Why is it that whenever China is concerned, their most non-violent aspirations are always framed as evil? Manhattan project for anything outside a literal nuke is pretty wild for a headline.
How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
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Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#272With Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...
Nvidia folding would be the best day of my life.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#273Why is it that whenever China is concerned, their most non-violent aspirations are always framed as evil? Manhattan project for anything outside a literal nuke is pretty wild for a headline.
It’s really not. It just is short hand for a government deciding that something really important is worth throwing a lot of resources at. I’ve heard it used to describe plenty of things western governments do too.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#274It's wild to me that so many skeptical westerners who want to nitpick certain unproven technicalities, when the entire world only gets bits and pieces of the on the ground reality of China's progress, like the original Reuters article which was clearly fed information by insiders. You should be living in the world of "China has successfully developed EUV and equivalent litho supply chain" and basing your decision mak…
It is always like that. Most people just don't have the attitude of getting things done, and they can barely believe it is possible when they watch what the people who do accomplish.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free markets? No, competition does that. Competition requires free markets but free markets don't guarantee competition.
I poorly paraphrased profits converge to zero under perfect competitive market. Yes real world not perfect competitive markets. Oligor/duo/monopolies form, sometimes subsidies other shenanigans pick winner(s), winners extract huge margins/rents to build moats lock out new competition. Sometimes they collude / settle on business model with higher margins, i.e. 10-20% being normal/commodity, 50% for software and semi i…
Note "converging to zero" doesn't really mean zero because economics includes opportunity costs. It just means that outsized gains don't exist over the longer term without some kind of market power. In the long run, most industries end up making the same returns.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the stuff you pointed out is addressed in a series of blog posts by Lattner : https://www.modular.com/democratizing-ai-compute
Many of those posts are opinionated and even provably wrong. The very first one about Deepseek's "recent breakthrough" was never proven or replicated in practice. He's drawing premature conclusions, ones that especially look silly now that we know Deepseek evaded US sanctions to import Nvidia Blackwell chips. I can't claim to know more about GPU compilers than Lattner - but in this specific instance, I think Mojo fuc…
what is provably wrong ?
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#277If I were running this show, I would have a second concurrent project as a hedge and as a chance of leapfrogging the West: trying to make free electron laser lithography work.
Free electron lasers have lots of (theoretical) advantages: no tin debris, better wavelength control, the ability to get even shorter wavelengths, higher power, higher efficiency, and it’s less Rube Goldberg-ish. Also the barrier to entry for basic research is pretty low: I visited a little FEL in a small lab that looked like it had been built for an entirely reasonable price and did not require any clean rooms.
So far it seems like Japan is working on this, but I have the impression that no one is trying all that hard.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.35848/1347-4065/acc18c
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
When did this whole quarterly profits thing start and what lead to it?
It's not real. Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth. But for some reason people love to use this as an explanation of everything wrong in our country.
I'd cite as a counterexample in recent memory Sears, GE, Boeing, and Intel. I think collectively they've destroyed close to a trillion dollars by focus on quarterly results over long term, and they're not alone.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. That's where this is heading, and the West-- as usual-- is pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up.
> pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up "Forgetting to look up" implies a desire or intent to do so. The United States - former leader of the collective West - made the choice decades ago to sacrifice everything on the altar of quarterly profits. All that remains are the consequences of that decision.
I would just be careful to discount the capitalist West. You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing. All of that wasted capital. Authoritarian regimes with controlled media always seem successful… until it doesn’t. Up until the USSR collapsed there were many prominent people in the West saying it was the superior system. The market test - meaning floating prices and the response to them - is a superior way of allocating capital. We need to see how all of this plays out
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's the same problem as the past administration and most members of congress- they're just too old to care about 50yrs from now. I don't think they're actively against the 50yr+ future, it's just that the world is changing too fast, and they're falling back to what they know- competing with their peers for power, money, and status. They only have some inkling of actual empathy for the communities their grand…
> same problem as the past administration Did you miss the Infrastructure act that spent $500B on roads, ports, and water projects? The CHIPS act that spent $50B on decoupling and R&D?! The Climate & Energy act ("IRA") that spent $400B on clean energy subsidies??!! I can understand the perspective of wanting more, but the forward-looking policies of the last administration were in a different galaxy compared to those…
I’ve met one person whose job was funded via the CHIPS act - she was a lawyer.
I bet China’s first priority when building semiconductors isn’t hiring lawyers.