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"However, in the long term 15-20 years, I would imagine, China would have fully caught up with the US particularly on semiconductor design and fabrication. Once

"However, in the long term 15-20 years, I would imagine, China would have fully caught up with the US particularly on semiconductor design and fabrication. Once that happens, the dominance of the US tech stack will start to falter and eventually erode away. " Are you assuming the U.S. will sit stagnant during these 15-20 years? If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity. Their best hope is a cultural revolution.

derwiki 7y ago
Am I being whooshed? They had a Cultural Revolution..
devoply 7y ago
US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up. Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_venture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent... ) . These moves are there to slow it down. But China can make other moves like moving tech knowledge from one company to others and play all sorts of games. Fact is knowledge despite what Americans want the world to believe, replicates and distributes powers in ways which are very difficult to stop. If China is not building it, they will move the knowledge to some ally which can build it. It's almost guaranteed at this point that we are already living in a bifurcated world where US will need to manufacture everything in other countries than China. And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc.
- wideasleep1 7y ago
  "US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up." So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe. "Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.... ) " All I see here is an agreement for AMD to transfer technology to China, for x86 chips destined for chinese-only server market. Further, that agreement appears stalled, since AMD will NOT transfer their Zen2 technologies in this agreement. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-license,39573.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-licen... "And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc." More like their manufacturing may not be going anywhere...their market has been shrinking by leaps and bounds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvement_in_5G_wireless_networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvem... They can have Iran, AFAIC.
  - primordialsoup 7y ago
    > So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe. Do you have sources from non-"mainstream media" that indicate otherwise?
    - wideasleep1 7y ago
      Presently, I'd consider The Verge to be mainstream, but Nilay was on point with his skepticism: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leadership-china-fcc-lte https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leade... I think one could produce articles supporting either view quite easily, which them becomes a task of separating the agendas of its authors.
      - thawaway1837 7y ago
        I’m pretty sure the poster you replied to was talking not about deployment of 5G but the fact that Huawei is supposed to be far ahead of its non Chinese peers when it comes to 5G tech. That’s basically why the US has to ban the supply of tech to them, because otherwise nearly every 5G deployment would be Huawei.
        devoply 7y ago
        Yeah it's a national security concern because if someone is leading so heavily they will destroy your lead and then you will never catch up. Just look at what happened to so many European tech companies.
        Teever 7y ago
        Is that the case or is it that the Chinese government is subsidizing the 5g products that Huawei makes so that western countries will purchasing them?
  - greatpatton 7y ago
    I don't know but from a science point of view all our last research are based on paper coming from people at China companies (Alibaba, Tencent), that currently have the edge in our specific domain (machine learning). So yes in domains that mainly require your brain they have caught up if not ahead.
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  China did not help AMD. AMD partnered with a Chinese partner and produced /knowledge transfered an older chipstack. Ps. Everyone can manufacture, so not sure what your mean with edge. There are a lot centralized/easy to be found in China, that's true.
- ReptileMan 7y ago
  >US was already shown to be behind in 5g Since 5g is technology with not much utility that nobody but the telcos want, that is probably wise on their part.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity. Yes, no lesson from world history is more obvious and robust than "once in the lead, always in the lead".
- rubber_duck 7y ago
  Like all the historic civilizations that peaked and fell apart ?
  - baq 7y ago
    my reading of the OP is that was exactly the point
  - kenny_r 7y ago
    The comment you replied to was sarcastic.
    - rubber_duck 7y ago
      I thought it might be since it's so obvious but discussing a similar topic with coworkers a few days back had a similar situation where someone just frames the argument in a time window that explains their narrative - I wouldn't be surprised if someone argued this because of the US economic dominance post WW2
daniel_iversen 7y ago
Apparently China is already leading the world as far as AI goes (I first saw this in Mary Meeker’s internet report this year I think it was and she usually links to the research in her slides). I read somewhere that Chinese scientists found it easier to get Chinese government funding for bold and ambitious research (and I imagine they’d also have other “advantages” given how the country is governed). So I wouldn’t be surprised if China would overtake the US in a whole bunch of technical sectors.
- BiasRegularizer 7y ago
  This is not completely true. China lead in terms of AI startup funding, but due to the huge shortage of talents, a good number of startups don't hold much water. The top Chinese talents (e.g. Kaming He, Fei Fei Li etc) all chose to move to the US. AFAIK, there are no Chinese institutions that employ elite foreign AI researchers. The US universities and companies still lead with a large margin in terms of high impact publications in NIPS, ICML, CVPR etc.
  - govg 7y ago
    You're wrong with the "large margin" terms. A lot of Chinese universities have stepped up in the recent past. You can take a look here : http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2019/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&ir&world http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2019/index?ai&v... 3 of the top 10 (all in the top 5 even) are Chinese in origin. This is a list of publications at the top venues in AI / ML for the past two years. If you extend it to past 5 years, you get a slightly better picture, but that doesn't change the 3 in top 5 comment either.
    - BiasRegularizer 7y ago
      The keyword is "high impact". The link you provided is only ranked by publication count, it doesn't consider the impact factor of journal/conferences. If you look at stats from ICML this year[0], the only Chinese institution TsingHua is ranked #13 in the top #20 list. Take a look at recent major advances in deep learning: information bottle neck, mask-rcnn, transformer, normalizing flow, all originated from US/Canadian/EU institutions. Chinese academia has very serious systematic issues that discourages innovation and encourages quantity over quality. https://medium.com/@dcharrezt/icml-2019-stats-4ba18fbc6543 https://medium.com/@dcharrezt/icml-2019-stats-4ba18fbc6543
jdnenej 7y ago
The lack of IP law in china will allow them to progress much much faster.
- yorwba 7y ago
  China does have IP law, and the big companies sue each other for copyright infringement all the time, e.g. https://technode.com/2019/04/26/baidu-bytedance-lawsuits-continue/ https://technode.com/2019/04/26/baidu-bytedance-lawsuits-con... There's a lot of talk about political censorship in China, but the majority of the content I've seen removed was not political, but in violation of copyright. What China does not have is a legal system that is both able and willing to stop all instances of copyright infringement (or most other crimes, for that matter). So you get a lot of small-scale operations flying under the radar for as long as possible and vanishing as soon as they risk punishment.
conjectures 7y ago
> Their best hope is a cultural revolution. You say this phrase, but I do not think it means what you hope it means.

