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The AI war and how to win it

100 points by hardmaru 4y ago

pshc 4y ago
Must funnel ever increasing resources into wasteful and destructive conflict. How about using AI to figure out how to cooperate at scale?
- remarkEon 4y ago
  Determining ways to win a destructive conflict is a mechanism to signal willingness to cooperate, and the value of that cooperation (averting the war in the first place). Pretending they’re mutually exclusive is wrong.
  - pshc 4y ago
    One problem with human governance is we can't seem to figure out how to coordinate without burning excessive amounts of energy signalling status and power at each other. What if we could do better?
    - remarkEon 4y ago
      What exactly do you imagine as “doing better”, here?
- cellis 4y ago
  If you never lift weights, and everyone else around you does, don't be surprised when the "cooperation" tilts in their favor. Such is the nature of man.
29athrowaway 4y ago
The AI war will be won by the faction having the best datasets, and China has no limits when it comes to collecting data. The Chinese government is all-knowing and all-seeing. They are also above the law and can do whatever they want.
- tomrod 4y ago
  > China has no limits when it comes to collecting data This is an overgeneralization when it comes to the sources and types of data used in a battlefield, to map infrastructure, and so forth. While the Great Firewall and social monitoring do collect much data on the population, thereby decreasing non-state internal intelligence gathering and capability for spying, there is a difference between tactical data from a hot front and identification of spies.
jasonshen 4y ago
As a naturalized US citizen who was born in China but intends to raise a family as full-bore Americans, it's hard for me to assess the China threat. I believe China very much wants to assert it's influence in the Asia Pacific + MENA region, but I just don't it trying to conquer the United States directly. It's never really had a history of imperialism like the West has (excluding the Mongol empire that collapsed almost immediately). That said, a country doesn't need to directly conquer another to be a threat. Still, it's hard to know how serious the threat really is—the post is compelling but also assumes as a forgone conclusion that China has aggressor ambitions.
- XorNot 4y ago
  What do you think imperialism is other then "exert influence"?
  - anshumankmr 4y ago
    Also,China has invaded India and claims many Indian states as its own. Plus it invaded Vietnam (and lost)
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    Extract taxes, i.e., the Roman version?
- caligarn 4y ago
  China was never an imperial force like European colonists, but it always saw itself as the “Middle Kingdom” and the most important civilization on earth. It may be a different paradigm but the right to power or hegemony is still embedded in the culture and ethos.
  - woooooo 4y ago
    It's actually a healthy and non-threatening paradigm? If they think they're the best and have no reason to expand because of that, the only threat is to our egos.
r3muxd 4y ago
With all due respect, has the author ever watched WarGames (1983)?
phdelightful 4y ago
Can the US taxpayer tolerate (financially, politically) what it will take to get the best and brightest to do AI work for .gov and .mil instead of adtech? All you have to do is look at defense lab salaries to see there is going to be a problem keeping talent around. Some people are certainly willing to take a pay cut to work on national defense, but probably not enough. Perhaps especially not the kind of person who went into adtech in the first place.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  The way to short circuit this is to make certain classes of adtech de facto (maybe even de jure) illegal.
- jonas21 4y ago
  This isn't going to happen by recruiting people to work for government labs. It'll happen by contracting the work out to companies that are already doing top AI research (many of which also work in adtech) and through grand challenges that incentivize research teams and startups to make new breakthroughs. Google, for example, would have gladly accepted Project Maven contracts if its own employees hadn't protested. If China does supersede the U.S. militarily, that may end up looking naive in retrospect.
  - Sebguer 4y ago
    Ah, yes, the solution is to cede more of the country to corporations!
    - phdelightful 4y ago
      People who feel strongly that current procurement strategies are the wrong way to go about things should devote as much toil and treasure as they can to seeing their preferred solution materialize. In the mean time, I hope they will allow others to work within our existing system to keep our adversaries from replacing the US with something much worse for the entire world.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
greatpostman 4y ago
I’m still confused by ai fear mongering. All the best models and advances come from the USA. Chinese research, while high in volume, never advances state of the art aside from incremental improvement. Incoming downvotes, but the fact remains most advanced have basically come from google, Fb and openai
- ETHisso2017 4y ago
  Simple, Scale AI is likely fishing for federal contracts now that its traditional enterprise customer set is throttling back on spending
  - species9606 4y ago
    Exactly this. The "AI race" is yet another nuclear arms race, where the American public is terrified into believing in some sort of (nonexistent) capabilities gap, and the only way to avoid utter defeat is to funnel billions, eventually trillions, of dollars to the right companies.
