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The future of AI will be dumber than we can imagine
Recently Scott and some others put out this snazzy website showing their forecast of the future: https://ai-2027.com/
In essence, Scott and the others predict an AI race between 'OpenBrain' and 'Deepcent' where OpenAI stays about 3 months ahead of Deepseek up until superintelligence is achieved in mid-2027. The race dynamics mean they have a pivotal choice in late 2027 of whether to accelerate and obliterate humanity. Or they can do the right thing, slow down and make sure they're in control, then humanity enters a golden age.
It's all very much trad-AI alignment rhetoric, we've seen it all before. Decelerate or die. However, I note that one of the authors has an impressive track record, foreseeing roughly the innovations we've seen today back in 2021: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like
Back to AI-2027! Reading between the lines, the moral of the story is for the President to centralize all compute in a single project as quickly as he can. That's the easiest path to beat China! That's the only way China can keep up with the US in compute, they centralize first! In their narrative, OpenAI stays only a little ahead because there are other US companies who all have their own compute and are busy replicating OpenAI's secret tricks albeit 6 months behind.
I think there are a number of holes in the story, primarily where they explain away the human members of the Supreme AI Oversight Committee launching a coup to secure world hegemony. If you want to secure hegemony, this is the committee to be on - you'll ensure you're on it! The upper echelons of government and big tech are full of power-hungry people. They will fight tooth and nail to get into a position of power that makes even the intelligence apparatus drool with envy.
But surely the most gaping hole in the story is expecting rational, statesmanlike leadership from the US government. It's not just a Trump thing - gain of function research was still happening under Biden. While all the AI people worry about machines helping terrorists create bioweapons, the Experts are creating bioweapons with all the labs and grants given to them by leading universities, NGOs and governments. We aren't living in a mature, well-administrated society in the West generally, it's not just a US thing.
But under Trump the US government behaves in a chaotic, openly grasping way. The article came out just as Trump unleashed his tariffs on the world so the writers couldn't have predicted it. There are as yet unconfirmed reports people were insider-trading on tariff relief announcements. The silliness of the whole situation (blanket tariffs on every country save Belarus, Russia, North Korea and total trade war with China... then trade war on China with electronics excepted) is incredible.
I agree with the general premise of superintelligence by 2027. There were significant and noticeable improvements from Sonnet 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7 IMO. Supposedly new Gemini is even better. Progress isn't slowing down.
But do we really want superintelligence to be centralized by the most powerhungry figures of an unusually erratic administration in an innately dysfunctional government? Do we want no alternative to these people running the show? Superintelligence policy made by whoever can snag Trump's ear, whiplashing between extremes when dumb decisions are made and unmade? Or the never-Trump brigade deep in the institutions running their own AI policy behind the president's back, wars of cloak and dagger in the dark? OpenAI already had one corporate coup attempt, the danger is clear.
This is a recipe for the disempowerment of humanity. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and these people are already corrupted.
Instead of worrying 95% about the machine being misaligned and brushing off human misalignment in a few paragraphs, much more care needs to be focused on human misalignment. Decentralization is a virtue here. The most positive realistic scenario I can think of involves steady, gradual progression to superintelligence - widely distributed. Google, OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek might be ahead but not that far ahead of Qwen, Anthropic and Mistral (Meta looks NGMI at this point). A superintelligence achieved today could eat the world but by 2027, it would only be first among equals. Lesser AIs working for different people in alliances with countries could create an equilibrium where no single actor can monopolize the world. Even if OpenAI has the best AI, the others could form a coalition to stop them scaling too fast. And if Trump does something stupid then the damage is limited.
But this requires many strong competitors capable of mutual deterrence, not a single centralized operation with a huge lead. All we have to do is ensure that OpenAI doesn't get 40% of global AI compute or something huge like that. AI safety is myopic, obsessed solely with the dangers of race dynamics above all else. Besides the danger of decentralization, there's also the danger of losing the race. Who is to say that the US can afford to slow down with the Chinese breathing down their neck? They've done pretty well with the resources available to them and there's a lot more they could do - mobilizing vast highly educated populations to provide high-quality data for a start.
