's cultural ancestry. It means "western europe and it's cultural derivatives". Spain and Portugal's empire fell away long before britain and france's and they don't have similar geopolitical relations like NATO, so it's hard to consider their former colonies/upstarts part of the same sphere of cultural influence.
China for sure will catch up, the question is what they will do with it. They're not ambitious like the US/West. The US wanted influence all over the world as an extension of the cold war and to keep economic interests safeguarded. But China just doesn't operate that way. They're more hands-off. They could be opening up alibaba cloud datacenters all over the US, offering it as an AWS/Azure alternative, funding tons of startups all over europe, the US,etc... to exert their influence, but they won't. They have a more long-term low-and-slow approach to global domination. The "100 year marathon" as they called it, which they'll win for sure.
China's greatest weakness is not just their lack of ambition,but their command-economy. They're doing capitalism but with central control of the economy. It intertwines government policy with corporate policy, making it harder to do business overseas (like with bytedance/tiktok).
False.
Westernism is broadly an extension of the academic notion of classicism, starting in Egypt and then Greece Rome and into Europe and the Americas.
It's not an academic notion (at least not strictly), since virtually everyone uses it routinely.
Oddly since I got many downvotes with this statement, it's clear the average hacker news reader knows very little about world history or common knowledge
That's very reductive of you. "western" like "3rd world" is used very differently than what you or academics would like.
I feel like you didn't even grasp the base sentence meaning. "Classicism" is an academic concept
I am not sure exactly to what degree, but "I hate the term 'western' because some 'weste[r]ners' use it to separated what they think are 'civilized' from 'uncivilized'" is definitely a bit of an antiquated perspective at this point; almost like a justification to hold on to other older perspectives about "racism". I have started resorting to using terms like European Cultural Block because of it in certain communities that understand contemporary topics and have an advanced understanding of the world.
Your first statement is not likely unique to China though, even though they have demonstrated that in about the last 40 years, which I don't really think qualifies as "history". What it does demonstrate is that societies that have a certain kind of ethnic self-respect and can cast off the detrimental influences of foreign, hostile, and even enemy elements to pursue their own self-interest and survival will succeed, regardless of hurdles placed before them.
It's really just a story of personal development and either escaping, evading, and avoiding detrimental, toxic people and their behaviors. All of humanity that all has to currently still share a single planet with ZERO save spots, would be better off if we all not just allowed each other to be ourselves in our won places without others subverting, subjugating, infiltrating, dominating, poisoning, or polluting any other people on the planet. Then everyone can decide if we want to be friends or not friends with each other, collaborate and be friendly or simply avoid each other. We do not have to like each other to get along if everyone agrees on a base understanding that no people can parasitize and abuse and manipulate any others.
The whole "western" or "the west" always makes me laugh. Half the time it's a dog whistle for "white". Like many right-wing commentators love saying "Western Values" to avoid saying "white, Euro-centric, Christian values".
Mexico is a modern country, an industrialized country, a country that is exactly as "western" as the US or Canada. They have the same religious beliefs, speak a dialect of a European language. They have European style cities, a long history of cultural contributions. Yet they're not white enough to be part of "The West".
I think at this point we should be honest with ourselves in it's usage. 90% of the time it's a racist dog whistle.
> Yet they're not white enough to be part of "The West".
In many contexts, Mexico and other LatAm countries are included in the Western Civilization grouping. For instance: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/western-c...
Earlier in your comment you say “half the time” while you end with “90% of the time” the phrase “western” is a racist expression, undermining your argument that is already flawed, emotional, and anti-constructive.
Mexico isn’t as “western” as the west. Mexico isn’t the first world. It’s not part of the exploiting Global North.
The stuff you bring up ignore the power dynamics which are arguably the most important part.
But why would anyone want to do that?
You do realize that antagonizing people with nuclear weapons and the largest economies in the world rarely results in positive results, right?
Arguably the sample size for that is 0 though; but even if we are generous, it’s only about 1 so far.
The number of nuclear armed countries with large economies that will get worked up if you call them racists for being ‘the west’ is waaaay larger than zero.
>History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.
I don't think you can really produce a definite counterfactual that they would or wouldn't have taken longer or shorter without it, but certainly they were pushing for self sufficiency long before technology restrictions. But we're not going to be handing our technologies to our competitors on a silver platter, and it's also best for businesses to start weaning themselves off the Chiinese market. Virtually every market reliant on them today is in big trouble.
As for hubris, I think that's more a projection of your part if you want to start bringing up race cards with regards to contributions, that kind of argument would be applicable to everyone. And AI research is highly diverse and international, Chinese names don't dominate the list more than Turks, Greeks, Malaysians, etc.
> History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.
Really? How long has China been attempting to build their own jet engines? How long have they been attempting to build competitive CPUs?
History has shown withholding tech successfully keeps them at least a generation behind the west.
