It always amuses me just how much of a hate boner America has for China. The absolute fury and indignation that those guys on the other side of the pond are catching up to them is funny to me.
Stealing. The word is stealing not catching up. It really doesn’t matter matter because China lacks the creativity and forethought to make the tech work. That’s a cultural problem.
Absolute garbage comment. Our entire LIVES and upbringing is assimilation of thoughts and ideas. We literally have sayings like “imitation is the most sincere form of flattery”.
Capitalism comes in and decides that ideas, in and of themselves, need to be monetized and commodified. We create parents and trademarks and copyrights, all flying in the face of millennia of human cultural evolution. Using this, we decide that copying is stealing. Absolute insanity. Stealing is wrong because it DEPRIVES someone of the use of their property. Copying doesn’t deprive anyone from shit!
We have a system where if someone finds a good way of doing something, but doesn’t play nice with others, we DEMAND other people to use INFERIOR ways of doing that thing so we don’t make the original inventor mad. This might, maybe, make sense with people, but corporations own just about every useful patent we’ve ever made, corporations aren’t people, we don’t owe them shit. ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS! IDEAS ARE NOT PROPERTY! IMITATION ISN’T STEALING! How did we even get here?
The problem is these new ideas cost time, money, manpower to create. Why would any person spend the time and energy to make something new only for someone to take your work?
Stealing is how you catch up. Imaginary property laws were also lax in the US as it was growing. By the way, the “they just steal, they have no creativity” line was the same old bullshit trotted out against Japan while Japan was outcompeting us. Unfortunately for Japan, they’re a US ally and were bullied into adopting a financially-engineered ticking time bomb that exploded and left them with multiple lost decades.
Japan literally took American ideas and make them work. Japan brought over American innovators who were stifled at GM and Ford. They put in the production that killed Detroit.
Have you seen the last couple of years who your most brilliant minds are? Hint most of them are either Asians or descendants of Asian parents.
Like it or not, but there are a lot of really smart people in maths, science and IT people in China and Asia who are much smarter than Europeans and/or white Americans.
My big question is: if they’ve got this much of a hate boner, why not just build the chips in Taiwan? I hear they’re even better than China at this shit. Or is this one of those “we’re pretending there’s only one China for the overlords” articles?
From a planning perspective, the West must assume Taiwan is already “lost” and merged into China. Therefore the rational action to take is to begin spinning up as much chip production as possible in the interim, while continuing to rely on Taiwan’s manufacturing.
Fun fact, the guy who founded TSMC was an immigrant working in tech firms in the mid-late 1900s but was unable to get promotions due to American racism against asians. So he said, “Aight guess I’ll go back and make my own company.”
The US had the TSMC founder and drove him away with hate.
Please do yourself a favor and check out podcasts covering this topic, there are some good ones.
European Technology firms also fucked this up really hard. Philipps created ASML, NXP and had a founding 25% share in TSMC, but managed to win nothing from it. Due to Philipps short-sighted management none of these great wins in the semiconductor industry benefited the company at all and all three firms are now completly spum out and worth way more than Philipps. The TSMC share alone is now worth much more than Philipps Market Cap.
Right? I don’t known why some Americans think they’re the only one capable of building AIs, and if someone else did it, they must be stealing it… (or more likely it’s an excuse)
Correct. The free market is only good when it’s enriching them, if it’s helping anyone else be it citizens or another country, then something is wrong and we can pay an economist to tell you so too!
Capitalism and neoliberal globalization is great as long as your capitalist organizations are dominating the system. But that inevitably results in the emergence of other competitive capitalist organizations. Then it’s back to trade barriers, and when that fails, military conflict.
It also leads to enshittification, Google Twitter and previous intel stagnation before rizen cpus were invented, subscription services everywhere and they always try to cut content and rise the prices, even subscription based cars like bmw and Mercedes, GPU prices overpricing, and Apple price gouging with additional 8gb of ram costing 500$ and apple vision pro USB 2.0 strap costing 300$, any market competition is beneficial for us commoners, it keeps corporations and their lobbyists at bay
A whole bunch of assumptions with not a lot to back it up there. Who exactly says Chinese semiconductors and AI are world class all of the sudden? The source they linked doesn‘t imply any of that. It states a couple of traitors to the free world support the Chinese genocide with a couple billion. That‘s pretty vile but hardly makes China a powerhouse in those fields. It‘s a band-aid fix to a broken leg.
Qwen has been around for a while, but from what I can tell it didn’t really stick out after it’s initial hype. Alibaba claims it’s open source when it isn’t and people are naturally suspicious about it. User experiences also seem to be really mixed about it. And maybe the latest update caught up on the likes of Mixtra, but that’s not breaking new grounds or makes China an AI powerhouse by any means.
I am very confused about this ongoing thing regarding "stifling China's access to AI models". Does the US government think GPUs are magic? All you need to make a ML model is some tensor math and a web crawler, maybe some human processing on the later bits. You're not gonna stop China from making them. You're not gonna stop college kids with gaming rigs making them.
