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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

#601

Post by estimator7292 »

snapcaster wrote: post #471
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…

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…

Because a shared cultural identity is vital to maintain a cohesive society that can muster the collective resources to get shit done?

The world is shaped by psychology and the actions of a very very few individuals at the peak of their respective societies. Material conditions merely enable success brought by cultural motivation.

Your argument really only holds water if you consider all humans to be fungible worker drones and that culture doesn't exist. The human factor is the critical factor in all of history. Material wealth does not magically produce innovation. The Romans could have started the industrial revolution a thousand years earlier, they had effectively unlimited resources. They simply lacked the cultural spark to pursue that line of research and industry. They even literally invented a steam engine a thousand years before modern times.

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

#602

Post by throwaway920102 »

irl_zebra wrote: post #572
throwaway920102 wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw the video a few days ago. It uses some napkin math but the author does at least use a spreadsheet / toy model to arrive at their conclusions.

Ohhh okay ty "throwaway920102" will take your word for this.

Was trying to be at least a little helpful "irl_zebra", not to suggest the video was sufficient evidence.

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

#603

Post by immibis »

jimmaswell wrote: post #552
immibis wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In China you don't criticise the dictatorship and don't be a Muslim and your quality of life improves every year and you get many cool products and services. In the USA they are disappearing people at random and they are banning the import of products and services from the places that are producing them (mostly China).

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

#604

Post by acituan »

snapcaster wrote: post #600
acituan wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

a perfect example in this context would be when a company is successful and it's attributed to culture not product market fit, funding or luck

I understand your point about misattribution but it cuts both ways. How about when a company is better than competitors because they executed better because they had a superior organizational culture. Or not successful and this is due to poor culture.

YC sets the prime examples. It is never product at the expense of who the team is and in what proven way they have worked together and plan to execute at scale.

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

#605

Post by pezezin »

petcat wrote: post #532
rsoto2 wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the TSMC factory that it's workers hate and has been facing heavy delays and power outages??? https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

From a China/Asia-centric newspaper? I would expect them to say that.

The article mentions the language and cultural barriers, and the rigid hierarchy with old bosses who demand blind obedience, even when the rules are counterproductive.

I have been living in Japan for years now and I have had the same experience, so I am inclined to believe the article. Mixing Western workers with East Asian management is extremely difficult, to put it mildly.

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

#606

Post by cryptonector »

ipdashc wrote: post #541
cryptonector wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The press release following the bombing of Hiroshima specifically stated which method of refining Uranium was used. The U.S. spent a great deal of time, effort, and money on researching and testing four different enrichment systems. Just that one detail saved the Soviets 3/4s of a sizeable chunk of the A-bomb effort. Sometimes you don't need to leak much detail to give away a great deal.

Do you have the press release in question? I'd be very curious to see it. All I found at a glance was Truman's well-known one ( https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/hiroshima-... ) which was followed by the Secretary of War's ( https://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1945/450806b.html ) and neither seem to mention anything about enrichment methods or even the concept of isotope separation.

Hmm, it was not quite a press release, but it's in the Smyth report from August 12, 1945: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/publi... (search for diffusion).

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

#607

Post by amluto »

impossiblefork wrote: post #456
jpgvm wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

XFEL is going to be destructive to the chip. It can't be the future.

One could tune an FEL to precisely the same wavelength as ASML’s setup if one were so inclined. (Subject to all kinds of complications, as the high energy electron sources needed are complex and EUV light is hard to work with. But there isn’t much of a fundamental constraint on the ability to adjust the wavelength of a FEL.)

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

#608

Post by dleeftink »

darkstar_16 wrote: post #449
dleeftink wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully, this century, we can shed some of the 'dominating' mindset that has led to technological exclusionism in the first place. Not that catching up to the state-of-the-art isn't warranted, but that progress will become pocketed once more if we keep falling for the same economic traps.

It's interesting how this comes up when the west is the one that is trying to catch up :)

Fair enough, but the point still stands: innovation of equal benefit compared to isolationism once more with a hefty share of underhanded copying, which will ultimately result in similar technical capabilities anyways.

While historically this has been difficult to achieve, when innovation cycles shift there is an opportunity to shift ingrained practices too.

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

#609

Post by greensh »

overfeed wrote: post #341
dash2 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made the most popular RPG last year already - why do you think it'll take 20 years for them to make the most popular shooter? For that matter, the Singapore-HQed SEA makes Free Fire, which topped Google Play in 2019.

Im aware of Genshin Impact, and that NetEase is behind Marvel Rivals. FPS tend to have sticker fanbases, but I chose 20 years because that's what I guess is how long it may take not only for the domestic EUV to launch and get yields good enough for a cheap but competitive GPU out the door.

FPS like Valorant, owned by Riot Games, owned by Tencent?

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

#610

Post by yanhangyhy »

snapcaster wrote: post #471
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…

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…

This is a country with its own written language, writing system, calendar, the internet, and so on; a country with the world’s largest single ethnic population; a country whose cultural traditions were established two thousand years ago; a country with an independent ideology. Are you saying that Western societies would rather believe this is a country of large-scale surveillance, that its people live under a social credit system with no individuality or freedom, than believe that its people possess a distinct and stronger sense of collective consciousness?
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