In some fields like CPUs they “make up for it” by just building larger clusters, but ultimately history does not show what you’re claiming. The only thing it shows is that we need to be even more diligent in protecting IP because a large portion of their catching up is a direct result of stealing the tech they were cut off from.
Jet engine since at least 2011. CPU since 2000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACAE_CJ-1000A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Manufacturing_In...
>Jet engine since at least 2011
Huh? Did you read your own link? The jet engine that was shown at an aviation show as a non-functioning prototype in 2011, with hopes they'd have a functioning version by 2016, and in service by 2020 (it wasn't in service in 2020). Notice at the very top of your own article it says "still in development".
>CPU since 2000
That isn't remotely competitive, and at least a full generation behind.
What 'since at least 2011' you don't understand?
What part of "a non-functioning prototype" don't you understand?
Literally anyone can make a prototype jet engine. The metallurgy and process to make a functioning one is several orders of magnitude more difficult. Which is why... China still buys the vast, vast majority of their jet engines from Russia for military use. And their commercial passenger jets use engines from CFM.
In a way withholding a tech becomes a signal saying "Hey this is important" so the result is China dedicates more resources to researching it lol.
It’s helpful to think of westernism as a platonic ideal. Individually derived reason and virtue, superior to state and sometimes ‘gods’ as a tradition to drive up the total survivability, richness, and stability of the community.
Concepts that enable the individual should empower a chosen configuration of society not the other way around.
Contrast this with non westernism where either education of the individual is not valued or the state is the primary goal over the individual.
I’ve worked with states governments and individuals around the world for 20 years and find this very useful definition. What’s confusing is the nations who have half adopted westernism but don’t fully due to either caste systems or government dominated thinking.
It’s an arrow towards rationalism over tradition, individualism over collectivism, flatness over hierarchy, and future over past. But only the limit of the resources any given society has.
Name one thing China has invented first in LLMs that the “west” adopted as a standard
Your silence is deafening, qwen bots
I find "western" is often used to disparage "western thought", as in it can't grasp the deep wisdom of those mysterious orientals that transcends normal logic and reason. Declaring such a split is the underpinning of a whole lot of woo-woo beliefs.
Disparage or exalt? It can also be used in an objective sense without conjuring insult.
It can be both. From different people, and it often is.
I think anti-immigrant rhetoric will have the most impact against the US. A lot of the people innovating on this stuff are being maligned and leaving in droves.
Aside from geography, attracting talent from all over the world is the one edge the US has a nation over countries like China. But now the US is trying to be xenophobic like China, restrict tech import/export like China but compete against 10x population and lack of similar levels of internal strife and fissures.
The world, even Europe is looking for a new country to take on a leader/superpower role. China isn't there yet, but it might get there in a few years after their next-gen fighter jets and catching up to ASML.
But, China's greatest weakness is their lack of ambition and focus on regional matters like Taiwan and south china sea, instead of winning over western europe and india.
> But, China's greatest weakness is their lack of ambition and focus on regional matters like Taiwan and south china sea, instead of winning over western europe and india.
That's a strength. Them not having interest in global domination and regime change other than their backyard is what allows them to easily make partners in Africa and LATAM, the most important regions for raw materials.
if you've been tracking the shark deals they give countries for loans, I think you'd recant what you just said.
"while the CCP accuses the West of predatory interest rates, the average Chinese rescue loan carries an interest rate of about 5 percent, more than double the IMF’s standard 2 percent. As of Oct. 1, 2025, despite higher U.S. interest rates, the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights lending rate stands at only 3.41 percent, still significantly lower than what China charges struggling nations for so-called relief."
These countries paying these loans are the ones least able to pay them back, and at more than double IMF loans, they are really putting them in a vise.
China’s retribution or punishment against loan issues is nowhere close to IMF and the west. Same with them not wanting the state to do what they want.
You did the equivalent of showing some stat showing black and brown people do violence and crimes and saying “see how uncivilized they are” ignoring everything else.
>Them not having interest in global domination and regime change
I don't even know where to begin with that one.
Yeah waiting to see historical examples of contemporary China being interested in global domination and regime change, especially in contrast to the US.
Alright let's hear it.
You would think so, but historically that's why they never became more than a regional power. Empires for millennia craved trade with China but only the mongols from that region made it all the way to western europe in their invasions.
It is a strength, if their goal is to have a stable and prosperous country long term, and that seems to be what they want. good for them. But nature abhors a vacuum, so there will always be an empire at the top of the food chain. Such empires want to maximize wealth for their people and secure them against threats, that's why invasions and exploitation of weaker countries happens. That game hasn't changed. Friendly relations work, until you need a lot of resources from a country that doesn't want to give it up. Or, like with the US, when they're opening up military bases next to your borders and you need a buffer state. Or, when naval blockades and sanctions are being enforced against your country for not complying with extra-sovereign demands.