    - zapataband1 4y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y the real question is do we still have a mineshaft gap? hope we figure out how to get along in our only home.
- willbudd 4y ago
  That's simply not true. There are numerous problem domains in AI where Chinese research groups are advancing the SOTA, or at least are well-presented at the forefront. Your comment reads like little more than casual racism to me.
  - jackblemming 4y ago
    Such as?
  - greatpostman 4y ago
superb-owl 4y ago
I've been skeptical of AI posing an existential risk. This article may have changed my mind.
ETHisso2017 4y ago
In 2021, Alex Wang of Scale (the author of the linked article) uncritically quoted the following from Eric Schmidt: "Eric states that the global growth of AI technology is a national security threat for the United States. In March, we believed we were ahead of China’s technological development in the AI sector, but they quickly showed us that we were wrong. By June, they’d demonstrated a model capable of producing human-like text that was comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-3 model in quality." https://scale.com/blog/Eric-Schmidt-Geopolitics-TransformX-Scale-AI https://scale.com/blog/Eric-Schmidt-Geopolitics-TransformX-S... As such, it's important to note that the author views the entire Chinese AI industry as a threat to the United States, and may believe that the growth of AI anywhere in the rest of the world is a threat to the United States.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  Is there a reason that I should think of Wang as uniquely qualified to comment on this space? He runs an AI startup, seems knowledgeable about AI in general, but what does he know about war?
  - bloodyplonker22 4y ago
    Fair question, but I don't think one needs to be very skilled in the arts of war and military tactics to foresee that AI will be important in the future of war. I don't think it's worth throwing our dear Wang's blog out the window for this. The points he makes about AI's involvement in the future of war are very broad and high level. For example, he compares the amount of money that each country is spending on AI in the military and concludes that the US is lagging. It would be interesting if we had someone, like Palmer Luckey, who is actually involved in military AI speak in more detail about it.
    - remarkEon 4y ago
      Right, they are high level points, which is why I am having a hard time finding something specific to critique or even disagree with. For example, when I think of the question of “how will AI be used” the obvious answer, which Wang more or less addresses, is targeting systems. Basically, we’re just going to automate all of that and instead of a bunch of captains in the S2 shop cooking up target packets and deciding which one makes the most sense, the AI just does all of this for us. But what does this actually mean? Can we obsolete some/most/all of the S2 shop and replace it with a container of servers stacked with GPUs to do imagine processing? Take that manpower and add another infantry platoon? A drone operations platoon?
qualudeheart 4y ago
AI is strong enough to decide who wins the economic fight. Prediction: 10% gdp growth year over year as we approahc general ai. The AI Economy will be a new reality. It may not be a good reality. Will it be your reality?
largbae 4y ago
I am definitely afraid of mass data collection and drones, both for warfare and law enforcement. They lower the cost of coercing and if need be killing, both emotionally and financially. AI will lower this cost further, and enable fewer and fewer powerful people to threaten or control the rest. The Chinese government has so far turned much of its technology inward toward the control of its own people, who seem either OK with it or unable to resist. Perhaps they are just early adopters, and one by one all governments will follow their example, first trusting their own judgment more than the will of their constituents, and then using technology to keep it that way. We may not need a world war 3, or even an external adversary to lose this race. How about we spend more time on defensive technologies for individuals and laws protecting their use?
- rdevsrex 4y ago
  I've seen a number of various voices speaking up about the possibility of a turn key totalitarian state in the US. Where everything is in place and waiting for some just to turn it on. That is the worst case scenario here. That said obviously we can resist, but it is worrying.
blacksqr 4y ago
It's funny that OP doesn't realize "the AI war" will be between the AI and all of humanity.
- tetraca 4y ago
  It won't. It'll be a war between the people and entrenched power structures who will use very primitive AIs to crystalize their position at the expense of everyone else. What rich man or government would ever fear riot or revolution when you can use data mining algorithms and precision drones to liquidate even the most minor whiff of dissent at the push of a button? They will eat everyone else with specialized drones as sapient as insects before truly human AI is a thing.
bugfix-66 4y ago