derwiki 7y ago

Am I being whooshed? They had a Cultural Revolution..

devoply 7y ago

US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up. Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_venture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent... ) . These moves are there to slow it down. But China can make other moves like moving tech knowledge from one company to others and play all sorts of games. Fact is knowledge despite what Americans want the world to believe, replicates and distributes powers in ways which are very difficult to stop. If China is not building it, they will move the knowledge to some ally which can build it. It's almost guaranteed at this point that we are already living in a bifurcated world where US will need to manufacture everything in other countries than China. And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc.

wideasleep1 7y ago
"US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up." So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe. "Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.... ) " All I see here is an agreement for AMD to transfer technology to China, for x86 chips destined for chinese-only server market. Further, that agreement appears stalled, since AMD will NOT transfer their Zen2 technologies in this agreement. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-license,39573.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-licen... "And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc." More like their manufacturing may not be going anywhere...their market has been shrinking by leaps and bounds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvement_in_5G_wireless_networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvem... They can have Iran, AFAIC.
- primordialsoup 7y ago
  > So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe. Do you have sources from non-"mainstream media" that indicate otherwise?
  - wideasleep1 7y ago
    Presently, I'd consider The Verge to be mainstream, but Nilay was on point with his skepticism: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leadership-china-fcc-lte https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leade... I think one could produce articles supporting either view quite easily, which them becomes a task of separating the agendas of its authors.
    - thawaway1837 7y ago
      I’m pretty sure the poster you replied to was talking not about deployment of 5G but the fact that Huawei is supposed to be far ahead of its non Chinese peers when it comes to 5G tech. That’s basically why the US has to ban the supply of tech to them, because otherwise nearly every 5G deployment would be Huawei.
      - devoply 7y ago
        Yeah it's a national security concern because if someone is leading so heavily they will destroy your lead and then you will never catch up. Just look at what happened to so many European tech companies.
      - Teever 7y ago
        Is that the case or is it that the Chinese government is subsidizing the 5g products that Huawei makes so that western countries will purchasing them?
- greatpatton 7y ago
  I don't know but from a science point of view all our last research are based on paper coming from people at China companies (Alibaba, Tencent), that currently have the edge in our specific domain (machine learning). So yes in domains that mainly require your brain they have caught up if not ahead.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
China did not help AMD. AMD partnered with a Chinese partner and produced /knowledge transfered an older chipstack. Ps. Everyone can manufacture, so not sure what your mean with edge. There are a lot centralized/easy to be found in China, that's true.
ReptileMan 7y ago
>US was already shown to be behind in 5g Since 5g is technology with not much utility that nobody but the telcos want, that is probably wise on their part.