History shows that countries content with what they have collapse or weaken very quickly.
China will have a population crisis in a few decades for example, and it won't have the large manufacturing base and its people will be too used to luxuries to go back to slaving for western countries for pennies. Keep in mind that the current china itself is so great and prosperous because of all the invasions it did against western china and satellite states like Vietnam and north Korea (the US isn't special in this regard).
> But nature abhors a vacuum, so there will always be an empire at the top of the food chain
The world has been bipolar and multipolar before in history, and it can be again. The unipolar period of American dominance is ending.
Yes, it can but those poles are expansionist/influential empires not isolationist states. For example, China wants involvement in African development but they don't want any say or interference in local affairs, they can exert influence but they don't want to.
I went to a school that was heavy on immigrants and had lots of 1st gen citizens as students and all they did was advocate against people like me for admissions and for preferential admissions for their own group. So in my opinion, skilled immigration is not a transfer of talent but an expansion of the upper classes who go to war with each other over a small number of seats. Ironically this zero sum game keeps overall skill levels the same. For every immigrant, say, one citizen loses a seat somewhere.
China's greatest weakness is that their working-age population has already peaked and is in the process of plummeting, which will continue over the coming decades.
Yes, and being content and lacking ambition isn't good. Expansionism and immigration can solve that, but they're culturally stagnant in that regard.
Without immigration, the US would have faced the same problems.
This is the era of automation. Will they run out of people first or run out of jobs first?
> But now the US is trying to … compete against 10x population and lack of similar levels of internal strife and fissures.
I can’t tell whether you think the anti-immigration stance is a good thing or bad thing.
it's bad for the US, because China has 10x population. the US can't make up in quality, what it lacks in quantity without immigration and attracting foreigners.
I don’t think you realise how many people in China still live in poverty, with not much prospects of improvement. I don’t see how having 100 million poor small scale farmers is a benefit in this equation.
You still can’t become a Chinese citizen. You can come to USA or Europe and build a life for yourself. While some people go to China to make some money for a few years you can’t really build a life. So I think US and Europe will still attract talent long term, and I don’t think you can discount that. China used to have the benefit of low cost labor, but that’s going away. What do they have to offer when that’s gone?
Chinas population isn’t 10x. It’s 4x. If you believe the numbers (the idea that local governments over report is not a fringe theory).
But it’s really only the wealthy coastal regions that matters in this comparison, and in that regard the population sizes are much closer. Yeah they can exploit cheap labor from the poor interior. But the US is doing something similar in some ways with central/southern America. The Hukou system means that China does act like a bunch of separate states in many regards, rather than one truly unified country.
This Wiki page says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_nationality_law
More specifically: I recall living in Hongkong and learning about non-ethnic Chinese people (usually South Asians) who became Chinese citizens to acquire a Hongkong passport. The process required them to denounce all existing citizenships. In the eyes of HK and mainland gov'ts, those people are Chinese citizens with HK PR and carry HK passport. The candidates needed to demonstrate sufficient language skills in either Cantonese or Mandarin. (I'm unsure if other regional languages were allowed.) There is a tiny minority of foreigners who do this in mainland China, as well as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Usually, they come to teach English, then marry a local and "build a life". Some also come as skilled migrants. I don't follow the part about the US exploiting LATAM labour. Can you explain more?The U.S. actually has more people age 25-64 with a college degree (about 90 million) than China (about 80 million).
Yeah, and lots more immigration too. I don't know if those are the ones with college degree, but you can see who's writing all the academic papers. Look up stats like the 3rd most popular language by state and you'll be surprised. There has been a huge effort to import doctors from all over for example, due to the shortage in the US. Even in our tech industry, you don't need to look far to see all the H-1B's. I can't think of a single industry requiring skilled and educated workers that isn't relying on immigration significantly. Even our schools are relying heavily on Chinese and other foreign students for revenue lol.
My point was, the non-immigrant birth-rate is very low, so arguably the US should have arrived at the same demographic crisis as japan, china and south korea. Not only that, immigrants attend college at a much higher rate than native-born too.
Your argument was that the U.S. needs immigration to compete with China’s population advantage. But China doesn’t have a population advantage in college educated workers. China has to scale its educated workforce by sending more of its population to college. Which is certainly doable, but they are currently where the U.S. was 60 years ago.
Also, the U.S. has a fertility edge over China, which skilled immigrants do not contribute to. The birth rate of the groups comprising most skilled immigrants (Asians) is very low, much lower than for other Americans.
You're taking things too one-to-one.
Skilled immigrants may not contribute to birth rate much, but immigrants as a whole contribute to the workforce across the spectrum. More working age people means less demand for unskilled labor, more demand for skilled labor and more competition for higher achievements to qualify for skilled work.
