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How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

japantimes.co.jp

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Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#311

Post by inavida »

irishcoffee wrote: post #169
selectodude wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure all of these LLMs operate in the black on inference costs. If I were to set up a DGX200 in my garage, say the 5 year TCO is a million dollars. Split that among 500 people and we can get it done for maybe $30/mo per user in total operating cost. I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server.

> I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server. Seems like on hn a lot of people pay for the subscriptions. I don't personally know a single person who pays for any type of llm subscription. I am a staff sw engineer, been doing this a long time. I acknowledge this is an anecdote. I just happen to know a lot of people at a lot of different companies from my network. Nobody pays for…

I think your skepticism is warranted. Top comments look a lot like ads to me.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#312

Post by spaceman_2020 »

energy123 wrote: post #294
subw00f wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, all those countries China has invaded really shows how apt they are to do that.

Please spare us. China invaded Vietnam to protect Pol Pot while he was mass killing millions of innocent civilians. They have territorial disputes with over 10 countries, which they've been unable to decisively act on because those neighbors either have nukes (India) or are protected by a more powerful country (US). Not because their government is some benevolent entity. They're basically an authoritarian dictatorshi…

China has resolved a lot of its border disputes already. The border disputes with Kazakhstan, Krgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Tajikstan have all been resolved

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#313

Post by AlotOfReading »

entangledqubit wrote: post #290
amluto wrote: post #277

If 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 b…

DARPA funded a bit in this space a while ago. (Example: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/darpa-maskless-nanowri... ) I'm not sure how you get over the bandwidth limitations, even with multi-beam.

What bandwidth limitations are you referencing? My understanding is that deep euv lithography is limited by chromatic aberration, so the narrow bandwidth of a single beam FEL would be an advantage. If you need more bandwidth, you can chirp it. Is the bandwidth too high?

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#314

Post by csomar »

monero-xmr wrote: post #279
GolfPopper wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 flo…

> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China

Isn't the same now happening with the US with the massive overbuilding of AI capacity? Seems like a tightly centralized capitalist system is not that different from a communist one.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#315

Post by ljlolel »

expedition32 wrote: post #241
chii wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The West only represents a minority on this planet. China alone has 1 billion people. The last 200 years has been an aberration and it is currently in the process of being corrected.

The West is easily over a billion people

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#316

Post by NicoJuicy »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #139
xmprt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't think the current US administration has any strategy I 100% believe the strategy is to enlarge the Trump family's wealth, and it's been a wildly successful strategy (in the past year he's been able to create billions in wealth for his family [0]). At least this vaguely ties Trump's success to the success of the United States in a limited capacity. Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, but it's…

> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him

Nah.

He wants to be a dictator that extracts wealth from it's citizens.

He has a benefit from following the communist path to extract wealth. Make lives miserable, so they are living off the state ( eg. standing in line for bread), so they can't protest.

Putin is not Trump's friend, but Trump idolises him for extracting enormous wealth from Russia, censoring news ( propaganda) and imprisoning political opponents, ...

Just check the "firehose of falsehoods" ( a Russian propaganda method), it will explain a lot about Trump.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#317

Post by neltnerb »

mcny wrote: post #293
terminalshort wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The exception proves the norm. The only major example I can think of is Amazon dot com which famously reinvested all its profits into itself for well over a decade. The fact that investors didn't punish Amazon dot com was seen as befuddling in the press. > Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth. No, I don't think this is true at all because you used the word "routinely". I would claim…

Don't most tech startups lose money for years before they maybe make a profit?

I mean, I agree that such companies are over-represented in thinking about small businesses if that's what you mean. Normal companies have to be profitable quickly for sure.

It feels like tons of companies get valued based on userbase or revenue or theoretical breakthrough rather than ever having to really think about breaking even, but I know that's just because those folks get all the press.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#318

Post by csomar »

xmprt wrote: post #86
echelon wrote: post #82

Earlier 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…

Current US strategy is to get South America+Canada resources and call it a day. They looked at global geopolitics and it looked too complicated for them.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#319

Post by parineum »

jpgvm wrote: post #289
amluto wrote: post #277

If 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 b…

Yeah I think it's likely they get an EUV machine working but with less efficiency than ASML just because of how long it takes to tune these beasts and work out all the kinks. The big brain move is to try leap-frog the whole thing with XFEL. Smaller wavelength, way brighter source, no vaporized tin particulate, etc. It's a much bigger lift, new optics, new resists, etc. So a completely brand new supply-chain from scat…

> However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.

I'm not convinced Chinese EVs are technologically better. They've just command economied demand and reduced costs via mass production. The technology seems pretty inline with anything available in the West but demand isn't there to take advantage of scale. China is ahead in EVs by metric of quantity for sure but I don't think they're got next gen battery tech they are keeping secret.

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