43 days ago I asked this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33215740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33215740 This question got voted down everywhere I discussed it on Hacker News, but somehow the submission itself got 11 points. Apparently, it is an offensive question to some silent, pro-censorship part of the population here. Today I'll ask it again, and I hope somebody will respond in a useful way: QUESTION: I write software for parallel processors at a hardware/software company you've heard of. I am located in California but many of my coworkers are located in China (roughly half the team). We are directly affected by the American government's severe new CPU/GPU export restrictions. It seems to me that America is preparing for a period of cold war, or worse. It's time to start thinking about contributing to the American war effort by writing high-performance military computing systems. For example, SIMD particle filters for hypersonic weapons, or low-latency convolutional neural networks for battlefield devices. So, Hacker News: What company is the best place to do this work? What team? Does anyone here already work in this field?
- phdelightful 4y ago
  If you can tolerate a .gov email address, there are high-performance computing, edge computing, and AI groups at DOE labs. My impression is that they're always starved for talent in these areas due to stiff competition from industry and lifestyle restrictions that come with a security clearance (being a US citizen, reduced international travel, no drugs other than alcohol and nicotine, your work may require on-site). Defense labs are probably similar.
capitalsigma 4y ago
Not super clear to me how useful computer vision algorithms are to the military. The important thing in the private sector is replacing (say) the lab tech who would otherwise be paid minimum wage to look through your data. If you have plenty of low skill labor available, what advantage do you get?
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  Outright speed, speed of scalability. If you can submit what you want and have it within moments, it beats a fancy typing pool. That kind of speed alone lets you have a highly trained someone retry different variations and filter more on quality of result. Scalability. If you need to do it ten times faster. More hardware = done. More people could make it done too but training etc is required.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thoweiru3o43 4y ago
Half the kids in US grad-schools are Chinese. The other half are Indian. Neither are particularly fond of the racial-religious notions of 'US hegemony'. Good luck keeping your 'supremacy'.
- RivieraKid 4y ago
  I want to live in a world where liberal democracies have the most power over the world. The power of China, Russia, Iran or North Korea should be minimized.
  - bllguo 4y ago
    how liberal and democratic, where 1b westerners and their 350m american elites especially get to lord over the remaining 7b, and consume orders of magnitude more resources per person.
    - abeyer 4y ago
      Thanks for clarifying that, I never realized the leaders and elites of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have nothing but love, generosity, and good intentions towards those 7b. /s When you're done with the whataboutism, there are plenty of things that could be improved with the system if you choose to engage with that. Your comment history looks like you're more interested in pro-China/anti-West astroturfing, though.
      - bllguo 4y ago
        Of course, left unchecked the barbarians will destroy us all! Never mind that you surround them with military outposts, are the two major oceans away from Eurasia, and have been the instigator of every conflict with them. And you have the temerity to claim the West has love, generosity, and good intentions! I'd love to hear you explain what you think "whataboutism" means and how Western dominance over the global south is actually democratic, but something tells me continuing to engage would be pointless. It's alright, keep thinking of me as a paid shill if it comforts you.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Some of this could be interpreted as satire. For example, it's not necessary to improve AI capabilities in order to generate believeable propaganda - nation-states have been doing that ever since the printed press was invented, and before. It certainly reached a fever pitch in the 20th century, with radio, television, print and internet media all being the scene of numerous pitched propaganda battles, with social media being (perhaps) the dominant information-warfare battleground of the 21st century. As far as the Ukraine drone war, that's not really different from the Afghan drone war, the main difference being the relative lack of energy infrastructure or heavy armor to attack in Afghanistan. Whatever one can say about Russia vs NATO-backed Ukraine, or the USA vs Afghanistan, neither serves much purpose for making predictions about an 'all-out war' between China and the United States. One glaring omission is the failure to recognize that China is a nuclear power (as its ally North Korea), and it's not hard to imagine a serious naval conflict between the USA and China going nuclear - what better way to eliminate an offshore aircraft carrier battle group, for example? This article mentions nuclear once (in a 1942 context) and barely discusses what a real naval conflict would look like, other than to claim that 'autonomous adaptive drone swarms' would be harder targets to than aircraft carriers. That's a science fiction story line from, say, the Iain M. Banks Culture novels, not a realistic scenario for naval warfare (and what about submarines?). All in all this reads like a bit of hyperventilation, or maybe a sales pitch put together by the AI warfare divisions of Lockheed and Northrup. It also ignores the rationale for 'having a human in the loop', but then maybe the author hasn't seen the 1980s movie War Games?