thaumasiotes 7y ago

> If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity. Yes, no lesson from world history is more obvious and robust than "once in the lead, always in the lead".

rubber_duck 7y ago
Like all the historic civilizations that peaked and fell apart ?
- baq 7y ago
  my reading of the OP is that was exactly the point
- kenny_r 7y ago
  The comment you replied to was sarcastic.
  - rubber_duck 7y ago
    I thought it might be since it's so obvious but discussing a similar topic with coworkers a few days back had a similar situation where someone just frames the argument in a time window that explains their narrative - I wouldn't be surprised if someone argued this because of the US economic dominance post WW2

daniel_iversen 7y ago

Apparently China is already leading the world as far as AI goes (I first saw this in Mary Meeker’s internet report this year I think it was and she usually links to the research in her slides). I read somewhere that Chinese scientists found it easier to get Chinese government funding for bold and ambitious research (and I imagine they’d also have other “advantages” given how the country is governed). So I wouldn’t be surprised if China would overtake the US in a whole bunch of technical sectors.

BiasRegularizer 7y ago
This is not completely true. China lead in terms of AI startup funding, but due to the huge shortage of talents, a good number of startups don't hold much water. The top Chinese talents (e.g. Kaming He, Fei Fei Li etc) all chose to move to the US. AFAIK, there are no Chinese institutions that employ elite foreign AI researchers. The US universities and companies still lead with a large margin in terms of high impact publications in NIPS, ICML, CVPR etc.
- govg 7y ago
  You're wrong with the "large margin" terms. A lot of Chinese universities have stepped up in the recent past. You can take a look here : http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2019/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&ir&world http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2019/index?ai&v... 3 of the top 10 (all in the top 5 even) are Chinese in origin. This is a list of publications at the top venues in AI / ML for the past two years. If you extend it to past 5 years, you get a slightly better picture, but that doesn't change the 3 in top 5 comment either.
  - BiasRegularizer 7y ago
    The keyword is "high impact". The link you provided is only ranked by publication count, it doesn't consider the impact factor of journal/conferences. If you look at stats from ICML this year[0], the only Chinese institution TsingHua is ranked #13 in the top #20 list. Take a look at recent major advances in deep learning: information bottle neck, mask-rcnn, transformer, normalizing flow, all originated from US/Canadian/EU institutions. Chinese academia has very serious systematic issues that discourages innovation and encourages quantity over quality. https://medium.com/@dcharrezt/icml-2019-stats-4ba18fbc6543 https://medium.com/@dcharrezt/icml-2019-stats-4ba18fbc6543

jdnenej 7y ago

The lack of IP law in china will allow them to progress much much faster.

yorwba 7y ago
China does have IP law, and the big companies sue each other for copyright infringement all the time, e.g. https://technode.com/2019/04/26/baidu-bytedance-lawsuits-continue/ https://technode.com/2019/04/26/baidu-bytedance-lawsuits-con... There's a lot of talk about political censorship in China, but the majority of the content I've seen removed was not political, but in violation of copyright. What China does not have is a legal system that is both able and willing to stop all instances of copyright infringement (or most other crimes, for that matter). So you get a lot of small-scale operations flying under the radar for as long as possible and vanishing as soon as they risk punishment.

conjectures 7y ago

> Their best hope is a cultural revolution. You say this phrase, but I do not think it means what you hope it means.