Eleizer Yudkowsky was credited by Altman for getting people interested in AGI and superintelligence, despite OpenAI and the AI race being the one thing he didn't want to happen. Really there needs to be more self-awareness in preventing this kind of massive self-own happening again. Urging the US to centralize AI (which happens in the 'good' timeline of AI-2027 and would ensure a comfortable lead and resolution of all danger if it happened earlier) is dangerous.
Edit: US secretary of education thinks AI is 'A1': https://x.com/JoshConstine/status/1910895176224215207
There are some problems with AI-2027. And the main argument for taking it seriously, Kokotaljo's prediction track record, given that he's been in the ratsphere at the start of the scaling revolution, is not so impressive to me. What does he say concretely?
Right from the start:
In reality: by August 2022, GPT-4 finished pretraining (and became available only on March 14, 2023), it used only images, with what we today understand was a crappy encoder like CLIP and projection layer bottleneck, and the main model was pretrained on pure text still. There was no – zero – multimodal transfer, look up the tech report. GPT with vision only really became available by November 2023. The first seriously, natively multimodal-pretrained model is 4o which debuted in Spring 2024. Facebook was nowhere to be seen and only reached some crappy multimodality in production model by Sep 25, 2024. “bureaucracies/apps available in 2022” also didn't happen in any meaningful sense. So far, not terrible, but keep it in mind; there's a tendency to correct for conservatism in AI progress, because prediction markets tend to overestimate difficulty of some benchmark milestones, and here I think the opposite happens.
Again, nothing of the sort happened, the guy is just rehashing Yud's paranoid tropes that have more similarity to Cold War era unactualized doctrines than any real world business processes. GPT-4 was on the order of $30M–$100M, took like 4 months, and was by far the biggest training run of 2022-early 2023, it was a giant MoE (I guess he didn't know about MoEs then, even though Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer is from 2017, same year as Transformer, from an all-star DM team; incidentally the first giant sparse Chinese MoE was WuDao, announced on January 11, 2021, it was dirt cheap and actually pretrained on images and text).
Notice the absence of Anthropic or China in any of this.
By the end of 2024, models were in training or pre-deployment testing that exceeded 3e26 FLOPs, and it still didn't reach $100M of compute because compute has been getting cheaper. GPT-4 is like 2e25.
I am not sure what he had in mind in this whole section on chip wars. China can't meaningfully retaliate except by controlling exports of rate earths. Huawei was never bottlenecked by chip design, they could leapfrog Nvidia with human engineering alone if Uncle Sam let them in 2020. There have been no noteworthy new players in fabless and none of new players used AI.
None of this happened, in fact China has rolled up more stringent regulations than probably anybody to label AI-generated content and seems quite fine with its archaic methods.
This is not at all what we ended up doing, this is a cringe Lesswronger's idea of a way to build a reasoning agent that has intuitive potential for misalignment and adversarial manipulative stance towards humans. I think Noam Brown's Diplomacy work was mostly thrown out and we returned to AlphaGo style of simple RL with verifiable rewards from math and code execution, as explained by DeepSeek in R1 paper. This happened in early 2023, and reached product stage by Sep 2024.
We've caught up. I think none of this looks more impressive in retrospect than typical futurism, given the short time horizon. It's just “here are some things I've read about in popular reporting on AI research, and somewhere in the next 5 years a bunch of them will happen in some kind of order”. Multimodality, agents – that's all very generic. “bureaucracies” still didn't happen, this looks like some ngmi CYC nonsense, but coding assistants did. Adversarial games had no relevance; annotation for RLHF, and then pure RL – had. It appears to me that he was never really fascinated by the tech as such, only by its application to the rationalist discourse. Indeed:
OK.
Now as for the 2027 version, they've put in a lot more work (by the way Lifland has a lackluster track record with his AI outcomes modeling I think, and also depends in his sources on Kotra who just makes shit up). And I think it's even less impressive. It stubbornly, bitterly refuses to update on deviations from the Prophecy that have been happening.