- jasmer 4y ago
  This is relevant document. The ability to automate and make 'good quality' content is decisive in the information space. The world is greatly moved by photos and video of horrible things, and if that can be faked with high fidelity it will make a huge difference. People won't have time for the truth - the 'video' of 'whatever' will make it's impact. The drone war in Ukraine is completely different from that in Afghanistan. The Baryaktar drones are almost useless, have an average lifespan of just a few weeks. They're almost all destroyed and don't play an important role. FYI many of the Baryaktar videos we saw over the months were released over time, as the units were mostly destroyed. Russia has no equivalent. Small drones are used for recon, target acquisition, dropping small munitions, which is nothing like Afghanistan. And the scale of it as well. We're seeing the firs 'small drone war at scale'. I suggest China, being China, will try it at real scale, and during the invasion of Taiwan I expect to see swarms of thousands of drones on the offence - overwhelming numbers. Everyone is aware that 'nuclear weapons exist' and also that AI works to varying degrees of autonomy.
gavin_gee 4y ago
The prudent thing is to invest in the technology even if china isnt.
poopboob 4y ago
Let's see Alex is the CEO of Scale Scale is a DOD Contractor Scale is an AI company Alex suggests DOD allocate funds for AI Here's some news from someone who has seen the AI leaderboard game closely and led teams that won some Leaderboards like COCO that Alex cites are not a good indicator. They are flooded incremental performance improvements that hardly translate to any real world application
- greatpostman 4y ago
  Either he’s trying to be manipulative by using that data, or he doesn’t understand “ai”
- ethbr0 4y ago
  >> (from TFA) In the past 5 years, the United States has still not started, let alone operationalized, a major AI capability that could disrupt our current warfighter. When he misses or conveniently ignores the Skyborg UCAV program from the Air Force [0], I also question the author's knowledge of the current state of military programs. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyborg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyborg
madmax96 4y ago
Is it wise to compare spending within defense budgets between these countries? Much AI research in the US is conducted by private firms. How does the current defense budget compare to historical defense budgets, such as during the early days of the digital computer in the Cold War? On a related note: yes, Chinese researchers have models that perform certain tasks well. But are those models useful in the contexts the author mentions? To be sure, I don't disagree that AI research needs funded. I'm just genuinely curious about these points.
lsy 4y ago
This is a very urgent-sounding article about China's supposed AI superpowers and how they will dominate the battlefield, coincidentally written by the head of an American "AI" company who would likely personally benefit from shifting $150B into AI research, as suggested. Complete with AI-industry standard claims about technology that is "less than 10 years away", and sci-fi about "autonomous, adaptive drone swarms". War is so much more complicated than the author wants readers to think. Raw technological dominance does not assure victory, as the US found after 20 years in Afghanistan. AI, for all its impressive feats, continues to operate without flexibility or common sense, and foundational concepts like geography or economic influence remain the most important contributors to success in the military sphere. Even if one takes the continuance of the DoD's aims as an unalloyed good, what areas of its budget would go unserved with 25% redirected to AI research? How do those cuts or reprioritizations affect US military capability? I don't suspect the author has thought about this very much, and yet he feels qualified to write yet another AI/China scare article, which more and more seem designed to terrify politicians who determine funding rather than to convince military experts.
- 300bps 4y ago
  To your point, I literally laughed out loud at this in the article: Based on the pace of progress with AI technology today, I believe this is less than 10 years away. How does anyone write things like this and expect to be taken seriously with the track record of AI regarding real world things like autonomous driving?
  - notjoemama 4y ago
    Surely someone has a "law" that states generalized AI is always 10 years away.
    - qbrass 4y ago
      It's usually predicted as 25-50 years away because of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maes%E2%80%93Garreau_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maes%E2%80%93Garreau_law A 10 year prediction is because this is the CEO of a company saying it. So the lifespan used in the prediction is that of the company and not the person.
pellucide 4y ago
Summary: China bad, because.... AI
bee_rider 4y ago
I dunno. I mean, yeah technology will be used in war, and counties ahead in technology will usually be able to design better weapons. But like: > Technologies including drones, AI-based targeting and imagery intelligence, and Javelin missiles have allowed for a shocking defense of Ukraine against Russia What is “AI-based targeting and imagery intelligence,” is it being used in Ukraine, and why is it sandwiched between two media-darling weapon systems? This kinda reduces my faith in the honestly of the author here. Does anyone know about weapons development, is he pulling a fast one?
