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China may match or beat America in AI

economist.com

71–80 of 114 posts

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#71
post #34
post #29

70% of the US budget is inexorably allocated to entitlements, interest on debt, and welfare. The rubicon of 100% US Debt-to GDP will soon be crossed. Many US states are hanging on to solvency by a thread. Corporations and banks have sequestered hundreds of billions in cash waiting for signs of US fiscal stability. And what does the media want to talk about? Russian spies and Chinese A.I. Rome burns and everyone is as…

You are just fear mongering. USA's debt to GDP ratio is not a problem for our economy or anything else and won't be for a very long time. The US economy is growing fast enough that the debt-to-GDP has no effect on our stability as we could pay it off if we wanted to and do indeed have plans for this sort of thing. Also most of our debt is actually owned by US citizens which also helps make this a non issue. There's a…

Debt suppresses growth above 85% of GDP. At current levels it reduces net purchasing power. It depletes tangible foreign reserves. It causes legislative gridlock. It distorts the Federal Reserve's balance sheet.

It also doesn't sit in isolation. The BLS statistics add another 200 or so percent for about 300% debt-to-GDP when you include household, state and muni debt.

Unlike China, the US citizen lender argument isn't helpful. US debt holders are free to move their money into other assets.

The only argument in favor of the current debt levels is that no other nation can float enough liquidity to compete with US debt. For that reason alone the sky isn't falling.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#72
post #29

70% of the US budget is inexorably allocated to entitlements, interest on debt, and welfare. The rubicon of 100% US Debt-to GDP will soon be crossed. Many US states are hanging on to solvency by a thread. Corporations and banks have sequestered hundreds of billions in cash waiting for signs of US fiscal stability. And what does the media want to talk about? Russian spies and Chinese A.I. Rome burns and everyone is as…

Don't mask simplistic ideological beliefs about debt and economics as some kind of melodramatic reality everyone else but you is ignoring.

There's nothing ideological in saying this isn't sustainable:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#73
post #54
post #29

70% of the US budget is inexorably allocated to entitlements, interest on debt, and welfare. The rubicon of 100% US Debt-to GDP will soon be crossed. Many US states are hanging on to solvency by a thread. Corporations and banks have sequestered hundreds of billions in cash waiting for signs of US fiscal stability. And what does the media want to talk about? Russian spies and Chinese A.I. Rome burns and everyone is as…

100% US Debt-to GDP would still put it ahead of most EU countries, LA, MENA, etc.

Nope. Add household debt, state debt and obligations, muni debt... its a sinkhole.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#75
Well, China both educates its own people instead of foreign national freeloaders ... and it sends Chinese people to the USA in order to pick up on AI and other technologies ... and they have been digitally stealing, robbing, and pilfering everything that they can get their hands on to launch themselves hundreds of years into the future in terms of technological advancement and development. Why develop things when you can just steal them from others, right?

But at least the communist dictatorship of China that has been using ideological subversion along with their cold war allies the Russians and Mexicans, to make Americans both hate themselves and throw open the gates to antithetical minded people, will surely be as benevolent and generous and self-sacrificing as the USA has been. They are communist after all, and we know that communism works really well due to all the examples of it working really well.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#76
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not to sound like an anti-intellectual, but could it be a misnomer to assume that innovation comes from academia. The use of “misnomer” in that sentence is, itself, misnomer. What you describe is, perhaps, a mistake, but not in naming.

A wordsmith I am not. Thanks for the correction.

Friendly writing advice: use simple words. Elongated romance (etymologically-Latin) terms sound pompous. Short words are better. Think "gut" not "stomach".

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#77
post #60

Here I was looking for the Dr. Strangelove equivalent of the "AI Gap" :-) Given that in the next four years it is likely that more than half of the PhDs awarded by top US schools are awarded to foreign nationals[1], and our current government policy is to restrict immigration as much as possible, we are on a path to insuring that soon the world will have a much better pool of talent to draw on to do the research than…

Not to sound like an anti-intellectual, but it could be a mistake to assume that innovation comes from academia. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a convincing chapter (I think it is Chapter 13: Lecturing Birds to Fly) in his book "Antifragile" about this very thing. Then there are cultural differences that could be at play concerning innovation. It is a general observation that east asian cultures tend to suppress risk-taki…

I don't think that line of reasoning is completely wrong but I think it's often over-emphasized as some sort of durable higher truth rather than a simplification of very complicated social factors, and usually this tends to significantly under-weight the ability to change things — e.g. many Americans are used to thinking that we have a huge cultural lead for entrepreneurship but the popular opinion there hasn't adjusted for the degree to which Europe, Canada, Israel, etc. have closed that gap over the last couple decades.

In the case of China, I don't think there's any question that it used to have higher barriers to innovation but I'm not comfortable concluding that this will be true for that much longer given how many people are trying to change it. Every time I read one of Bunnie Huang's gongkai posts[1] it really seems like the view in 20 years will be radically different.

1. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#78
Of course they will. Americans have turned on each other in their period of greatest economic vulnerability, basically self-destructing while the Chinese government gladly hands out 5x your research grant from elsewhere to do that research in China. America's running on desirability to high-skill immigrants and existing ecosystems, both of which are fading fast. NIH is halving budgets while China is multiplying them by 10. The West is fucked, I just wish I spoke Chinese.

Re: China may match or beat America in AI

#80
They are building chips without the x86 albatross. The US State Department is to blame for the phoenix by cutting off their Intel MIC supply.

They have enough labor to do supervised learning on a grand scale that the U.S. can't compete with.

The U.S. can't compete.

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