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

japantimes.co.jp

551–560 of 645 posts

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

#551
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…

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 think the world would be better on the whole if such people returned home and improved their countries. The US cannot brain drain the entire world for its own benefit.

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

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the population size and school system, I'd conjecture there's more ... though there is brain drain and emigration to consider.

I'd rather be in China than the USA right now.

Are you being facetious or are you ignorant of what it's actually like over there?

https://reclaimthenet.org/china-man-chair-interrogation-soci...

Or even worse, do you actually support their views on human rights?

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

#553
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 An obvious counter-example to this is the NSA/GCHQ and cryptography. They've repeatedly shown that they're a good 5-15 years ahead of everyone else.

Aside from doubts about whether or not this is actually the case the pertinent question that comes from my point is:

If cryptography researchers were keeping their results secret to within their institution / research circle, instead of sharing with academic community / public, would that advantage or disadvantage the NSA relative to the researchers? I think the answer is obvious, and it's a pretty excellent analogy for the US-China situation.

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

#554
post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah they really shouldn't be blockading their neighbors while claiming every country around them is their sphere of influence and openly interfering in their allies domestic politics while leveraging their size to force other countries to accept asymmetric economic deals...

How is this different from what the US is doing? See Monroe Doctrine for example and recent events concerning Venezuela?

thats the joke

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

#555

Love how people (americans) are always framing it "China vs the west" or "Russia vs the West" when in reality it's just China vs the US. It's convenient and makes people think that the whole western world is allied and agrees with the US. While it's true in theory, the reality is much more nuanced than this.

ASML is a Dutch company.

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

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you on the conclusion, but man I just wish people stopped believing in fairy tales about countries like this. America does it too. Why are people so allergic to materialism? I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take. Material conditions shape his…

To speak to this importance, it wasn't long ago that the sentiment I heard about the country was that it isn't, or wouldn't be, ascendant due to their "culture". It's the Schrodinger's cat of cultures. Or maybe generalities about culture aren't to explain for economic and political velocity.

But it's undeniable that culture and how that's reflected in governance have a huge impact: South vs North Korea.

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

#557
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> West-- as usual-- is pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up. The companies building out vast data centers for AI aren’t looking to make profits for several years (if ever), and are catching a lot of flak for it. The shareholders who seem to be focused on short-term profits and punish them every time they get cold feet. Oracle is a prime example of this. I don’t know if the markets in Asia work differe…

And they should be catching a lot of flak for it because it's not really long term strategic planning, it's overhyping a technology and running roughshod over society promoting misuses and AI slops.

Although I'm the first to agree with this, it is actually commendable in the sense that it breaks with the quarterly profits approach.

Like meta with the metaverse thing, I hate it with a passion, but pouring billions yearly with little return just to support your vision is at least a break with tradition...

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

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowhere close, but pace now seems faster than estimated, i.e. original western estimate is they won't even get EUV prototype up until 2030s. Right now their chips are already "economically" competitive, as in SMIC is starving on 20% margins vs ASML/TSMC/NVIDIA getting gluttonous on 50-70%, at least for enterprise AI. Current scarcity pricing = litho costs borderline rounding error, 1500 Nvidia chip flips for 30000, 6…

How does one even smuggle an ASML machine? I'd assume the machine stops working if the GPS position doesn't compute, at end of life I wouldn't expect ASML to allow these devices nor their components to end up on the second hand market, I'd expect the future transfers to require continued permission of ASML, much like weapons distribution.

I don't think entire machine, more components to keep current machines, some export controlled after purchase, running.

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

#560

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…

I don't disagree with you on the conclusion, but man I just wish people stopped believing in fairy tales about countries like this. America does it too. Why are people so allergic to materialism? I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take. Material conditions shape his…

Why would you assume culture is immaterial? And to make this less emotional let’s take the micro scale; don’t you think the culture of doing engineering doesn’t affect outcomes team to team within the same company, or company to company within the same country or even country to country within the same company?
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