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What? This is not happening unless there is very new news. China's home grown system is still much worse.
FT article this week: https://www.ft.com/content/8fd79522-e34f-4633-bc87-ef0aae2d9159
Archive link: https://archive.is/UKulo
Yes, they continue to try and play catch up, what I'm definitely not seeing is the regret for making them do that rather than just giving them the more powerful chips. Lack of access to nvidia chips is demonstrably slowing down their AI progress.
What is the end goal here? Or any goal?
OK, you're slowing them down alright. They will not have as capable models, as quickly or cheaply, in the next 4-6 years. Then what? Is this just banking on an AGI superweapon to make economic dimension irrelevant, or on the windfall from economic growth this is supposed to beget? Huawei is superior in networking equipment, China has an overabundance of energy and skilled labor, if they scale up production of even past-generation compute chips (and mainly HBM), they will have a fully adequate and incompatible domestic ecosystem and Nvidia and others will never reenter their market, and American slice of it will be that much smaller.
Do I really need some kind of special reasoning to oppose sending scarce resource that already sells out in western markets to a geopolitical rival to not only not direct gain but very straightforward direct losses to domestic firms? To sell our opposition the rope it needs to hang us is something a particularly short sighted firm might advocate for, but to do so below market rate? This is madness.
This lock-in effect is just nonsense and has not worked for literally a single firm that has sold out to china. China is not going to forego building their own echo-system and hasn't for any other sector they've found strategically important.
It's banking on the certainty that surrendering our major advantage in the AI race to china for no reason or gain will turn out badly for us, obviously. I can't even fathom how a thinking person could convince themselves otherwise. You've already highlighted their advantages, is your position that the race is already over despite us currently being ahead?
This has always been the goal and the chips would only be used to push towards this goal faster. Our one chance at dominance in this sector is remaining ahead in AI and reaping compound interest on that lead whether it's AGI or simply accelerated AI and chip development. If it's not enough then I just don't buy this fantasy that selling out now is going to give us a better seat in the future.
This is pretty asinine. You're defending export controls with the claim that their absence would… distort markets? Do you think that's what Nvidia is trying to do, sell GPUs below market rate, despite having an unsaturated domestic market that would generate higher margins? Why do you imagine they would hurt themselves like that? Might it be time to install some loyal apparatchiks on board, or do a little witch hunt for Communist agents?
As I've said before, "China" is not omnipotent and cannot create an ecosystem solely through political will and subsidies, they've been trying for decades and it hasn't been working so long as Nvidia was the obvious superior choice. Even now, nobody wants to use CANN if afforded the chance. I think this is how Jensen views this: he's straightforwardly fighting as the CEO of American company Nvidia, not just for line going up in quarterly reports but for enduring global dominance of his stack.
Are you avoiding the question, or does it not parse for you?
I think that to discuss whether "the race" is over, it's important to establish whether a race is happening and what it is that you are racing towards. The US is ahead in AI. Again, without American chips, China will be developing AI slower for the next few years. Is that a "race"? What happens when you reach the finish line? Don't huff and puff, say concretely. Do you build an AGI superweapon that disables their nukes with nanobots? Or what? What's the end goal, in the face of which every thinking person would deem hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of profits a mere short-sighted distraction? Can you spell it out?
Not enough for what? Like, what's the theory of victory here? Repeating the Great Divergence, now with automation, relatively growing so quickly that China is forever left in the dust? Lights-out factories spawning across the US, producing ungodly goods optimized by AGI, incomprehensibly advanced weapons systems, Pax Americana becoming permanent?
How likely do you think that is? And what happens if this doesn't work out?
I think the answers are basically "yes/likely/better not to think of this", and personally, I believe this is all deluded and very much in the spirit of last days of Nazi Germany. Both sides will have adequate AI to increase productivity, both will have "AGI" at around the same time, you're not going to have some dramatic inflection point, you will not leave them in the dust as a military or economic power, you'll just slow down global economic growth somewhat, and in the long run end up poorer and have a smaller slice of the global market. That's all.
You'd have to ask Jensen Huang why he's so hungry for demand despite not saturating the domestic market. The traitor, the treasonous little worm, is fighting bills that merely demand he offer the chips to domestic buyers for the same price. His public logic is the same short sighted nonsense of a "toehold" that you propose. This is a man who lies through his teeth at every opportunity. He claims that selling chips to China won't reduce chips available for western markets, this is a lie, in his earning report he very clearly says they already sell out of the chips.
