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Trump is indeed importantly bad. It's important for me to lay out why I think Trump is bad because, as you know because you keep deploying "what about what trump is doing" as counters to my arguments, much of what makes him bad is that he's doing things China has been doing for a while now. And you also use his stance on chips as a major line of support for your triumphalism of Chinese chip production. Our models of him diverge on this subject in ways that are important to the discussion.
There's some nuance I could edge at here, China itself runs deficits both at the national level and massively at the local government levels so this is hardly just a problem for the US. But I don't fundamentally disagree that the debt spending is unsustainable and should be curbed. My point was that Trump is not doing this, his "vision" does not include doing this and he makes even less convincing noises about doing it than previous administrations that did not do it either even if he sometimes burbles up some incoherent thoughts about how the tariffs will pay down the debt right before promising to instead give that money out in checks.
Well no, there are other options. If we behaved like China then we would deploy state espionage to steal their trade secrets, establish national champions to feed those trade secrets to and subsidize those champions while pushing our other industries to favorably use them. There is an important difference in how the two nations behave when they rely on an outside actor in their supply chain, this is core to the question of autarky.
In the earlier post you quoted I gave you three levels of AI plateauing that seem extremely plausible to me, although the first and third seem like more likely states if I'm honest. The fact that the middle level erased much of China's biggest advantage in number of engineers was more of a side point than the whole thrust of my argument but you seem really fixated on that possibility. You've thought about that potential world more than I did and found some interesting features of it that I thank you for sharing. It really is a world worth thinking about. But I don't think it's the more likely world.
Yes, it is bad that we've been dominated by the boomers for so long and have elected so many elderly candidates in the past decade or so. Fortunately we'll have an opportunity to correct this in a few years, when will China's next chance to relatively smoothly change its leader be? Can some other entity make the call to push him out without fear of retaliation if he declines but refuses to accept it? These are civilizationally important questions.
I suppose it depends on how you define good news whether zero covid being possible was the good news or was it bad news that stoked his paranoia that he favored. The point is isolation from alternative viewpoints that he himself doesn't actively seek out.
And maybe another of his biases is this belief in the importance of autarky. As you go on to say he espoused autarkic rhetoric of the importance to have no "choke points" and that desire was processed by the state media apparatus into a report about where those "choke points" are and then the state apparatus set about alleviating them and succeeded in that goal, well it succeeded in it as far as that very same state apparatuses measurements are concerned. But this is all downstream of his view that it's very important to be entirely self sufficient and autarkic. That isn't a fact of the universe, it's a bias in Xi's head that the state apparatus confirmed and attempted to address. Other nations do not attempt to be free of any foreign dependencies and it's not a costless goal to pursue.
Maybe further economic independence is a good thing, maybe it's not, but either way China will pursue it because it's what Xi thinks is right and it would pursue it into ruin if that's where it leads. I doubt the autarky demand will lead China to doom, but there are policies and biases that could. Maybe Xi gets a militant edge and goes after Taiwan too early or too late or gets it too easily and then pushes too far for other islands. There's a lot running on one guy who may live another twenty years but for how much longer will he remain as sharp as he was in 2020? senility sure hit Biden pretty fast.
I am indeed very thankful that both of our out of touch leader's terrible decisions cancel out.
You're telling me refusing China State of the Art chips might get more of the most talented researchers to come to the US and this somehow forms itself into an argument to send them the chips because as a second order effect the talent remaining there will demand to use our chips? I think the first order effect swamps here and is an incredibly good argument for not sending them our chips. I think a job offer at our frontier labs should in fact come with a free golden Trump citizenship card stapled to an H200.
Turning off export controls to prolong export controls is a little too big brained for me. I could grant some small, measured in weeks to months, "lock in" effect for releasing export controls if that's what you want to call Chinese chip makers getting slightly less feedback from the frontier labs. But at the cost of our largest advantage in the race this is silly.
With the benefit of a new night's sleep and a reread through this thread I think we can cease the back and forth on this topic, Trump era American international trade policy is so bad that it has become as nakedly extractive as Chinese international trade practices have been for decades. Going back and forth on examples is not productive. It seems we agree that nations today will act in their economic self interest. My point is that America has an economic self interest in using its trade policy to remain ahead in AI and we discuss this elsewhere.
These are American brains. We claim those. It's one of our things. Homogenous nations get an easier time remaining high trust and unified, us mutt nations get to claim all the output done in our name, that's only fair.
