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So China is sort of a big place. With a bit of effort you can dig evidence in any direction: that China is democratic, that China is woke, that China has a problem with murderous cardiologists, that China
But then:
and of course
What I've learned is that Westerners can reliably dig up some random impressively-sounding titles and half-bullshit Orientalist translations demonstrating some grandiose coordinated Chinese agenda, and yet nothing. ever. happens. The Chinese nation does not have the capacity to act in its rational self-interest. The half that's not bullshit is mostly big character posters and interests of individual powerless weirdoes.
The director of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence argues AGI is an all-important topic? You don't say.
Why not bold it like that instead? By the way you can listen the Congressional discussion and dig some much more ambitious quotes. Including «even if we pause to prevent risks, Choyna won't». Can you imagine Xi saying «we shouldn't focus too much on risks of AGI progress, because Americans won't»? I can't.
And did Xi talk to their equivalent of Sam Altman? Or is this just impotent political sloganeering into vacuum, one more conference among hundreds – about agriculture, climate change, real estate, football?
Yes, but what does this matter for AI? Do you have any evidence that they prioritize AI work with those trailing edge chips?
I think they're straight up going to plug them in Xiaomi robot vacuums and those atrocious barking dog toys. This is what the challenger to American hegemony looks like.
Americans have always been subpar in direct combat and prevailed through air and artillery advantage, so this doesn't matter, especially in this age.
This is normie shit for oil and gas exploration. Where are their AI supercomputers? Yeah, you're right: they use AWS. Do you suppose relying on regulators being «dopey» is a clever move? No, it's desperation. And they don't train anything of strategic importance in any case. It's more commercial and surveillance gimmicks, boring dystopia infrastructure, not AGI.
Elon fucking Musk has over 1 exaFLOPS of DL-relevant performance on a single pod. Google sports 4-exaFLOPS tier pods. God knows what Gemini is being trained on. By 2025, Americans will reach zettascale. Again, China is as relevant as the Czech Republic.
A nice cope, I suppose. One a Kung Fu sage could come up with in the MMA cage.
They'll keep biding their time, while Americans eat their lunch, their supper, their dinner and their nation.
Yes, excuse me but I'll laugh. Taiwan is a red herring, Americans can nuke the whole island just to be sure nothing goes to PRC, and it's impossible to defend TSMC anyway; if the invasion starts, fabs go down.
AGI can be completed with already available hardware, and the US-led bloc has like 95% of it, and total control over means of production. Intel has many 10nm-capable fabs and will have 5nm by 2025. China will maybe have 7nm in 2030 or something, if they don't implode first from overregulating pork, or a housing bubble, or some other absurd problem.
A very Chinese strategy: build a massive junk fleet for the era of robot wars. Have you seen their exercises? Such moving choreography.
Or perhaps they want you to think that, so you're too wary to deliver the finishing blow.
Or perhaps they're just too busy to think about any of this, preoccupied with their small mercantile interests, unchanged in millenia, while the West rushes into posthuman Singularity.
You have to understand I hoped it won't be like this. I hoped that if not my own country, then China will be able to provide a second pole. I wanted to have a minimally livable refuge from GAE, somewhere on the outskirts of Chinese project – in some African mineral supplier or in Thailand, whatever. But that depended on China not squandering this decade. Not shooting themselves in the foot. Not being cartoon villains. Being actually rational.
But that wasn't their role.
I'm not saying China is a perfect state. The One-Child Policy was a bad move, amongst other things. But in a great many fields, they do better than the US does. There is a level of comprehensive strength and cohesion they have that the US lacks.
Unlike the blatherings of US elected officials, (one of which started a diplomatic furor by threatening to blow up TSMC in scorched earth policy as you linked, which is not helpful to the US) Xi knows that officials are forced to pick over everything he says with a fine-toothed comb if they want to get ahead. Everything he says is super super bland and dull-sounding but it's never into the vacuum. Xi Xinping Thought is big and important in Chinese officialdom, just as Biden 'Thought' is laughable in America and routinely corrected by officials. Xi consistently says the time for struggle is near, we must be resolute, train more soldiers, prepare for confrontation. That's what the fleet, air and rockets are for. Why is Xi's China building such a gigantic fleet if not to challenge the US? If he wanted just to defend Fortress China, he could just stack up ICBMs, land-based missiles and SAMs.