I'm guessing the endgame here is to make it slightly more expensive to do this in China to get American companies to have slightly better versions in the market and prevent a TikTok situation, rather than any legitimate strategic goal. Right? I mean, besides commercial protectionism I don't see how this type of language makes sense.
It’s a military defensive strategy. This is more about ending the supply of chips and chip machines to China than it is about the AI. Western designed chips are being put into advanced Chinese weaponry. And since Xi is telling the world that Taiwan will bend the knee during his lifetime, it might be a good idea to stop giving China the tech that will turn that scenario into a reality.
None of that makes any sense. "Western chips" all come from Taiwan in the first place. "Western designed chips" are also in laptops and mobile phones, including tons of Chinese devices, and that's assuming you mean to include South Korea as "Western", which is a bit of a stretch. Those are fundamentally interchangeable with military hardware. Nobody is putting 4090s and A100s in ICBMs.
Make it make sense. What specific hardware is this stopping from getting to China and for what application?
It doesn’t matter, anyway. Sanctions like this can be easily sidestepped by China going through series of proxy vendors across the world and still receive whatever it is that they want.
Regardless, it’s not so much the 4090s the US government cares a lot about, but rather the giant data center TPUs. They included the 4090s etc in the ban because Chinese government can easily afford to buy thousands of them to network together to accomplish the same thing as DC TPUs.
As for the military application of the chips: You could absolutely reengineer and use a 4090 GPU chipset in an ICBM, but no I don’t think that’s what they’re really concerned with them doing. I’m betting they’re more concerned with their cyber warfare and other espionage/surveillance capabilities, which a 4090 can easily be repurposed for (especially a lot of them).
Edit: And I don’t disagree with your earlier point! I would guarantee there’s a good deal of corporate protectionism going on. I honestly wouldn’t even be surprised if that’s 100% the real reason behind it. I was just trying to provide a plausible explanation for why it could be considered a military justification.
Right, but that's my point, compute is compute is compute. There are tensor acceleration cores in commercially available hardware dating back five years. They capped things above a specific performance threshold, is my understanding, but that just means you need more of the less powerful hardware, so all you've done is make things more expensive/less energy-efficient, but not block any specific application. Not in cheap, portable chips, not in huge industrial data center processors.
So not particularly useful to stop cyberwarfare, not particularly useful to stop military applications. The only use I see is making commercial applications less competitive. Specifically on the training side of things.
The goal is kinda to just fuck China overall. Also youre wrong about military application, just cause you can duck tape 500 PS2s together to achieve the same thing as my PC doesnt mean it will be as fast, efficient, or as small as my pc.
Just using an example say an American General Dynamics AA missile weigh 400 pounds with the newest and best hardware, to achieve the same thing cludging together a bunch of older hardware for an equivalent Chinese missile may very well increase the weight to 450 pounds, which in turn can effect speed, maneuverability, and even explosive yield.
Remember theres a reason nobody cludges together a bunch of vista era computers to try to match a modern PC on a practical level.
That’s because the Chinese experience was very peculiar. When American and European investors and industry giants went abroad to outsource manufacturing, they brought in the capital and left with the profits. But the capital, and technology or knowledge, never spread in the colonies or neo-colonies. When China “opened up”, they were real clever about it. They said: “sure, you can open your factories here where there is an abundance of cheap labor. But in exchange, we want the knowledge and technology”. And since opening up China to foreign capital has been the wet dream of capitalists and proto-capitalists for the past several hundreds of years, they accepted the deal. So China was left with the know-how to be able to set-up their own national industries. And the profits of exporting manufactured goods was used for strategic industries and infrastructure, unlike most colonial and neo-colonial experiences where the profits are just pocketed by a national bourgeoisie.
And the profits of exporting manufactured goods was used for strategic industries and infrastructure, unlike most colonial and neo-colonial experiences
that’s because most colonial/neo-colonial experiences are about raw resources extrativism
where the profits are just pocketed by a national bourgeoisie.
There sure are billionaires in China. But they don’t control the political structure like the billionaires do in the US. They are controlled by the political structure. When has it been the last time the US or EU executed a billionaire for harming the environment?
Holy shit… bro please don’t be racist like this in public. You should keep this shit to your brain and feel deep shame for it. No one ever taught you that?
The Chinese didn’t break any laws or “steal” anything. China had different copyright laws, and western companies agreed to share technology as part of their agreements with the CPC to operate in the SEZs. If they didn’t want China to have the tech, they could’ve just not taken the deals and go build their factories in India, or Bangladesh, or Malaysia etc.
And what you describe as the “Chinese mentality” is just literally capitalist logic, aka, psychopathy. It’s projection. The Chinese are winning, so you assume they are the apex capitalists, the Patrick Batemans. But you couldn’t be more wrong. They are winning by finding a different game, and playing it better. The rest of the world is following their lead, and your place on the board is soon to be extinct. So you panic and turn to dumbass things like racism.
So many reports of Chinese doing dodgy shit. Just look at how much copy right infringement they do.
People go over there and set up factories and the Chinese will take the machines a part at night and put them back together as they are being installed.
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