First, they do not update on the underrated insight by de Gaulle: “China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.” I think, and have argued before, that by now Orientals have a substantial edge in research talent. One can continue coping about their inferior, uninventive ways, but honestly I'm done with this, it's just embarrassing kanging and makes White (and Jewish) people who do it look like bitter Arab, Indian or Black Supremacists to me. Sure, they have a different cognitive style centered on iterative optimization and synergizing local techniques, but this style just so happens to translate very well into rapidly improving algorithms and systems. And it scales! Oh, it scales well with educated population size, so long as it can be employed. I've written on the rise of their domestic research enough in my previous unpopular long posts. Be that as it may, China is very happy right now with the way its system is working, with half a dozen intensely talented teams competing and building on each other's work in the open, educating the even bigger next crop of geniuses, maybe 1 OOM larger than the comparable tier graduating American institutions this year (and thanks to Trump and other unrelated factors, most of them can be expected to voluntarily stay home this time). Smushing agile startups into a big, corrupt, centralized SOE is NOT how “CCP wakes up”, it's how it goes back to its Maoist sleep. They have a system of distributing state-owned compute to companies and institutions and will keep it running but that's about it.
And they are already mostly aware of the object level; they just don't agree with Lesswong analysis. Being Marxists, they firmly believe that what decides victory is primarily material forces of production, and that's kind of their forte. No matter what wordcels imagine about Godlike powers of brains in a box in a basement, intelligence has to cash out into actions to have effect on the world. So! Automated manufacturing, you say? They're having a humanoid robot half-marathon in… today I think, there's a ton of effort going into general and specialized automation and indinegizing every part of the robotic supply chain, on China scale that we know from their EV expansion. Automated R&D? They indinegize production of laboratory equipment and fill facilities. Automated governance? Their state departments compete in integration of R1 already. They're setting up everything that's needed for speedy takeoff even if their moment comes a bit later. What does the US do? Flail around with alienating Europeans and vague dreams of bringing 1950s back?
More importantly, the authors completely discard the problem that this work is happening in the open. This is a torpedo into Lesswrongian doctrine of an all-conquering singleton. If the world is populated by a great number of private actors with even subpar autonomous agents serving them, this is a complex world to take over! In fact it may be chaotic enough to erase any amount of intelligence advantage, just like longer horizon on weather prediciton sends the most advanced algorithms and models to the same level as simple heuristics.
Further, the promise of the reasoning paradigm is that intrinsically dumber agents can overcome problems of the same difficulty as top-of-the-line ones, provided enough inference compute. This blunts the edge of actors with the capital and know-how for larger training runs, reducing this to the question of logistics, trading electricity and amortized compute cost for outcomes. And importantly, this commoditization may erase the capital that “OpenBrain” can raise for its ambition. How much value will the wealthy of the world part with to have stake in the world's most impressive model for a whole of 3 months or even weeks? What does it buy them? Would it not make more sense to buy or rent their own hardware, download DeepSeek V4/R2 and use the conveniently included scripts to calibrate it for running your business? Or is the idea here that OpenBrain's product is so crushingly superior that it will be raking billions and soon trillions in inference, despite us seeing already that inference prices are cratering even as zero-shot solution rates increase? Just how much money is there to be made in centralized AI, when AI has become a common utility? I know that not so long ago the richest guy in China was selling bottled water, but…
Basically, I find this text lacking both as a forecast, and on its own terms as a call to action to minimize AI risks. We likely won't have a singleton, we'll have a very contested information space, ironically closer to the end of Kokotaljo's original report, but even more so. This theory of a transition point to ASI that allows to rapidly gain durable advantage is pretty suspect. They should take the L on old rationalist narratives and figure out how to help our world better.
What does this actually mean? And what is your evidence for this? Have you spent time among Chinese researchers in China? Have you spent time in China? Not saying I don't believe you, just curious what you're basing your opinion on (hoping it's not just papers and Chinese social media).