salamo 4y ago
I tend to worry about the opposite problem: what if the United States is successful in deploying artificial intelligence? In the article, the author uses the United States interchangeably with the concept of liberal democracy, which I believe is a fair assumption today. However, I worry that many of the author's calls to soak up more and more information for the purposes of military supremacy will cause irreparable damage to our political system. Artificial intelligence has the tendency to centralize power in the hands of a small number of people, and breakthroughs in AI are likely to exacerbate this trend. In short, the US might win this hypothetical war, but at what cost? The way I see it, there are three kinds of technologies: A) those which tend to centralize information or control B) those which are essentially neutral and C) those which democratize information and control. Group A artificial intelligence capabilities are not hard to imagine. Ubiquitous surveillance is a good example. Many current AI technologies are great for surveillance and can dramatically reduce the marginal cost of surveilling a person. For an autocracy this is great. For a liberal democracy, it threatens civil liberties and reduces trust. Group B technologies are things like self-driving cars, precision agriculture, and AI-facilitated entertainment (e.g. recommender systems, Dall-E). These are things which I don't see as fundamentally helpful or harmful to liberal democracy. Another way to look at these technologies is that both autocracies and democracies should be equally amenable to developing and using them. I can't think of any Group C technologies and this worries me. These are AI-enabled technologies whose effects are disproportionately democratizing. A democracy should seek these out while an autocracy will ban them.
- pshc 4y ago
  The consensus algorithms used by cryptocurrency fit into group C. Smart contracts are programmable incentive mechanisms. I am hoping we figure out how to use them to coordinate productively, rather than for financial schemes.
  - airgapstopgap 4y ago
- zapataband1 4y ago
  I feel like it's just to difficult to pin down what area of ai will improve. For example what about an AI that is relatively powerful at brute force decryption(not sure if this violates some thermodynamic principle). Or even just an AI that can easily find exploitable websites. Things like that destroy trust in systems and probably large systems like gov or corporations have more to lose if information is up for grabs. But maybe it's the opposite way around. Hard to tell imo
abeyer 4y ago
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
somenameforme 4y ago
This article seemingly handwaves away the single most important factor in modern war between major powers: nukes. If two major powers go to war, and it's a real war in the sense of one trying to directly conquer the other's land then that's going to, near immediately, escalate to mutual nuclear annihilation. AI doesn't change this basic and now decades old formula in any way, shape, or fashion. I'd also add that the article fails to mention that the wargames we keep losing are not outright nation vs nation war, but instead over things like Taiwan. We're trying to win a war at a location 10,000 miles away against a country 100 miles away. Overextension is at the heart of the decline of all great Empires.
machiaweliczny 4y ago
Article is fancy money begging but has some truth in it. From my layman understanding core defence rests on GPS and hypersonic misiles. China has their own GPS and good satelite tech. US has Starlink, space millitary branch. So that’s enough to prevent all-in war. The Taiwan war if happens will be more boring than you think. Probably it will be chinese embargo for Taiwan and US. But that’s not profitable unless you secure other core customer (EU). Win would guarantee higher currency value against dollar but you get embargo anyway so again no profit. Also with economic issues means less export. Drones probably will be important but US has laser tech to fight them. Can invest into better/faster image recognition. I think communication systems could be improved. You still find that command is often poor (soldiers act autonomically but dont have enough context info - AI could help with broadcasting). Not relevant for Taiwan issue. Cybersecurity is obvious AI target, because the point is for things to go wrong ;) Taiwan war would need to be siege or total destruction as assault by sea is not feasible AFAIK. Siege means economic war or stupid attrition war. If chinese would be stupid enough to go for attrition war then US has advantage in the sea and air. In such case air defence would matter in Taiwan and then also logistics, that why Starship delivery is needed tech. Economic is also not that sure as US can block Singapur choke point and then you need to go around Brazil to trade by sea.
- machiaweliczny 4y ago