Well by this logic, Russia can just nuke the US tech sector to ash. Sarmat and Topol can fulfil their destiny, do what they were made to do. If nukes are on the table, then that radically evens the playing field. In a scenario where megadeaths are locked in, why not have a full exchange?
According to Reuters, CHina can shrug off US AI sanctions using the dumbed-down US H-800s, theft and smuggling. The US is terminally dopey. They don't learn from their mistakes. Do you think Kamala Harris is going to lay down some really effective, well-thought out AI policy? Her presence reveals a level of unseriousness - she was previously supposed to be border czar where she did next to nothing to defend US national interests.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-ai-industry-barely-slowed-by-us-chip-export-rules-2023-05-03
They overwhelmed their enemies with industrial output. Now they face China. Anyway, my point was that if the US is so united and committed, they should be able to put boots in the ground.
Well you asked for supercomputers, I gave you supercomputers! How can China be capable of putting together a FP 64 supercomputer on par with the US but not FP 16? Everyone agrees that they have first-rate chip design skills. They designed a TPU-equivalent back in 2018: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3289387/baidu-takes-a-major-leap-as-an-ai-player-with-new-chip-intel-alliance.html
Now I can't find out what exactly came of these chips, I can't read mandarin and China doesn't have a habit of announcing everything they do for foreign audiences like the US does. (America's previous plan to undermine CCP rule by economic liberalization and free trade failed for precisely that ludicrous, anime-tier insistence on declaring how their attack works, as they use it in battle). You're free to say that it's a nothingburger, another dancing robot puppy. I will say that something's powering Tiktok, which is a truly impressive soft-power/adversary cultural degradation tool. Profitable too. Nobody seems to know where they trained and refined their algorithm but it's still important.
How much division and conflict in the West has it's root in Tiktok? Libsoftiktok, those abhorrent social media trends, shortening attention spans of the youth. Where is the US equivalent, if they're so far ahead in AI? Now I sense you'll think of me a strident boomer, maniacally warning against the evil Chicoms corrupting the youth. Well, it's still true. Fentanyl and Tiktok are corrupting Western society, though it's like pissing into an ocean of piss at this point. Shouldn't we expect the leading power in AI to get to these things first? Shouldn't there be some American Tiktok-equivalent that can make patriotism really cool, get kids into STEM, make it fun to hate China? The US is still doing analogue stuff like NAFO and brigading reddit, stuff that can't even pierce the Great Firewall. And why can't the US make anything superior to Huawei's 5G on cost-efficiency? That's not AI but it's AI-adjacent.
Why can't the US produce commercially valuable products if they're so far ahead? Sure, ChatGPT is coming online now but there are Chinese equivalents, multimodal too (though I'm not willing to pay for Chinatalk's substack to see. This looks fairly decent, especially the trick question noticing stuff: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/baidus-ernie-china-reacts ). If they're just leveraging the huge amount of Chinese data they've sucked up to counter their crappier hardware, then so be it. That works too.
Now I'm not saying the US is behind China, just that it's close enough for the conflict to be interesting.
Well, at the cost of trillions of dollars and about 130,000 US veteran suicides plus a good chunk America's global reputation, what was the outcome of the Middle East Wars 2001-2023? Iraq and Yemen are now in the Iranian sphere of influence, by extension they're in the Chinese sphere. Saudi is flirting with Beijing, Russia is now wedded at the hip. Maybe if US diplomats studied Daoism and practiced a little inaction, they'd have saved blood, prestige and treasure while getting a much better outcome. The Chinese sage spent over a decade building up strength while the musclebound MMA thug bashed his head into the wall. This is what skilful diplomacy looks like, cheap victories over expensive losses.
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