This actually means, for example, that a strong paper from a Western lab will be about one big idea, big leap or cross-domain generalization of an analytical method, like applying some physical concept. Eg nonequilibrium thermodynamics to image generation. Or consider dropout (Hinton, Sutskever):
I can scarcely remember such a Chinese paper, although to be honest a vast majority of these big Western ideas turn out to be duds. A strong Chinese ML paper is usually just a competent mathematical paper.
Whereas a typical Chinese paper will have stuff like
And then 10 more tricks by shorter-range combinatorial noticing of redundancies, similarities, affinities. It doesn't look like much, but three papers later you see a qualitative, lifelike evolution of the whole stack, and you notice this research program is moving very quickly. They do likewise in large hardware projects.
I have Chinese friends. I have read a lot of papers and repositories and watched as research programs developed, yes, sorry to bash your hopes. I have played their games, consumed their media, used their technology, acquainted myself with their tradition a little. I have considered the work of the allegedly greatest Chinese mathematician, Terence Tao, and his style of work. And there is the oft-repeated thesis that Asians tend towards holistic rather than analytical thinking which is exactly about the bias in exploration style I'm talking about.
I am interested in whether you find this an impoverished or wrong perspective.
I don't know enough about AI to say anything about the current state of things. But I have spent the last ~20 years hearing ridiculous takes about how China is an unstoppable juggernaut that is just so much more efficient and growing so much faster than the West, with a growing middle class! and a cashless society! and giant dragon drone formations! and cyberpunk LED skyscraper forests! and, and...! They must be doing something right! Look how much more advanced they are! They're going to eat our lunch!
All of that just flies in the face of my actual experience over there (in one of the richest cities no less). Everything was Potemkin, everything was corrupt and chabuduo, everyone lied to your face with a smile, the gaslighting was off the charts. Buses broke down, parts of my quite expensive apartment fell off, litter and human feces were everywhere, and eating at an unknown restaurant was truly a gamble, especially when the weather was warm. Business dealings were (are -- my team in Japan is currently half Chinese!) a game of brazeness and information warfare where you try to hide your true intentions for as long as possible and, when you are caught, you just shamelessly tell outrageous bold faced lies ("I never promised that." "But I literally have your promise here in writing." "Well, I never promised that.") And somehow despite this incredible culture of shoddiness and aggressive deception there were plenty of Americans taking Chinese news outlets' and and China boosters' reports of the incoming Chinese Century at face value with zero skepticism.
Of course, there were also the "China is collapsing!!1" set. I had slightly more respect for some of them. Their predictions were equally dumb, but at least a few of them seemed dimly aware of the very deep rot. Although, the majority were of course mere chauvinists, racists, or grifters.
Both the optimists and the doomers' predictions were based on little to no verifiable evidence, especially since most people had never been to China or spoken to non-Westernized Chinese, much less read a Chinese newspaper in Chinese (an important distinction!). I'm surprised you're not more skeptical -- isn't the Western reporting on "Russian intentions" and "the Russian mind" just completely laughable to you? And Russian society and culture that (AFAICT -- low confidence) are considerably more accessible to the average Westerner.
To return to the main topic, because of the above, I simply don't trust any alleged incredible scientific miracles coming out of China. I think that if they were truly crushing America in AI, they would be hiding that fact (能而示之不能，用而示之不用 / 謀密則無敗). When the Deepseek news came out about it costing 95% less to train, my bullshit detectors went off. Who could verify their actual costs? Oh, only other Chinese people. Hmm, okay.
I have no ability to judge whether this is true, so feel free to Euler me if you like. But if Chinese research is so superior, why aren't Western AI companies falling over themselves to attract Chinese AI researchers? I know we all spend too much time online, but many Western countries are still much nicer places to live than all but the absolute richest areas of China (source: Chinese friends living in China, Chinese friends who permanently emigrated to America, and having lived in a rich area of China myself).