  If I was Chinese I would invest into energy and food and ignore every other country (as they have most rare-earth). When it comes to computation then photonic computing could be the leap needed.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I’m also not involved in weapons development, but I’m pretty sure by hypersonic missiles, you mean ICBMs. Technically ICBMs are hypersonic and missiles, but when people say hypersonic missiles, they mean something more like a hypersonic cruise missile or glide vehicle. The idea being, they don’t follow a ballistic trajectory and can maneuver a bit, harder to shoot down, and so scarier to our carrier groups. In the end of course, the final “core defense,” as you put it, for major powers rests on the fact that we have a bunch of nuclear ICBMs, so, a real existential war between us can’t actually end in real victory for either party (the “loser” in a nuclear war just gets to be first in line in Hell, where we all be for destroying civilization). Anyway, the reason I bring up the distinction is that ICBMs are old tech, relatively simple, while hypersonic missiles are a recent thing, never tested in battle. Less interesting to the US I think, they are mostly for scaring away carriers, so obviously China would like them!
huijzer 4y ago
I always wonder how China can "dominate" AI while there still are no noteworthy Chinese compilers, programming languages, chip building tools, software collaboration tools, and more. It is likely that "dominance" claims are inflated just like China’s GDP [1]. And for people thinking that China will in the future dominate AI, there is the problem that the demographics are unfavourable and that the foreign policy has been extremely hostile in the last 10 years [3] which partially contributed to nobody willing to collaborate on high tech. For example, China has 0 fabs with EUV machines [2] meaning that no chips below 5 nm can be produced domestically. [1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/aug19/official-statistics-overstate-chinas-growth-rate https://www.nber.org/digest/aug19/official-statistics-overst.... [2]: https://www.lightreading.com/semiconductorsnetwork-platforms/asmls-china-business-endangered-by-us-sanctions/d/d-id/781094 https://www.lightreading.com/semiconductorsnetwork-platforms... [3]: https://youtu.be/y87R3Lp0jd0 https://youtu.be/y87R3Lp0jd0
- impossiblefork 4y ago
  There's little reason to develop compilers or programming languages when so many already exist. China's total population will indeed not be growing, but they'll soon be getting their first third- and fourth-generation engineers. It takes time to establish an engineering culture from nothing, and I think their capability is likely to increase even if their population decreases. There'll be quite many people in China anyway. When it comes to ML there really are very many publications by Chinese authors, and many are very good. I'd even say that some of their work is underappreciated. I can't judge as carefully when it comes to materials science, but it seems similar there. I think Chinese industry is very different from that in Europe, the US or Russia-- jumping to something I understand, for example, they're competing on volume in things like synthetic crystals. They're selling what seems like good hydrothermal quartz in dimensions 20x30x30 mm for 56.5 USD. When I contacted Western and Russian companies about that kind of thing, they have neither an interest in selling nor gave me a price. Meanwhile, these guys are selling it on the internet for basically no money. I think they'll only get better at technology and volume is its own thing.
  - huijzer 4y ago
nazgulnarsil 4y ago
Uses the term "very clear" a lot for something with such hand wavy reasoning. Probably not a coincidence.
mornanding 4y ago
The future of AI is not US vs. China. The future of AI is to empower a minority to control the majority.
ArielYang0102 4y ago
It feels like China is always overstated by the west
WhiteBlueSkies 4y ago
Quick, give me money or China will destroy us. I also have only a high-school degree but I'll pretend I'm an AI expert.
anarticle 4y ago
The underestimation of US realpolitik in this article seems off. Russian tactics in Ukraine are not US doctrine. Ref: Desert Storm for an example of how the US vs a standing army can go. Never mind discounting aircraft carriers, which no other country fields in the way the US does: blue water navy, logistics, TRAINING (caps, because readiness is most important, look at stats between US carrier and anyone else, nearly 10x less error rate), and scale. If we try to strong man this argument, let's say it is over for carriers. Exocet/Harpoon equivalent missiles have 100% hit rate in this scenario. Does that make it more or less likely for China to be able to take Taiwan? I'd argue it doesn't matter because China does not have an expeditionary force. Full stop. I'd like to be wrong, but my guess is they are not trained like US. Either missiles can stop ships and Chinese landing forces are stopped by a hail of Harpoon missiles, or they can't, and US conventional warfare sinks them in the East China Sea. I would guess China has to go for culture victory, somehow convincing Taiwan that they should come back into the fold. Taiwan does not sound like they are interested. If we think US military is not working on AI drones, I'd offer US invented the best global network of drones with the highest body count. Turkey is doing a great job with their TB2, but that's no predator/reaper, and those are the drones we can see. It's more than one thing I think, and this article glosses over that. You can say many bad things about the US military, it's bloated, they overspend, etc. However, they have logistics absolutely down. It is the greatest bomb FedEx ever created on Earth. They work tirelessly whether there is a peer or not. Not a bet I would take.
generativeai 4y ago
Says the guy who sold products to the Chinese company (Baidu) and tried to sell more to china in the early days. Such hypocrisy. http://web.archive.org/web/20190805191959/https://scale.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190805191959/https://scale.com/