There are millions of phd's and super-talented engineers, but it is a small percentage of those that actually innovate and invent new things. And for them to do that, you need a corporate/commercial sector funding it. Even someone flipping burgers at mcdonalds is a consumer contributing to economic activity, which in turn contributes to funding competitive R&D and risk taking.
Simply having lots of people and free schools won't do much on its own. You need R&D funded, you need companies and the government itself to invest in risky scientific endeavors. Highly skilled jobs need to pay well. For example, there is a metric crapton of talent in Europe that flocks to the US for the pay alone, even though most of them hate it here. Even Candian pay across the border is dismal. That's why Europe doesn't have Nvidias, Intels, Googles,etc..
This very site alone belongs to US venture capitalists which are a product of capital available, a pipeline of educated labor domestically as well as immigrants. The products and services companies sell is mostly funded by consumers buying things, they can buy those things because they have jobs that pay well. The guy who flips burgers at mcdonalds buys a nintendo switch, the help desk worker nvidia gpus,etc... if your population is too old, those things don't happen, old people conserve money and their economic activity doesn't go as far.
Have you heard of the vitality curve? It's how in virtually everything involving human contribution, 10-20% carry the "thing" 10-20% are detrimental to it and everyone in between is needed to keep it from crumbling. I believe that's why performance reviews are always in quintiles. Either way, I don't know if the top 10% that give the US an advantage are immigrants, but some of them for sure. and a lot of the papers I'm seeing from the US in recent years have not been from US sounding names. But the middle 60% or so, it doesn't matter where they're from, you need enough people that are skilled and competent to keep the ship afloat.
If all the variables are the same, China has more people so it wins by default. The US however can attract talent from all over the world for the top 10% talent and have them compete. I don't know the stats but let's say 95% of educated people are native born. That still doesn't mean the competition for top jobs is adequate. To compete with China, the US's top 10% talent must have more quality to make up for the lack of quantity. Quality isn't measured by numbers and it isn't a product of random lack you can improve by increasing quantity. it's a product of competition and the incentives and rewards at the end, which includes compensation but more than that - the quality of life money affords.
In other words, whether immigrants are smarter or not, they can either contribute to the economy by being good and reliable consumers and laborers that create more economic activity and drive the demand and opportunities for skilled work, or, they can drive up the compeition for skilled work, driving up quality.
What you have in the US, is a lot of educated people are into things like health care these days, because that's where the demand is. Even immigrants. But in east asia, it's much worse, they do needs lots more health care workers and care givers for the elderly, which even there, they're using more and more immigrants.
The bulk importing of immigrants only serves to stabilize the economy. The importing of educated immigrants and workers (Most of YC would collapse without H-1B lol) drives competition and increases quality (innovation,inventiveness,etc..).
You can have more americans, even have more americans attend more college. But you can't kick out americans that refuse to pursue education or are content with mediocrity. You can filter out immigrants by telling them they don't have enough education or money (we've been doing this for a long time in the US), but you can't do that with natural born americans.
If you work in tech, this should be of no surprise to you.
If you go by official figures, China has 4.2 the population of the US, but some experts believe that China's official figure is drastically exaggerated.
The greatest weakness of the US is its utter lack of self awareness and its ambition to dominate others. Nobody is looking for another "leader", people just want to live well without a bully on their neck. So, many countries that are not part of the US closed club are welcoming China as a new business partner.
>But now the US is trying to be xenophobic like China, restrict tech import/export like China but compete against 10x population and lack of similar levels of internal strife and fissures.
Do I infer correctly that you believe that China has less internal strife and fissures than the US has?
By perception of the population at least, yes. I mean, the US is literally on the verge of a civil war lol.
> But, China's greatest weakness is their lack of ambition and focus on regional matters like Taiwan and south china sea, instead of winning over western europe and india.
How can they have international hegemony before they clear their regional order? China is more interested in aligning Taiwan than invading; though it’ll probably invade if it can’t align it diplomatically.
China is probably not interested in continuing the current Western-style order but to implement their own sino-stuff. At least with the CCP at the helm.
They've dominated their region for a long time. Vietnam and NK are their sattellites basically. Russia is their close ally. The only regional opposition they have is India. Taiwan is a small bug to them, the only reason they haven't invaded it is because of TSMC and ASML, mainland China hasn't caught up with them and Nvidia yet.
They're all over Africa and south Asia. But unlike the US/West they don't exert political influence. When they build infrastructure for example, they set up worker camps, isolated from the local population. they only employ their own imported people and clean up and leave quietly afterwards.
They're acting like good business partners, instead of a superpower wielding it's might and extending its influence. it's good for business for all involved parties for sure, and smart too. But not having strong influence means for example, the US can come in, outbid them, bail out african loans to China and they lose that source of commerce.
Nobody is anti-immigrant outside of a small pocket of anti-H1B folks in the tech community. People are, however, anti-illegal-immigrant, which is completely different.
A lot of actual racists nazis hijack the anti-illegal-immigrant sentiment. I get that it's illegal, and every US administration has enforced it strictly (despite popular rhetoric).