I'll stop my rant here, and also offer some preemptive defenses. First, I'm no Anthropic/OpenAI fanboy. I think it's probably a good thing if they fear Chinese competition since I'd bet they're slow rolling progress to maximize profit. Second, I'm not a European/white chauvinist. The Chinese people I've known were mostly quite intelligent, some even brilliant. But as I said before in the post you linked, Chinese mind games and information warfare are simply on a different level than that of the more candid and credulous Westerner (note that I do not say "honest" or "virtuous").
tl;dr Chinese are intelligent and have a rich and deep culture, but they are next-level deceivers and should be treated as such until proven otherwise
When have you last been there and in what city? This was like watching Serpentza's sneering at Unitree robots back to back with Unitree's own demos and Western experiments using these bots.
I simply call bullshit on it as of 2025 for any 1st tier city. My friends also travel there and work there, as do they travel to and live and work in the US. They report that straight from the gate in JFK, US cities look dilapidated, indeed littered with human feces (which I am inclined to trust due to your massive, easily observable and constantly lamented feral homeless underclass) and of course regular litter, squalid, there is a clear difference in the condition of infrastructure and the apparent level of human capital. I can compare innumerable street walk videos between China and the US, and I see that you guys don't have an edge. I do not believe it's just cherrypicking, the scale of evidence is too massive. Do you not notice it?
And I have noticed that Americans can simply lie about the most basic things to malign the competition, brazenly so, clearly fabricating «personal evidence» or cleverly stiching together pieces of data across decades, and with increasingly desperate racist undertones. Now that your elected leadership looks Middle Eastern in attitude, full of chutzpah, and is unapologetically gaslighting the entire world with its «critical trade theory», I assume that the rot goes from top to bottom and you people cannot be taken at your world any more than the Chinese or Russians or Indians can be (accidentally, your Elite Human Capital Indians, at Stanford, steal Chinese research and rebrand as their own). Regardless, @aqouta's recent trip and comments paint a picture not very matching yours.
They are not currently crushing the US in AI, those are my observations. They don't believe they are, and «they» is an inherently sloppy framing, there are individual companies with vastly less capital than US ones, competing among themselves.
This is supremely pathetic and undermines your entire rant, exposing you as an incurious buffoon. You are wrong, we can estimate the costs simply from token*activated params. The only way they could have cheated would be to use many more tokens but procuring a lot more quality data than the reported 15T, a modal figure for both Western and Eastern competitors on the open source frontier, from Alibaba to Google to Meta, would in itself be a major pain. So the costs are in that ballpark, indeed the utilization of reported hardware (2048 H800s) turns out to even be on the low side. This is the consensus of every technical person in the field no matter the race or side of the Pacific.
They've opensourced most of their infra stack on top of the model itself, to advance the community and further dispel these doubts. DeepSeek's RL pipeline is currently obsolete with many verifiable experiments showing that it's been still full of slack, as we'd expect from a small team rapidly doing good-enough job.
The real issue is that the US companies have been maintaining the impression that their production costs and overall R&D are so high that it justifies tens or hundreds of billions in funding. When R1 forced their hand, they started talking how it's actually "on trend" and their own models don't cost that much more, or if they are, it's because they're so far ahead that they finished training like a year ago, with less mature algorithms! Or, in any case, that they don't have to optimize, because ain't nobody got time for that!
But sarcasm aside it's very probable that Google is currently above this training efficiency, plus they have more and better hardware.
Meta, meanwhile, is behind. They were behind when V3 came out, they panicked and tried to catch up, they remained behind. Do you understand that people can actually see what you guys are doing? Like, look at configs, benchmark it? Meta's Llama 4, which Zuck was touting as a bid for the frontier, is architecturally 1 generation behind V3, and they deployed a version optimized for human preference on LMArena to game the metrics, which turned into insane embarrassment when people found out how much worse the general-purpose model performs in real use, to the point that people are now leaving Meta and specifying they had nothing to do with the project (rumors of what happened are Soviet tier). You're Potemkining hard too, with your trillion-dollar juggernauts employing tens of thousands of (ostensibly) the world's best and brightest.
This is unverified but rings true to me.
