351–360 of 586 posts
China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't They're subsidizing this in many ways - Huawei chips, new DDR5 memory fabs, etc. Ultimately, DeepSeek's architecture is significantly more cost effective than anything from Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic. Presumably, they'll incorporate DeepSeek's MLA* architecture to get all the benefits for next year's releases (if not this year's upcom…
What’s the TLA architecture? I haven’t read about that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Put another way: if the average US citizen doesn't subsidize the costs of these trillion dollar companies, China is gonna come get you. Funny that you talk about being afraid of your own shadow. I have some exposure to utility regulation and from what I can tell some of the AI companies are "good actors" and willing to shoulder some of the burden. But others are pretty adversarial and want a free lunch.
> Put another way: if the average US citizen doesn't subsidize the costs of these trillion dollar companies, China is gonna come get you. The future is blatantly going to be electric. Between cars, heat pumps, ranges, etc, the quantity of kilowatt hours consumed will rise dramatically per capita because they are replacing burned fossil fuels. We don't need to subsidize the trillion dollar companies, we can settle for…
Reminds me of this parking ramp I used to use occasionally. I'd park for hours and when leaving the guy in the booth would tell me the charge and it would always be ridiculously low, like $0.50 or $1.00. Definitely not enough to pay for the guy to sit in the booth. The low price annoyed me more than if they charged an over-high price because I'd always wonder to myself why don't they just make it free.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Put another way: if the average US citizen doesn't subsidize the costs of these trillion dollar companies, China is gonna come get you. The future is blatantly going to be electric. Between cars, heat pumps, ranges, etc, the quantity of kilowatt hours consumed will rise dramatically per capita because they are replacing burned fossil fuels. We don't need to subsidize the trillion dollar companies, we can settle for…
All public infrastructure benefits the public but the role of our governance is to correctly prioritize. $100 billion spent on nuclear power plants is $100 billion being withheld from other critical social services.
What? No it isn't.
There are many places the government could use to appropriate funds, not just social services. The military, for example. Other subsidies. Tax credits. Simply increasing the debt.
China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.
It feels like the US for years has operated under the assumption that homeostasis for the global economy would always be “designed in California, assembled in China.” Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here. But China it seems doesn’t need the US to produce great cars, devices, robotics, or AI. We absolutely need China to help us build all…
There's nothing special about anything we design in the US other than time and money commitment to create it. China did have some espionage of course going on, but the vast majority of shit isn't some secret. And with the US shitting on China with restrictions, we increasingly caused them to invest time and money into things they otherwise would have passively accepted as coming from the west. ASML sees the writing on the wall for themselves in particular.
China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.
It's not really a bottleneck. US capital is building data centers in South Asia, MENA and SEA. Many of these countries offer tax breaks because they want US data centers, and they have abundant equatorial land for solar. You might say that US would prefer sovereignty but that's a separate argument vis-a-vis strategic competition with China in particular.
China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.
"China is building for the future, " Meanwhile, the USA is paying for its past excesses, with interest on its debt being the number two most expensive line item in the budget. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
The formerly "fiscal conservatives" that I know are working overtime explaining how the debt isn't a bad thing and we can just move numbers.
I have no idea why people celebrate this. It is replacing one feudal lord by another. We don't need AI at all. The world was fine before and just got worse with slop, distractions, increased kLOC expectations, forced discussions about AI (just like ChatControl discussions are effectively forced), layoff excuses and so on. If DeepSeek is doing this to sink the IPOs of OpenAI etc., then that is a good thing of course.
China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China. China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.
It feels like the US for years has operated under the assumption that homeostasis for the global economy would always be “designed in California, assembled in China.” Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here. But China it seems doesn’t need the US to produce great cars, devices, robotics, or AI. We absolutely need China to help us build all…