China is already exerting the maximum amount of demand and political pressure it can to try and compete on chips. The internal market demand is irrelevant. The government will guarantee every chip is sold and prop up all the companies making them. Whether or not AI labs can use NVDIA hardware has zero actual influence on the development of their ecosystem. Hardware "lock-in" on these labs is an entirely made up concept.
Specifics could shake out a number of ways depending on where, whether and how you think AI will Plateau. In all cases besides it basically capping out at gpt-5 level dominance in this field is critical. If it is powerful enough to actually do high level engineering work then it instantly obviates China's other major advantage in having a big workforce. If it scales all the way to AGI then forget about it, winning that race is all that matters.
Winner gets to be the center of commerce and yes some latitude that comes along with having the most powerful military. These things come with social and political influence. Social and political influence that I think is better in the hands of democratic powers, as flawed as they are, than the autocratic CCP. We know what PAX Americana looks like and it looks pretty good actually. Billions rising up out of poverty. General spread of democratic institutions. And we know who Xi is allied with, nations like North Korea and Russia.
I'm happy that the Chinese people are prospering. I certainly don't want to take that away from them. But CCP dominance hasn't even been particularly good for them. China is host to the poorest and least prosperous Chinese people in the world. It's not a regime I would like to see replicated and given strength and more than Soviet Russia was a regime I would have liked to see replicated and given strength. surely you understand the "equals across the sea" isn't an option on the table. That isn't what is in store if we give up all our advantages in this sector.
China will take the chips, use them to accelerate their position, including in advancing their own semiconductor industry. I don't know how you could actually believe giving them the chips now would actually guarantee a slice of this market. As soon as China has even slightly competitive chips they will crumple up NVDIA and toss it out like so much garbage. It's what happens with every firm that tries to compete in China.
I have to note: I am undecided on what's better for me. I argue for the sake of argument. I believe the current US policy will end up making everyone poorer and American global standing lesser, as in the long term it will guarantee a separate technological civilization existing and building in and around China. So, given how undesirable your hegemony is, maybe that's overall a good thing and I should shill for export controls. Maybe this mad bet on the AGI race will work and I'm wrong, though.
This made me smile. Very "nationalize SpaceX" energy. You do realize that your Hail Mary attempt at preserving hegemony largely depends on him? For some reason, Loyal Americans run their hardware companies into the ground. I do think he believes that this game will continue for decades, and China is not going anywhere, it's not going to critically fall behind, and so he wants to keep a piece of that market for the US. And that can be done.
Asinine. As it's said, "there is nothing to be learned in matters of faith". If anything, this describes Intel. No, market demand is not irrelevant, PRC corporations actually have incentives beyond 5-year plans, largely because they have slim margins. Americans really have worked themselves up into a frenzy with this doctrine that everything in China is massively subsidized and so can be unprofitable forever. It's not about subsidies, they're just more productive than you and have a more ruthless market, to the extent that the state is trying – and failing! – to arrest "involution".
Just because you hate the CCP really, really hard does not give you the license to spew bullshit. Being very confident doesn't help. It is not, in fact, possible to create a competitive ecosystem by decree, even if it's super-duper maximum pressure. This just takes too many people. I know DeepSeek has been asked to and declined to do serious training runs on Huawei due to immaturity of CANN stack. They have this choice, for a little longer. They're typical. There are maybe 2 Chinese companies doing large-scale training on Ascends, and one is iFlyTek, which has been on entity list since forever and has no choice; they haven't achieved much. Even Huawei themselves are yet to release a single compelling model, they literally can't keep top-tier people interested as they leave to companies like DeepSeek. Huawei has 200K employees, for reference.
On a smaller scale, we've seen this when Microsoft attempted to make Windows Phone a thing. Tremendous effort went into it, a formidable corporation was banging against the wall for years, subsidizing the app marketplace, and it all fizzled out. No developers, no users, no network effects, no future.
One of those "billions" is in China, can you really take credit for it? I call bullshit, mostly it's just post-WWII economic growth the nexus of which was the US for reasons of not being bombed out, not some profoundly benign and productive doctrine or culture or people. India is illustrative: they wanted to latch onto Pax Americana and get something out of it; what have they got so far for India proper? I am in your "sphere of influence", so to speak, and it really doesn't look like you're spreading prosperity around. In fact it looks like you have nothing to spread, you don't invest, your own riches are a speculative bubble and you mainly "supply demand". You're demolishing your nuclear infrastructure, you don't build anything except datacenters, certainly you can't boast of turning Pakistan into a solar-powered economy or something. Outside a few premium items like these very GPUs, your wares are non-competitive trash that people abroad have to be compelled to buy, you're even pathetically forcing third parties to share your tariff regime to cling to some markets (very funny in this context of "market share is useless"). Yes, in theory you could cheat with AGI, but ask yourself, if a cheat on the scale of AGI is needed to redeem your claim to hegemony, what do you, as a people, stand to contribute? Having created the solutions where you've got AGI earlier than others?
