MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE • Hacker News Board

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#91

Post by thrwawayw434 » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

eastendguy wrote: post #88

novaRom wrote: post #63

I just finished reading 'AI Superpowers' and I hardly understand now if US has any single chance to compete with China's Tech fairly, openly, democratically, with respect.

...in what area is China actually leading? Catching up and leading require two very different skill sets.

Do you follow ML ? A lot of big-impact papers in Computer vision has come directly from mainland China and Hong Kong. MSRA, CUHK, Sensetime, and Baidu have made quite a few advances in the field.DMLC a group of members composed mostly of Chinese students basically wrote things like MXNET and Xgboost.

Granted most of these are collaborative ventures, but calling China 'catching up' at this stage is ignorant.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#92

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #43

lexs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has been caught doing industrial espionage as well, more of a pest or cholera situation here.

False equivalency. The US has not been caught on the scale of China and its forced tech transfer policies. US may have some limited targeted activity, but they aren't wholesale strip mining industry IP.

[deleted]

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#93

Post by mark_l_watson » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

dfgert wrote: post #80

novaRom wrote: post #63

I just finished reading 'AI Superpowers' and I hardly understand now if US has any single chance to compete with China's Tech fairly, openly, democratically, with respect.

What makes you believe US completes fairly and openly? Don't you see news on China import embargo and capture of it's executives.

I don't think that novaRom was not saying that we compete fairly. I read novaRom's comment to say that we can't win if we play fairly.

I also read 'AI Superpowers' and I agree with the book's premise that long term China will win the 'AI war' economic competition because their society allows broad use of data and since they are more of an online Internet-connected society they have much more data to use for training deep learning systems. China is also throwing a ton of money at supporting startup AI companies.

I pains me to be too critical of my own country (the USA) but I think we are really making bad mistakes by: 1) not sufficiently supporting research at the government level. 2) turning our students into life-long debt slaves with student loans. 3) screwing up our long term economic and social health by, for example, not providing free meals to poor kids in schools (one of the very cost effective ways to get a more educated work force - kids who are hungry in school tend to not do well). 4) stop allowing Facebook/Google/etc. unfettered use of private data while at the same time not figuring out a way to get more training data to people doing basic reseaerch.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#94

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

zelon88 wrote: post #82

dfgert wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you believe US completes fairly and openly? Don't you see news on China import embargo and capture of it's executives.

You also don't see TMobile stealing robots from China or Facebook luring Baidu developers to "interviews" for interrogation.

[deleted]

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#95

Post by mark_l_watson » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

varjag wrote: post #66

novaRom wrote: post #63

I just finished reading 'AI Superpowers' and I hardly understand now if US has any single chance to compete with China's Tech fairly, openly, democratically, with respect.

Chinese tech is impotent, so there's a fair chance for America.

I can't agree with you. I am in the USA. I had dinner last night with several people talking about starting up an AI/medical company. When I got home, I found companies in China that were already shipping similar products to what we had just been talking about at dinner, just as possible ideas.

My fields are NLP and deep learning, and from my perspective, research papers coming out of China have been innovative and high quality in the areas I am interested in. That is to take nothing away from the spectacular NLP deep learning models that Facebook and Google have recently been publishing and sharing. Just because we have very good tech, that does not mean that our competitors don't also have advanced technologies.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#96

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #94

zelon88 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also don't see TMobile stealing robots from China or Facebook luring Baidu developers to "interviews" for interrogation.

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#97

Post by mola » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

microdrum wrote: post #45

farresito wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an European, I would rather get spied on by the US than by China.

[flagged]

I'm not sure the US isn't imperialist by your definition. At the very least the second Iraqi war hints to the contrary. It appears the main agenda there was a grab for oil and not a security threat. Not to mention its behavior in South America during the cold war. Now, I prefer the US over China, because its ideals are at least against imperialism and pro human rights, democracy and freedom. They might not always do what they preach, but these ideals combined with soft power approach, is (was?) A source of good. (If only they didn't hate socialism so much, and didn't prefer corporation freedom over human freedom, it would have been even better... well, let's hope the EU can survive)

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#98

Post by ryacko » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

eob wrote: post #61

I was a PhD student at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and recall an incident where a visiting scholar from a corporation who had donated money had to be asked to leave because he essentially scraped every piece of internal data and code in the lab and sent it back home. What was amazing to me was that he was allowed to return a few months later with the explanation “it was just a cultural misunderstanding” I want to be ca…

What grey area? It was bad enough they decided to send him home.

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#99

Post by gnu8 » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

eob wrote: post #61

I was a PhD student at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and recall an incident where a visiting scholar from a corporation who had donated money had to be asked to leave because he essentially scraped every piece of internal data and code in the lab and sent it back home. What was amazing to me was that he was allowed to return a few months later with the explanation “it was just a cultural misunderstanding” I want to be ca…

By home, do you mean their personal network, their employer, or their country?

Re: MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE

#100

Post by artificial » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:36 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #93

dfgert wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you believe US completes fairly and openly? Don't you see news on China import embargo and capture of it's executives.

I don't think that novaRom was not saying that we compete fairly. I read novaRom's comment to say that we can't win if we play fairly. I also read 'AI Superpowers' and I agree with the book's premise that long term China will win the 'AI war' economic competition because their society allows broad use of data and since they are more of an online Internet-connected society they have much more data to use for training…

I haven't read the book, I'm adding it to my encumbered reading list (this site spins off so many excellent recommendations it's difficult to keep up).

1) Is the argument then that only the government can succeed with large scale initiatives? Pretty much everything that government is involved with becomes encumbered, if it's liked to a code base it drives up complexity for diminishing returns performance wise. I like the mission that NASA does and private initiatives are much more cost effective. 2) Schools are expensive with the rise of access to cheap money and ballooning administrators vs instructors. Should this be regulated? 3) I'm not against the "lunch" program. I'm curious why is it a schools job to feed students? The meal programs extended from lunch to breakfast and dinner. Isn't it a parents basic job to feed their kids? If this were someone with a pet would you consider them a good custodian if they can't meet their obligations? I'm not talking about someone on hard times I understand crap happens but more of an extended living scenario. 4) Stop giving information to these companies. This is akin to "I can keep a secret but the people I tell can't". Is it really private data if you share it? If you have a spending problem, stop buying crap.

What are your proposals to drive research domestically? If there were a market for it that's untapped seems like a goldmine.