Looking at Samsung printed on the back of my phone "Are you Chinese?". I dispute this dichotomy.
Well yeah, that's the very expensive part. We can argue, and I largely agree, that the FDA should have lower standards; but providing proof that a drug is safe and effective to a very high standard is not pure rent seeking. There's genuine economic value there that the rest of the world often freeloads on, even if rationally we might prefer a lower but less expensive standard.
Sure, we can quibble around on the accounting, but China's household consumption as a percent of GDP isn't just low compared to the US, it's low compared to basically all developed economies. The EU runs around 52% without the US healthcare peculiarities.
But more importantly you haven't addressed the demand problem. Chinese industrial capacity is built to and relies on exporting to function. It's not an accounting artifact. It's clear in the trade surplus and it's been a priority to fix for over a decade now with little to no progress. If trading partners want to behave like China and cut their imports then this whole system falls apart. The companies reliant on exports fail systematically. The savings of the Chinese citizen dry up. The debt of the local governments turns acidic and the whole thing seizes. Economies are complex systems, it's not enough to be obsessed with minimizing the inputs, you need to ensure the outputs work too.
I know you're skeptical of the importance of demand. Maybe this will make more sense if we swap the sides. Why were American businesses so willing to risk such high demands to gain access to the Chinese internal market? More demand is good right? It's good for companies when they find lots of new customers? What happens to a company if it suddenly loses 90% of its customers? What happens to a country if all of its companies suddenly lose 90% of their customers? From a god's eye naive view you might look down at this country and say "what's the big deal? There are lots of people in that country that could use new cars or widgets, this seems like a win, we don't have to send the cars and widgets to foreigners, just give those people the products. But those products were produced with debt on the assumption of payment that the country's people can't provide. The production was all forward shifted before the payment and now the payment isn't coming.
Well wait, this is a bit of a dodge. Are these other nations not getting access to the labor erasers?
This bulverism is beneath you and something you seem to always return to. These beliefs are neither in my heart nor on my lips. So frequently you accuse interlocutors of believing in vile orcs or subhuman bugmen. Give me a break man.
There is, of course, a difference between sovereign debt, which China has (though the ratio to GDP is exaggerated, because GDP is underrated), and external debt, which in China's case is minuscule. But okay.
You are indeed pondering the use of fairly underhanded means, except you don't need to steal «secrets» because most of that is your own IP, the main problem is skills. I think the gap is near entirely due to stronger US position in established technology (real and, even more so, arrogantly perceived), not any moral preference.
I'm really not, I'm talking about third parties, mainly the EU, but extremely high levels of automation on some timeline <20 years seem to be the modal scenario for me.
When Xi grows tired and steps down, like Deng did (Deng, importantly, kept manipulating his successors). Personally I think he'll nominate Ding Xuexiang on merit of overseeing the EUV project, assuming that it succeeds. Ding doesn't have the required track record of governance, but Xi broke rules himself, and this is more important than boosting KPIs in some province.
I think the good news was about the technical possibility of zero Covid, or at least drastic slowdown of the spread with full lockdown and tracking measures. The bad «news» was overestimation of potential costs of Covid, and once we reached Omicron, it took too long for Xi to notice both failure and good news of Omicron's relative mildness.
I think you're failing to model him. This boilerplate grasping autocrat theory is about as lazy as your theory of Huang, too. More generally I guess you're biased against and uncharitable towards «rulers», both CEOs and personalist dictators, they must be irrational, petty, and shooting themselves in the foot. Because otherwise it's not clear if «uh, but we'll stop electing boomers one day» suffices as a defense of a structurally compromised, easily corruptible universal suffrage 2-party democracy. I seriously believe that your succession system is straight up inferior to the CPC's one, both morally and technically. You impose no filter besides "graduated from a good school", you ask for no virtues except popularity and political instinct, your checks and balances and «institutions» are revealed to be hot air, you reward clientelism, and so on it goes. It's a very good system for ensuring non-violent successions and popular buy-in, but that's all it has going for it – insurance for elites who want to play the game of power without skin in the game. It's a complete profanation of the idea of democracy, which was designed for a different people, of different class, in a different context. Chinese system was at least designed for modern-ish China.
Other nations can't, at least not yet. Only China and the US have a serious shot. It's a very valuable goal when you have a powerful enemy that wants you to be technologically behind and vulnerable to trade disruptions because it considers your self-directed development morally wrong, or inherently a threat.
