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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

#521

Post by expedition32 »

reeredfdfdf wrote: post #428
vkou wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing. Is it all being demolished, or is 95% of it being moved into? Because all those ghost cities that China was building that the news kept bitching about... Are now all full. Meanwhile, in the West, we have a housing shortage. Who looks the fool now...

Yep, it's way better to overbuild than underbuild. Lack of houses for young people looking to start families / move in for better jobs has big negative societal impacts that we're only starting to see.

In the 60s and 70s European countries were giant construction yards. It gave many people jobs and we still enjoy the infrastructure today!

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

#522

Post by smallmancontrov »

trollbridge wrote: post #280
smallmancontrov wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

TSMC Arizona Gigafab, Intel's Chandler fabs, Micron's Boise megafab, these are all giant buildings full of equipment cranking out chips or credibly preparing to. I'd hazard a guess that more than lawyers were involved.

Oh, but trollbridge saw a lawyer once! That's it, phone it in, shut it all down, corruption proven, the gigantic buildings must be all be a mirage. Trollbridge saw a lawyer and that disproves everything!

Troll harder lol.

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

#523

Post by qcnguy »

yanhangyhy wrote: post #323

Domestically, we often put it this way: since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves. It’s only a matter of time — if not this year, then next year; if we can’t do it next year, we’ll just keep going. This is how we approach everything. There is a small caveat, though. China was not actually that far behind in the semiconductor field in the past. The problem was that corruption and fraudulent proj…

It’s only a matter of time, but time matters, as they say.

You should know that what China is doing was tried in the past. It is an old story. When the microchip was brand new (invented in the USA) the Soviets realized they needed the tech for military purposes. So they built a closed city devoted to silicon research called Zelenograd. It was staffed with very bright physicists and engineers.

But Zelenograd didn't make the Soviets a computing superpower. In fact they were always behind and fell further and further as time went on. The reason is that the Zelenograd scientists were given copies of US chips and told to clone them. By the time they finished cloning one chip the US had already invented several that were much more advanced. Unable or unwilling to forge their own path, even though they were smart enough to do so, they could not truly develop the in-house expertise needed to match the ever accelerating pace of innovation.

The Soviets never did catch up. Americans tightened security and they just fell ever further behind. By the 1980s they did not even have any attempt to develop an internal internet.

That China is running secret projects to try and clone ASML's machines isn't surprising because for all it has changed, it's still a communist state and its leaders still think in communist ways. They don't understand or appreciate distributed wisdom, so are mentally unable to truly understand how innovation works. Government projects like that are destined to fail - they will clone yesterday's machines tomorrow, and just like the Soviets, will fall further and further behind.

The thing that saves China is that its private sector actually does exist and is much more developed, so the Chinese government projects aren't the only way it can make progress.

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

#524

Post by selectodude »

coliveira wrote: post #469
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.

How much of the current usage is paying at least 1 cent per inference? AI providers are giving away AI for anyone to use. Only professionals and big companies, that are at most 1% of the market, are paying anything at this point.

Who knows? LLM providers losing money on every user and making it up on volume is a problem for them to deal with. I’m simply saying that the products are here to stay, even if (hopefully) the companies need to right-size their growth strategies. If Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 is the pinnacle of models and we never see a new one again, I think they’ll be useful and cash flow positive. OpenAI and Anthropic will, of course, go bankrupt. But the models themselves are absolutely valuable.

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

#525

Post by why-o-why »

tgv wrote: post #349
why-o-why wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, USSR did finish, just 4 years later. Maybe it was because we had all those immigrants working on it (e.g. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, and John von Neumann)!

There's a whole regiment of immigrants who worked on the Manhattan project, as we all know. We also know that the USSR obtained much of their knowledge on how to build the bomb through espionage.

Espionage? Gasp. The US would never do that to get ahead. I'm so suspicious of claims without external sources of provenance about American exceptionalism during the cold war that I take all if it with a large grain of salt. Back then, everything Russia said was propaganda, and everything the US said was truth from the mouth of god.

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

#526

Post by dangus »

soared wrote: post #494
dangus wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the places where American inefficiency is most visible is in construction, urban planning, and healthcare. America blows a significant amount of its money by having its citizens drive everywhere with no option to take a train, bus, bicycle, or low-speed e-scooter. Americans take a crazy percentage of their income and just dump it into the stagnant automotive industry. Americans blow between $5,000-10,000 a ye…

Show me these magical cities where an extra $750/mo in rent lets you both move from the suburbs to downtown, and increase your sq footage!

Certainly! Here’s my source: https://youtu.be/kYLPUsn0X

The top 5 or 10 of these you’re basically getting close to equivalent square footage or better once you replace your vehicle spending with housing spend.

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

#527

Post by dangus »

senordevnyc wrote: post #505
soared wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me these magical cities where an extra $750/mo in rent lets you both move from the suburbs to downtown, and increase your sq footage!

Seriously, delusional take. I live in Manhattan and I’m considering a move to Westchester (large suburban county just north of NYC). Average cost per sq foot to buy in Manhattan is about $1500, and it’s about $400 in Westchester. That’s before you touch the other differences in cost of living (taxes, childcare, groceries, etc).

Manhattan is not one of those areas, and is actually one of the worst on the list. Mostly this applies to a lot of smaller cities, here’s my source:

https://youtu.be/kYLPUsn0X3E

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

#528

Post by dangus »

mcculley wrote: post #478
cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding your last point, back when my political views were "evolving", I had thought about if, instead of handing foreigners diplomas and kicking them out of the country as fast as possible, we should do the opposite: have student visas require that the recipient stay in the US at least five years after graduation, and then fast-track them through the permanent residency -> citizenship pipeline. It made no sense to…

I like the idea of incentivizing people to stay, but I don’t know how we could “require” it. I don’t want the U.S. to implement exit visas or egress control.

Maybe this could be done with a different mechanism like an incentive to stay or an escrow deposit that you get back once you’ve met the requirements.

I think a streamlined path to real citizenship would be an incredible incentive for a lot of people.

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

#529

Post by smallmancontrov »

earlyreturns wrote: post #470
vkou wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never met a corn farmer, but somehow the corn ends up on my plate.

Where are the CHIPs then? Oh but at least our infrastructure was rebuilt. Right?

In the google results, if you had bothered to google. It turns out $50B was enough to tip the investment calculus on half a dozen large projects and a dozen or so smaller ones.

So tell me: was it learned helplessness or partisan hackery that made you severely underestimate what turned out to be possible?

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

#530

Post by expedition32 »

decafninja wrote: post #451
_lvbh wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like this. Feels like easily become racist. E.g. people from Southeast Asia, Japan, or Korea who might not even speak Chinese but getting fired because they "look Chinese"

I don’t like this either. It falls under what I referred to as “highly controversial” choices. But I also don’t doubt that if the coin was flipped, China would not hesitate at all to fire any non-Chinese person from such sensitive projects, and all without any outcry you would see in the West.

Racism against Chinese fuels Chinese patriotism and nationalism which is weaponised by the CCP.

I believe that a democratic China would still want to beat the West and become a superpower.

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