But, the value illegal immigrants bring to the US economy cannot be understated. Purely from a economic standpoint, illegal immigrants are a huge asset. There are other portions of the population that are largely a liability.
It's not like illegal immigrants are taking skilled work americans could be doing. And let's be honest, even without illegal immigrants, a lot of unskilled work will be replaced by AI/automation.
I personally, have no problem against humane and lawful enforcement of immigration laws. But given that it is a determent to the economy, perhaps more serious and concerning crimes should be enforced? Perhaps the targets should be employers of illegal immigrants? Perhaps zip tying children and locking them in cages and denying them basic hygiene is not the right approach? I think the details is where it gets controversial, most sane people would agree that laws should be enforced.
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Wow
Unsurprising that someone with such beliefs would be too much of a coward to use their real account.
This is my only account. I'm very proud of my beliefs.
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The US isn't slowing China anymore.
China has an import ban on chips [1] so its irrelevant what the US does.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/17/nvidia-ceo-disappointed-afte...
> China has an import ban on chips
Only in response to the US banning the export of the high-end GPUs China wanted. The import ban is the Chinese government burning the the landing ships, it clearly communicates to everyone that there is no going back, and total commitment is expected.
The US is certainly slowing down China considerably. China would certainly not have an import ban on Blackwell GPUs if they were made available. And upstream, the ban on EUV and other high end semiconductor production equipment has severely limited china’s capacity to produce logic and DRAM (including HBM).
You severely underestimate what they can do with alternative tech paths. You don't have to chase nanometers for good AI system outcomes. Their current, and very viable, strategy is to build a ton of slower chips and to pump in a humongous amount of power. And to optimize the software stack, e.g. more efficient architectures. Unlike the west, they have a lot of cheap power (think solar panels in the desert) and excellent transmission. It also means they'll have to innovate on powder delivery and cooling systems to handle that sort of scale, but that's still easier than building EUV. Huawei has already done it with their phone from last year: they put in a more power-hungry chip, but they innovated hugely woth passive heat dissipation and bigger batteries, so the end product is still something consumers want. And with these Chinese AI models you're already seeing how they're reducing costs so they can run more on fewer chips.
Would they have done that if the US had been more "reliable" in providing the chips and didn't cut them off in the first place?
The point still stands that the US instigated the split.
Tbh this whole situation reminds of how Japan excelled in making a lot more with a lot less after WW2, e.g., fuel-efficient engines, light cars, etc. these constraints were not present in the US (and to some extent in Europe), and resulted in US cars being completely not competitive in non-US markets.
I've been in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica.
The streets are flooded with cheap Chinese cars and I see more BYD than American cars. If the car wasn't made in Japan or Korea which probably account for most of the cars, it was likely made in China. Moreover, I haven't been in countries with the closest ties to China.
> The streets are flooded with cheap Chinese cars and I see more BYD than American cars
This isn't surprising in any way, American "cars" (quotes because the vast majority of what American manufacturers pump out isn't cars, it's trucks) haven't been competitive in decades. The only globally competitive vehicles were developed in Europe by GM Europe (Opel, since sold to PSA now Stellantis) or Ford Europe (which axed all models bar the Puma). The rest is too big, expensive and inefficient from the vast majority of uses. Tariffs and good marketing keep American car manufacturers in business in the US, but those don't work in most other markets.
The more appropriate comparison is with European automakers such as VW Group, Stellantis (Peugeot, Citroën, DS, Fiat, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram), Renault. And there too BYD is winning as well in mosy countries, but at least there's a comparison possible.
The US couldn't compete anyway. The US is an advanced economy and will struggle to compete in non-advanced categories.
It's like trying to level your MMORPG character to 100 by only farming in lvl 30-40 mob areas. It's really not worth it and mostly forced.
Cars are relatively advanced and more importantly, seen as a status symbol by many. There is, IMO, plenty of space for not-the-cheapest, quality cars.
Take Renault for example, their Renault 5 and 4 EVs are good looking, not luxury but definitely premium, and the 5 sedan starts at 30k€; the 4 crossover starts at 29k€. This is before a 5k€ government subsidy. Their boring, fewer bells and whistles, low cost model, the Dacia Spring, starts at 17k€. The Renault 5 and 4 are made almost entirely in France, while the Dacia is made in Romania - a lower cost country, but still an EU member state.
The comparable in size and autonomy BYD Dolphin starts at 20k€. Both for cheapness and quality/design, Renault are competitive.
The new 5 is one of the first cars I've really liked in a while.
They really nailed the modern-with-subtle-calls-to-retro look.
Agreed, I'm not a car person and too young to remember the original 5, but it's really good and fun and modern and slightly retro looking. It's almost making me want to buy it, and I have absolutely no use for it.
If you haven't already (which seems unlikely), look into the Renault 5 Turbo.