This is a very tiresome talking point. They didn't have the benefit of a sane administration until 1978, after which they've consistently had the highest growth rate of all major economies. In any meaningful sense, including consumption spending, general QoL. GDP per capita comparisons are misleading. I've been reading on Taiwan recently and it seems that they're straight up having poorer lives than coastal Mainland Chinese in comparable population centers; like, they have higher costs of living and don't have meaningfully higher salaries. This, too, is Pax Americana; not even the smallest and most important clients can be sure to prosper. What else do we compare to? Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong? Please.
Now, history doesn't start in 1978. But nations change, even under the same regime and slogans. The US of today is not the US of 1960s either.
No. I don't understand. Why? What happens to the US that did not "win"? Unlike the USSR, China doesn't even have a messianic revolutionary project.
I think this is just wounded ego. You're used to hegemony, it's part of your personal identity, and it slipping away, likely forever, is perceived as existential horror, with appropriate rationalizations. This sounds about as compelling as Russian noises about NATO threat and absolute rationality of going all in to "denazify" Ukraine. In reality Russia could well survive Ukrainian integration with the West, it was merely humiliating (and deserved, certainly so after 2014 when we've demonstrated our mettle in managing "people's republics") but not affecting the survivability of the Russian state, and the costs of war have already far exceeded any sane estimate for costs of doing nothing.
Like what, using AI to design floor maps? They're doing it already, it doesn't take a lot of compute. A rather contrived concern.
The thing is, chips are very, very hard and ensuring the supply chain is all outside China has been one of the few truly great American political successes (not that it was hard, this chain was mostly complete when China was around $2000 GDP per capita) . The trifecta of ASML-TSMC-NVDIA (nevermind their multiple one-of-a-kind suppliers like ZEISS, and EDA software) will genuinely take China a decade or more to even approach. They will not have competitive chips. They will have (already have announced for Q1 2026) competitive systems, but those only exist because NVDIA is prevented from exporting the good stuff.
Again, I don't know what I should "rationally" shill for here. And anyway this might be too late. The US has clearly stated its hostility, burned the bridges, and will have to "lose", in a war of its own creation.
45% of Indians are agricultural workers. In England, that threshold was last fallen beneath around 1675. In America, it happened around 1880. In India, it obviously has yet to happen.
Everything is downstream of this. In the aftermath of independence, the Congress regime (and that is what it was) decided that adopting state-driven industrial policy in the socialist mould was necessary to overcome this. The result was chaos and food insecurity, because the huge mass of rural Indians still had extremely high birth rates. The response, because in a democracy every peasant farmer had a vote, was to invest a huge proportion of the state's resources into incentivizing those peasant farmers with agricultural price floors while also implementing a highly protectionist policy regime that prevented farm consolidation and agricultural efficiency, which in turn prevented urbanization at the degree necessary for the industrial transition.
The % of agricultural workers is the most important metric for understanding India. You can understand nothing without it and understand everything with it. India has a space program and tech outsourcers, but these are the equivalent of the royal astronomer or the imperial library circa 1237; they have not undergone the industrial revolution, let alone anything after that. Imagine a Western country in which peasants obtained universal suffrage around 1400, but which was too large and well-armed to be invaded. This is India. The masses vote themselves the most generous affirmative action policy in the world, with 60% of all government jobs and college places reserved for lower castes and tribes. They vote a huge percentage of the state budget to be devoted to minimum agricultural prices, which make staple crops more expensive in India than they are in the West, and halt mechanization, which further disincentivizes urbanization (because urban workers rely on cheap food). Interstate commerce is guarded by labyrinthine protectionism, all of which leads to the inevitable corruption.
Modi attempted some tiny, granular reforms. Tens of thousand of haggard peasant smallholders marched on Delhi. The Supreme Court, the only true authority in India, stayed and then forced the repeal of the laws (which the government happily accepted) for reasons of social order and societal stability. But India's problems aren't a result of any allegiance with America, which is limited enough as it is (it is if anything closer to Russia).
We are, of course, in agreement here.
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