Grok 3, Sonnet 3.7 also have failed to convincingly surpass DeepSeek, for all the boasts about massive GPU numbers. It's not that the US is bad at AI, but your corporate culture, in this domain at least, seems to be.
How much harder do you want them to do it? 38% of your top quintile AI researchers came straight from China in 2022. I think around 50% are ethnically Chinese by this point, there are entire teams where speaking Mandarin is mandatory.
Between 2019 and 2022, «Leading countries where top-tier AI researchers (top 20%) work» went from 11% China to 28%; «Leading countries where the most elite AI researchers work (top 2%)» went from ≈0% China to 12%; and «Leading countries of origin of the most elite AI researchers» went from 10% China (behind India's 12%) to 26%. Tsinghua went from #9 to #3 in institutions, now only behind Stanford and Google (MIT, right behind Tsinghua, is heavily Chinese). Extrapolate if you will. I think they'll crack #2 or #1 in 2026. Things change very fast, not linearly, it's not so much «China is gradually getting better» as installed capacity coming online.
It's just becoming harder to recruit. The brain drain is slowing in proportional terms, even if it holds steady in absolute numbers due to ballooning number of graduates: the wealth gap is not so acute now considering costs of living, coastal China is becoming a nicer place to live in, and for top talent, more intellectually stimulating as there's plenty of similarly educated people to work with. The turn to racist chimping and kanging both by the plebeians since COVID and by this specific administration is very unnerving and potentially existentially threatening to your companies. Google's DeepMind VP of research left for ByteDance this February, and by now his team in ByteDance is flexing a model that is similar but improves on DeepSeek's R1 paradigm (BD was getting there but he probably accelerated them). This kind of stuff has happened before.
Sure, the West is more comfortable, even poor-ish places can be paradaisical. But you're not going to move to Montenegro if you have the ambition to do great things. You'll be choosing between Shenzhen and San-Francisco. Where do you gather there's more human feces to step into?
There is something to credulousness, as I've consistently been saying Hajnalis are too trusting and innocently childlike. But your nation is not a Hajnali nation, and your people are increasingly draught horses in its organization rather than thought leaders. You're like the kids in King's story of how he first learned dread:
I think Americans might well compete with North Koreans, Israelis and Arabs in the degree of being brainwashed about their national and racial superiority (a much easier task when you are a real superpower, to be fair), to the point I am now inclined to dismiss your first hand accounts as fanciful interpretations of reality if not outright hallucinations. Your national business model has become chutzpah and gaslighting, culminating in Miran's attempt to sell the national debt as «global public goods». You don't have a leg to stand on when accusing China of fraud. Sorry, that era is over, I'll go back to reading papers.
I'm not sure if my travels could cut cleanly in one way or the other on this honestly. If someone's vision of China is of cities openly falling apart then that's at least definitely not true of Shanghai or Nanjing. It may have been due to the older, mostly to my experience solved, problem of smog but I do remember the buildings browning more than I've noticed in American big cities. I certainly didn't stay long enough or speak enough of the language to get a sense of any kind of society wide duplicity. My wife reported that obeying traffic rules had improved since her last visit and you did still see pretty frequent incidents of scooters riding on the walking area. I was in the familial ingroup for most of the people I spoke to, someone living and breathing the culture would have a better idea.
I'll recount the story of a friend of the guy I met in Osaka who is hopefully getting out of Chinese prison soon, call him Andrew. I do trust this Osaka friend but am less sure how much I trust Andrew. Supposedly Andrew moved to Beijing on a business visa partnered with some local to start an American BBQ business that took off pretty well, growing to a couple locations. Fast forward to covid and Andrew needed to go home for some reason, can't remember if it was family or Chinese policy. When he returns he finds that his previous partner has opened a competing chain and claims that Andrew lied on his original work visa, landing him in Chinese prison while the previous partner took possession of all of his restaurant assets. This is of course an anecdote and perhaps a dubious one, Osaka friend vouches that Andrew isn't the type to falsify business documents but you have no reason to believe that and I give it maybe a 20% chance he's at fault. My wife found it plausible if that means anything. I like almost all the Chinese people I met, but I don't think I'd want to try and live in China full time.