Bit of an absurd car, but the modern (non-turbo) 5's slight bumps over the rear wheels are such a good callback to the Turbo (the original Renault 5 were basically all flat).
Really fine design stuff IMO.
The premature optimizer is never the innovator.
Japan eventually stopped that role and their products improved greatly.
I like your point but I think it's a little too harsh to call it premature. Sometimes you're forced into that position and it makes sense to do so. But it's a good take if you're busying yourself with optimizations of old tech you'll never innovate or be a leader. It's still a good preoccupation in many constrained situations.
may backfire? it's a bit too late for that.
go to 2024, western labs were crushing it.
it's now 2025, and from china, we have deepseek, qwen, kimi, glm, ernie and many more capable models keeping up with western labs. there are actually now more chinese labs releasing sota models than western labs.
But they aren't keeping up
They are lauded for the ability to cost ratio, or their ability to parameter ratio, but virtually everyone using LLMs for productive work are using ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude.
They are kind of like Huffy bicycles. Good value, work well, but if you go to any serious event, no one will be riding one.
they are keeping up. i have been using just chinese models for the last 2 years. chatgpt/gemini/claude have marketing. there's nothing that you can do with those models that can't be done with deepseek, glm or kimi. if there is, do let us know.
They can't attract a large contingent of users. Because despite being able to do everything the big name models can do, they cannot do it as well.
This aligns with the benchmarks as well; they benchmark great for what they are, but still bottom of the barrel when competing for "state of the art."
And yes, it's great you daily Chinese models, but the vast majority of people try them, say "impressive", then go back to the most performant models.
I'm not sure if you understood what OP meant by "marketing".
The downside of their efficiency and cost-ratio is that they undermine the circular economy of massive data centers, GPU sales, and VC money that is constructing an extremely wasteful bubble.
The bubble is there in China too, it's just on the governments books instead of private investors books.
way too early to say that
while qwen, deepseek and kimi are opensourced and good, they are preferred because of their insane token ratio, they use a lot less for more, but a by product is that they are less accurate it is amazing progress by the chinese companies, but they definitely can improve a lot more
Have you tried using those models? qwen for example cant even do something as basic as clustering analysis on a list of integers, hell it goes off the rails when just reading said integers from a file - starts babbling about determining number of digits, indexes, tries concatenating numbers together into one big string, no idea wtf is going on with that model.
too early to call a winner, though it is disappointing to see US withdrawal from open source. Still the main outcome of open source is distribution / diffusion of the idea, so it will inevitably mean US open source will come back, hopefully via some grass roots maniac, there will be a Linus-like character emerge at some point
i'm not calling a winner, i'm just saying that the chinese have caught up despite the embargo. google, openai & anthrophic have phenomenal models. i stopped using openai & anthropic after they called for open weight/source regulation. i use google because they offer gemma and i got a year gemini-pro subscription for free, use openai gpt-oss-120b since i can run it at home, and the only model i currently pay for is a chinese model.
user growth has slowed. the technology that should help users is only being pushed from the top, while users refuse to use it. openai pivoted to porn.
does it really feel like they have a chance to recover all the expenses in the future?
crypto grifters pivoted to ai and, same as last time, normal people don’t want to have anything to do with them.
considering the amount of money burned on this garbage, i think we can at least declare a looser.
Fingers crossed for convergence rather than divergence in the technical standards.Although the way hings are going it looks like the 2 stacks will diverge sooner rather than later , with the US+ banning the use of CHN models while simultaneosly banning the export of it quasi-open models. We may very well end up in a situation like the old PAL vs NTSC video standard where the PAL(EU/Asia/AFrica) and NTSC(America's/Japan) gradually converged with the adoption of digital formats. Instead here would be a divergence based on geopolitical considerations.
positive take: a bifurcated tech tree might give us (humanity) a better chance of faster advancement, as it would be a persistent A/B test in live environment. Where I would join you in the crossing of fingers is to ensure such A/B testing is competitive but not destructive. We may even evolve to a situation of complementarity, an American Ying vs the Chinese Yang. Lets hope so!
Their are signs that China is not open sourcing their SOTA models anymore. Both Huawei and Qwen (Qwen-Max, WAN 2.5) and have launched flagship models which are yet to be opensourced.
Qwen's max series had always been closed weight, it's not a policy change like you are alluding.
What exactly is Huawei's flagship series anyway? Because their PanGu line is open-weight, but Huawei is as of yet not in the LLM making business, their models are only meant to signal that it's possible to do training and inference on their hardware, that's all. No one actually uses those models.
Small counterpoint but there are also 2 new players putting out SOTA open source models (Moonshots Kimi and zhipus GLM) so we're still seeing the same number of models overall, just via newer entrants.
You mean, thank the US for their FAILED "civilizational" gate keeping.
