Seems like demographics, AI, and tech parity are converging on a Taiwan takeover attempt in the 2027-2030 timeframe.
Peaceful democratic transition is also on the table when KMT wins back the presidency next.
How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
221–230 of 645 posts
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Controversial take: Democracy and the US are awful at keeping secrets, and are incapable of winning by an information delta, if we followed your strategy we would surely be doomed. Our greatest advantages come when we work in the open, and share knowledge and empower ordinary people and the world with technology. As things stand, we are funneling our brightest minds into creating proprietary (secret) technologies...…
But that only works if China reciprocates, which they show no sign of doing. I’d imagine a Chinese citizen living, studying, or working in the US has access to a lot more advanced knowledge than a US citizen trying to do so in China. Up to this point, the US has been the one with the advanced knowledge. We now face a world where the opposite might become true. But using the previous example, I’d imagine a future hypo…
It doesn't require reciprocation because it is a generalized version of the rebasing problem in software.
Over a big round table with cigar smoke in the air it's natural to come to the conclusion that the closed party can always outpace any set of open parties since it can take the public work and extend it with an advance that it keeps a secret.
In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party. In the rebasing metaphor, the reason for this is the free coordination an open party gets with other open parties. The closed party never gets to insert its advance into the shared state-of-the-art, so it loses all of the free maintenance of coordination, and it has to choose between paying the maintenance cost of integrating its secret advance with the public SOTA, dropping the secret advance and going back to parity with the public SOTA, or disconnecting from the public SOTA and going all hands in on its own ideas. The maintenance burden of integrating your ideas with the constantly moving SOTA may sound trivial but in practice it is usually prohibitively expensive if there are a lot of parties collaborating on the public SOTA and doesn't leave you with much time/budget to find new secret advances.
Right now in the US, we have all of the disadvantages of the open model: the closed parties of the world can cheaply take ideas they like from Meta, Google, OpenAI and mix them with private advances, and all of the disadvantages of the closed model: our domestic tech industry keeps all of its technology a secret from other domestic competitors, and gets none of the coordination benefits of open research / technology, independents and startups are not only unable to access information about the SOTA, but they are actively attacked by the existing monopoly players with any means available when they approach it independently, including using their access to massive capital to drain the talent pool, or being bought outright. And, as we are all too familiar with, the entrenched players don't even care that much about whether or not they can even use the talent efficiently, denying it to competitors is worth more.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is anyone here calling legislators about it to inform them of this? Does anyone here have leverage to affect strategy?
It might be a bit nihilistic but at this point I don't think the current US administration has any strategy. In past administrations, it felt like even if there was a strategy, bureaucracy and lack of caring enough to do their job led to nothing happening. In this administration, it feels like there's no care for the rules so in theory a strategy could be pushed through... except there isn't one - literally whoever i…
Without getting overly political, it is nihilistic because one of the major US parties got so high on its own supply of lies that the people currently running it FORGOT they were lying. You're looking at a similar situation to many authoritarian or fascist political systems in which they way to get ahead in no way involves doing your job, but making sure Stalin or Mussolini is happy with you. This started in the US in the mid 1990s when GOP leadership bought in on power being its own end and is now on full display.
People have all sorts of mythologized reasons for why the USSR failed, because while it often produced immense amounts of goods and services and well educated people in certain areas (sometimes beating "the west" by a good margin for one or two years at a go), it also made long term advancement contingent on the party and not the real world and became incapable of handling major changes.
We're witnessing that now in the US with perhaps one of the most incompetent governments in history that is also burning down the non-political institutions of expertise that for all their faults and mistakes, at least had educated and motivated people that cared about their purpose.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
The machines live indoors, far from being able to see GPS signals. Sure, you could require that there be an antenna run to the roof, but you can spoof that stuff. The thing that helps prevent smuggling of ASML machines is that a) there are few of them (i.e., people would notice), b) it requires tremendous effort to move them at all, let alone without anyone noticing.
it might contain accelerometers, which burn away cryptographic fuses ( setting them all '1' or all '0' so to speak)?