I tire of this debate about autarky. It's a somewhat recent discovery for the Western public that China is doing that, overwhelmingly the complaints were about gross trade imbalance, IP theft, «military applications» and sectoral competition, you're one of the few who's talking about autarky as a problematic philosophical position. Though notably, Neal Stephenson predicted this dynamics in Diamond Age, see Seed vs Feed (no relation to Sneed).
No, that's not the argument. I'm just listing their options. On the margins, yes, total compute denial might drain some more brains. I think that your bias is preventing you from noticing that they're not desperate like Indians, they're already pretty nationalist, and such blatantly hostile effort may backfire. I know that some OpenAI folks proposed stalling Chinese AGI project by granting O1s to top DeepSeek researchers, who privately said they are not interested in this garbage (several of them are returnees, and I guarantee you that they can easily 5x their income anytime by switching sides again).
Your society is just increasingly losing attractiveness. There are costs to vice, to dysfunction, to casual racism, to smug forgiveness of your every demerit, and to antagonism. There are also costs to having low sexual market value, frankly. How much is it worth in $$$ or H200s for a 20 year old nerd with 3400 CodeForces ranking to justify living in a place where you get Chinese women, rather than in Hangzhou? I think this detail is often underrated in analyzing people's choices.
Anyway, the argument was more about the difference between freely working on the best hardware they can get, and working in a shitty Soviet-style sharashka with a commissar. If the latter is implemented, the US does win on freedoms, values etc. Xi does not want to fold frontier private companies into a SOE and destroy them, in AI and otherwise. So he's navigating a fine line here in permitting Nvidia with caveats.
This may seem naive and romantic to you, but that's my view. They are invested in their research projects, their companies, their mission, their nation, these companies are currently culturally healthier than American ones. You can't change that with some bans, but Xi can, and he has to weigh the costs.
my 95% interval is 1 to 5 years. You really overrate how plug and play it is. It's comparable to the problem of chips as such. They were designing chips on par with Nvidia back in 2019, they still don't have an equivalent to CUDA. In 2026 they'll tape out chips on par with Nvidia from 2022, and still won't have an equivalent to CUDA. I'll change my mind if I see any non-garbage model trained on Ascends, there's definitely more than enough raw compute for that already. Last time Huawei tried, it was an obfuscated DeepSeek V3 with a switched tokenizer.
Well, that's the spirit. But there's a difference between being a heroic man at home and a brainy bugman in a foreign land. You've got to offer better deals if you want to keep them, because some top performers are going back. This guy, for example. New top performers are often skipping the US stage altogether. I see 5 IOI Gold winners on DeepSeek team. Graduated PKU and went straight for <$200K compensations at home. I think Zuck would be eager to pay multiples of that.
That's a fair concern, and yes of course the Party shares it. I don't think it's an existential concern, because thermodynamics is more important than financial flows. If you really can produce everything cheaply in terms of energy and labor, you can lose 90% of your trade surplus and pivot to subsidizing demand, it'll be a politically costly but technologically straightforward adjustment, and yes you can survive an implosion of your companies. If you cannot produce much of anything cheaply, you can try to subsidize supply but you'll probably be flailing for years. And speaking of debt, you can do the arithmetic here. Even their most involuted industries are not in such a gutter.
China cannot fully implement Dual Circulation. That's largely a failure. That's also largely a product of tradeoffs that make sense under their assumptions about long term competitiveness and security, which I believe are not paranoid and in fact more rational than American assumptions were and are. Too many of their exported goods cannot be replaced in the short term, so they can currently afford this model. Notice, for instance, how they've shrugged off the decline of exports to the US market, fully offsetting it with Asia. The developing world has much need of cheap high quality goods, particularly capital goods, and will have for a while yet.
Going forward, we'll see.
Are they? My impression is that the US intends to monopolize the top-tier product for national security purposes. They'll get open source Chinese versions or some nerfed American stuff.
But that's my idea of how your AGI race narrative would actually develop. Personally I think that everyone gets their sovereign AGI, sooner or later, so we'll indeed see a large reduction in non-commodities trade, shoring up of critical industries, and have to live with that.
I believe in individual responsibility for shared delusions, and I do think that your analysis is strongly influenced by an implicit belief in racial hierarchy, which is why you are not curious to learn more than tropes and some macroecon about this system your nation is in competition with. But fine, I won't insist.
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