China's innovation relies on the stolen western IP, without it, China is nothing. Also USSR/Russia is no longer a scientific powerhouse that can supply China with some military innovation. A dictatorship combined with cheap labour it 100% guarantees that the country's innovation is stunted, no matter what the Chinese propaganda claims.
Nowadays, China produces about the same amount of high-quality R&D as the US does.
Your view of China is several decades out of date. Chinese labor isn't even that cheap any more. China is moving up the value chain and outsourcing production that needs cheap labor to poorer countries (or replacing workers with robots altogether).
And the US has never stolen IP?
No, they haven't! https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88...
Corporate espionage is ever present but it is criminalized. The only time US as a country did that you can say "stole IP" was after WII when it took Nazi rocket scientists and technology. China is the opposite; stealing tech is done by the state apparatus (same was done by USSR and reverse engineering computers for example).
Frankly I'm not surprised that this is done, probably if US was so behind it would have done the same to reduce the gap. Everyone is trying to survive and outsmart and outwit the other, instead of collaborating.
You are mistaken about American intellectual property theft. They engaged in extensive IP theft from Britain in the 18th and 19th century with the encouragement of the government. See https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/the-spies-who-...
Also during World War I the American government seized German chemical patents thereby launching the American chemical industry. So that is an example of theft by the state apparatus.
I'm talking about modern times, after WW2. Not when US had slavery and lynching, blacks was a form of entertainment.
After it took over and solidified itself as the world leader at it of course there was no need to steal IP anymore, most of it is registered there already and to the benefit of their nation. I'm sure people a hundred years from now will be having similar conversations if china or someone else takes the us's place and naturally starts caring about IP(and the runner ups stop caring).
Negative.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/the-spies-who-...
https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/stealing-success-how-ip-thef...
https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/07/05/americas-industrial-revolu...
NSA 'engaged in industrial espionage' - Snowden (2014)
https://www.bbc.com/news/25907502
Every single sentence you wrote is untrue and can be disproven by empirical evidence. You can learn about it here[1][2].
1. https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...
2. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/06/12/...
That's how it usually goes, fully expected
I want China to release GPUs with a ton of VRAM, 128gb - 256gb. It doesn’t matter if they are half as fast as Nvidia because having a big model at a reasonable speed is better than not being to run them at all. AMD could have done this and have had a massive impact on nvidia’s market share but they choose not to because reasons.
Another outcome may be that we now have to learn Chinese to understand their datasheets ...
I was doing this in the 70-80s with electronics from Hong Kong and Japan. The nice cheap stuff ( I was very young ) was all sheets in things I basically had to pattern match against notes of others on BBS and meetups.
It's much easier to copy what others are doing instead of spending the time and money for research and engineering. It's also much easier if you steal the tech. I could never have invented a bicycle but I can sure make a copy of one.
"... instead of spending the time and money for research and engineering..."
China has plenty of R&D and science now.
China is a nation of engineers...The US has been relying in on H-1B immigrants. Science is under attack. The truth is the US already lost: https://youtu.be/whVlI6H4d-4
I believe this is an Pollyanna take on AI. There is nothing about humans that tells us humans will bring AI to fruition for the other humans and a mountain of evidence showing how it will be used to abuse humans instead....for profits/power/whatever horse shit the masters of the universe have decided upon.
Does someone know if there's some equivalent of those engineering/research blogs for Chinese companies?
I used to follow the ones from Western companies, but honestly, after some point in time, I would like to see some cases from what I consider is a good benchmark for everyone that does not work in FAANG in terms of engineering.
The company blogs of Chinese companies will often do articles like this[1] talking about a new innovation or optimization that they did, but this will be often just mixed in with marketing articles too.
I would also assume there's a lot of content in the native Chinese forums, which unfortunately, as an English-speaking person, I wouldn't be able to easily refer to :(
[1] https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/how-does-alibaba-ensure-th...
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I still think nVidia has the most to loose in the AI race, optimisations like this will continue coupled with better ASIC's.
> Distributed executor: Inference engines support model parallelism via distributed executors (e.g., Ray [32] and NCCL [9]), whose initialization takes tens of seconds.
I mean, it really shouldn't take tens of seconds for those initialization(s) to occur. There's no good fundamental reason that it should take that long. It's just bloat.
They are working with tiny models. Not sure how well it'd scale to bigger models (if at all).
They're all LLMs, so no, not tiny, but not exactly huge either:
> Our current deployment runs in a cross-region cluster comprising 213 H20 GPUs, serving twenty-eight 1.8–7B models (TP=1) and nineteen 32–72B models (TP=4).
Would this make cloud providers running low volume fine-tuned models more economically viable?
Sounds like this virtual GPU is a separate scheduler. I wonder what kind of latency is introduced by marshaling all that data around.
To what extent is this practice applicable to other loads?