I've noticed a trend of our Russian posters being very obsessed with framing American views on geopolitics in a racial angle. I haven't seen a single American call Russians orcs but seen many Russians accusing Americans of thinking in those terms. If Americans have a racial view of Chinese people it's as nerdy math kids, hardly the kind of people you'd be prejudiced against when it comes to ML research. Among the researchers I've known there has definitely been some sneering at the research paper output of the mainland, Wife and Mother in law both say that in the past it was a problem where China produced a lot of not very good papers but supposedly this has gotten better. Americans certainly have some neurosis around race but not in the way you should be merging it with American Exceptionalism to form American Racial Exceptionalism. Much ink has been spilt on how Americans deal with being a very multi-racial society and how that experiment is going. American's views on China has much more to do with their communist government than with their racial character.
I've seen plenty of Nuking Three Gorges Dam posting, “China is the welfare queen of nations” posting, “we built up those chinks with our toil and look at how they repay us” posting, “Ways That Are Dark” posting, “only steals and poorly copies” posting and all other sorts of unhinged, entitled and dismissive posting that receives applause lately that I feel secure in saying that there is an undertone of stereotype-driven racial animus and condescension/cope, and it goes way back to the Chinese exclusion act. Again, this is also visible in the smug confidence with which Trump's team initiated a trade war, assured that Xi will fold due to his sweatshop of a nation being existentially dependent on exporting cheap junk to the US. It is perhaps not at all or only marginally present in normal people, but then again normal people probably don't care a lot about the topic. I'll also say that I've definitely seen some Americans liken Ruskies to Orcs, but generally it's a European (or even specifically Baltic) thing, I will grant that Americans do not imagine themselves Elves, they're happy enough being citizens of a real great nation.
Your anecdotes sound completely believable, I don't put much trust in Chinese law system or IP protections for foreigners and recognize that most of the country is pretty poor.
Scooters on sidewalks, however annoying, are a far cry from human feces on sidewalks - a matter of lacking civic virtue or manners, but not decay of civilization. I don't see scooters on sidewalks here in Buenos Aires, but I do have to look where I'm stepping. Was the other way around in Moscow, would that it were the same way here.
There are more groups than the normies and the kind of people who are engaging in the China vs US threads on X. I'll note that when I have the misfortune of making the algorithm think I'm interested in China related politics I am fed some truly outrageous sludge both from anti-china hawks and mao apologists all slinging the hottest takes they can think up. There's a dynamic there and I fear you may be being misled about what smart Americans actually think on this subject. Things like the three gorges dam posting strike me more like apes pounding their chests at a rival than the thoughts of serious people.
I would hesitate to draw much inference from what the guy who clearly doesn't understand trade deficits thinks about the ability to win a trade war. Yes yes, to my great shame this idiot was elected to the highest office of the nation. I understand that this is what might be called a bad look. I'm just saying that him in particular being smuggly confident and wrong about some subject shouldn't really be taken as the opinion of thinking Americans. Thinking Americans, when they want to speculate on an Achilles heel on China are more likely to come up with the birthrate issue, the inflated housing market or the general issues of having a state substantially run by the kind of guy who can make people who bring him bad news disappear. These are all arguable points but they're not "these people are racially incapable of defeating us".
Most of what I've noticed when the topic of Russia comes up, and it's really fallen quite a distance out of focus, is that people are mostly talking about Putin in particular and not Russians in general. It's described as "Putin's war" and if people are feeling spicy they might bring up the oligarchs. Maybe it's a hold over from narratives of us spreading freedom but usually if we believe a country to be headed by a dictator we mostly feel bad for the citizens and pour most of our animus into the dictator. Deep in our cultural outlook we still believe if we got rid of the corrupt leadership that either the people would immediately thank us or the scales would fall from their eyes and they'd embrace us as friends.
The scooters on sidewalks was more noting that things tended to be trending in the improvement direction as far as orderliness goes.
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