Considering that these tools are installed in seismically active areas [0], the last thing a customer would want is for the tool to zeroise itself because of an earthquake.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-says-all-its-sites-o...
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be very fair, Chinese companies are also pursing quarterly profits. They're just better at scaling things up and down very fast because of immense supply chain options.
> immense supply chain options. so this begs the question - why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense? My unresearched answer is that the gov't policies of the west doesn't induce it, while china's gov't does (which includes targeted subsidies, tax incentives and state driven finances). The "hidden" cost is that the workers in this supply chain isn't as well paid and isn't as powerful as the workers fr…
There are lots of reasons, but also, having 1.4B people under the same government that has more-or-less aligned strategic goals help. Like supply chains within Japan, from what I've seen and experienced, are pretty strong. However, the options will always look smaller compared to a gigantic organism across the pond.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#226With 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...
If that happens, hardware trust becomes non-verifiable. We will also see talent pipeline erosion. Just further Western industrial policy failure.
> If that happens, hardware trust becomes non-verifiable.
Unfortunately I already have to run a binary blob just to play fps games from 10 years ago. I can't even load a new OS onto my phone anymore.
Ultimately I'm not sure hardware sourced from China changes the trust equation very much, at least for me individually. I have much more concern about the FBI, which has recently decided to ramp up investigations into queer people [0][1][2], than I do about foreign powers - at least as long as it's not actively destructive malware or something.
> We will also see talent pipeline erosion.
We absolutely will, and to some degree I wonder if we aren't already with how popular tablets and phones are. I've noticed many young people these days don't really know how to interact with anything on a computer that isn't an app. GPUs and RAM becoming more significantly more expensive will take a huge chunk out of the hobby market and in doing so they will intensify the pipeline erosion.
[0] https://www.advocate.com/politics/pam-bondi-trans-equality-b... [1] https://ncac.org/news/advocacy-isnt-terrorism [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/09/26/us-trump-targets-opponen...
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#227Is "Manhattan Project" supposed to be sounding threatening or something? Is anyone in on Japanese newspapers and whether they often us such rhetoric, when reporting things about China? It reads really kind of idiotic. As if chips are to be equal to atomic bombs and could be dropped on Tokyo any moment now. Maximum alarmist. That on the background of recent clumsiness of the Japanese PM ... It starts to paint a certain picture.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a good thing that Chinese companies have zero expertise in leveraging consumer demand for lower-end tech to develop know-how and catch up with the state of the art from Western-aligned companies and then economies of scale to surpass them in distribution.
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.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#229Is "Manhattan Project" supposed to be sounding threatening or something? Is anyone in on Japanese newspapers and whether they often us such rhetoric, when reporting things about China? It reads really kind of idiotic. As if chips are to be equal to atomic bombs and could be dropped on Tokyo any moment now. Maximum alarmist. That on the background of recent clumsiness of the Japanese PM ... It starts to paint a certai…
When I hear Manhattan Project, I don't think about the outcome. I think about the massive amount of effort for a singular goal that might not even be possible.
Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cuda is 20 years old and it shows. Time for a new language that fixes the 20 years of rough edges. The Guy (Lattner) who made LLVM is working on this: https://www.modular.com/mojo Good podcast on him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-swift-to-moj...
What I gather from this comment is that you haven't written CUDA code in a while, maybe ever. Mojo looked promising initially. The more details we got though, the more it became apparent that they weren't interested in actually competing with Nvidia. Mojo doesn't replace the majority of what CUDA does, it doesn't have any translation or interoperability with CUDA programs. It uses a proprietary compiler with a single…
Most of the stuff you pointed out is addressed in a series of blog posts by Lattner : https://www.modular.com/democratizing-ai-compute