This is for platforms that serve many different models, most of which have very low usage. e.g. huggingface, civitai
Its easy enough for a a well resourced entity to take a pre trained model and deploy it on new hardware to save on the NVDA tax. It's far less likely for research and model training to happen outside the mature NVDA ecosystem.
Sounds like they stopped doing something stupid.
Lots of shareholders here, move along, there is nothing to read
How feasible is that in an horizon of 5 years new optimized "equations" will cut the need for more GPUs?
Not feasible.
Is this another nail in the gpu/ai stock market bubble coffin?
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I haven't read the paper yet, but it's here: https://ennanzhai.github.io/pub/sosp25-aegaeon.pdf aka https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3731569.3764815 .
So, definitely not state media, probably not lying on the fundamentals. Of course, still presumably viewed favorably by the CCP, I'd imagine.
Well if it is real, we will surely see out Claude Code limits go back up.
From the abstract, this seems to be a scheduling mechanism for datacenters that serve multiple models. I have no idea whether this applies to Anthropic.
This is such a popular coping tactic from Americans when it comes to facing actual competition, especially from China. Everything they do must either be a lie or just stolen American technology, as if there's something inherently special about Americans that no one else has.
It's easy to guess that an opponent that is focusing on information control and theatre above all else is doing so for reasons.
> Everything they do must either be a lie or just stolen American technology
as an aviation enthusiast for 30+ years this claim , while deliberately blunt, is not far from the truth -- the truth being that half of their hardware was stolen Russian design, too.
Let's consider : The KJ-600, the J-31, J-10, H-6, Z-20, J-7, J-15, J-11.
If it isn't a direct shape-to-shape knockoff like the J-31 it's either a licensed reproduction from Russia or something derived from a reverse engineering effort like the Su-33 prototype they got from Ukraine. Similar story with their Ghost Bat knockoffs.
There are very few novel designs. I'm not faulting the methodology -- the shape of the thing w.r.t. aircraft is half (if not more) of the struggle.
It's a tremendous advantage to start from a known good shape and go from there. If I were the boss I would do exactly the same thing when trying to bootstrap an aerospace industry.
>as if there's something inherently special about Americans that no one else has.
the US has proven numerous times that this is exactly the case.
It comes from what people are taught in schools and from their own self perception. When those beliefs about American exceptionalism are challenged, cognitive dissonance kicks in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
Did y'all not read the last sentence?
That is a great respomse to something I did not say.
It's a response to the most obvious motive for you saying it. Why are you bringing up the possibility, in such an inflammatory manner (in particular, making reference to "state media"), otherwise?
Your presumptions are not always obvious to the rest of the world.
Interesting. So, we're going to deny that most of the IP theft from China up to this moment? Do you even think China is this advanced just because of chinese innovation? C'mon man.
The comment I replied to was dismissing a research paper describing innovation from a chinese company wrt more effective use of their hardware, by insinuating that it must be propaganda with no supporting reasoning.
Of course China has copied foreign technologies, I didn't say they haven't. My point is that you guys love to hang on to that as an excuse to dismiss everything from China even when they're obviously plenty capable of doing R&D in many fields, even with it having gotten its start off "stolen" IP.
America "stole" plenty of rocket technology from Germany, yet it's well understood that they eventually innovated on it and made it their own. But somehow whenever China's involved, you guys come out with your unsubtle bigotry.
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scmp is kinda the opposite of state media lol
It is owned buy AliBaba.
Can anybody independently verify any of this?
Ah, yes, the American media environment, which is internationally famous for not lying.
So we are in agreement, we should not take every thing at face value.
I just hope you extend this skepticism consistently.
I do. I don't know what gave people the impression that I was born an American and went to their schools. In "open societies" like the US, the form information control are rather sophisticated, but they are there. However, I grew up in a one TV channel country. I learned to never trust the news. This immunizes me from state propaganda a little bit.
I think I was more referring to general abundance of credulity that is thrown at all AI stories at HN. There are a lot of skeptics when an Ed Zitron blog is shared. But every time a "ChatGPT was worried about being shut down" story is shared, it gets hundreds of upvotes. This story is just as ridiculous. AliBaba claims to reduce usage of equipment from a business that is being banned by their government. Magically. And during a trade war.
> I don't know what gave people the impression that I was born an American and went to their schools.
The fact that your comment appears to defend the US position, by virtue of attacking a press release from a major non-US competitor by questioning its source.
> This story is just as ridiculous. AliBaba claims to reduce usage of equipment from a business that is being banned by their government. Magically. And during a trade war.
When you have a nuanced argument, it is good to speak plainly (without snark) and proactively bring that evidence. That is, start out with "I doubt the veracity of this story because XYZ involved people have ABC motivation to fabricate it", and actively try to make a case that would convince someone who doesn't already see things your way.
> The fact that your comment appears to defend the US position, by virtue of attacking a press release from a major non-US competitor by questioning its source.
It only appears that way because you see the world through a simplistic bipolar lens.