100 points by hardmaru 4y ago

pshc 4y ago

Must funnel ever increasing resources into wasteful and destructive conflict. How about using AI to figure out how to cooperate at scale?

remarkEon 4y ago
Determining ways to win a destructive conflict is a mechanism to signal willingness to cooperate, and the value of that cooperation (averting the war in the first place). Pretending they’re mutually exclusive is wrong.
- pshc 4y ago
  One problem with human governance is we can't seem to figure out how to coordinate without burning excessive amounts of energy signalling status and power at each other. What if we could do better?
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    What exactly do you imagine as “doing better”, here?
cellis 4y ago
If you never lift weights, and everyone else around you does, don't be surprised when the "cooperation" tilts in their favor. Such is the nature of man.

29athrowaway 4y ago

The AI war will be won by the faction having the best datasets, and China has no limits when it comes to collecting data. The Chinese government is all-knowing and all-seeing. They are also above the law and can do whatever they want.

tomrod 4y ago
> China has no limits when it comes to collecting data This is an overgeneralization when it comes to the sources and types of data used in a battlefield, to map infrastructure, and so forth. While the Great Firewall and social monitoring do collect much data on the population, thereby decreasing non-state internal intelligence gathering and capability for spying, there is a difference between tactical data from a hot front and identification of spies.

jasonshen 4y ago

As a naturalized US citizen who was born in China but intends to raise a family as full-bore Americans, it's hard for me to assess the China threat. I believe China very much wants to assert it's influence in the Asia Pacific + MENA region, but I just don't it trying to conquer the United States directly. It's never really had a history of imperialism like the West has (excluding the Mongol empire that collapsed almost immediately). That said, a country doesn't need to directly conquer another to be a threat. Still, it's hard to know how serious the threat really is—the post is compelling but also assumes as a forgone conclusion that China has aggressor ambitions.

XorNot 4y ago
What do you think imperialism is other then "exert influence"?
- anshumankmr 4y ago
  Also,China has invaded India and claims many Indian states as its own. Plus it invaded Vietnam (and lost)
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Extract taxes, i.e., the Roman version?
caligarn 4y ago
China was never an imperial force like European colonists, but it always saw itself as the “Middle Kingdom” and the most important civilization on earth. It may be a different paradigm but the right to power or hegemony is still embedded in the culture and ethos.
- woooooo 4y ago
  It's actually a healthy and non-threatening paradigm? If they think they're the best and have no reason to expand because of that, the only threat is to our egos.

r3muxd 4y ago

With all due respect, has the author ever watched WarGames (1983)?

phdelightful 4y ago

Can the US taxpayer tolerate (financially, politically) what it will take to get the best and brightest to do AI work for .gov and .mil instead of adtech? All you have to do is look at defense lab salaries to see there is going to be a problem keeping talent around. Some people are certainly willing to take a pay cut to work on national defense, but probably not enough. Perhaps especially not the kind of person who went into adtech in the first place.

remarkEon 4y ago
The way to short circuit this is to make certain classes of adtech de facto (maybe even de jure) illegal.
jonas21 4y ago
This isn't going to happen by recruiting people to work for government labs. It'll happen by contracting the work out to companies that are already doing top AI research (many of which also work in adtech) and through grand challenges that incentivize research teams and startups to make new breakthroughs. Google, for example, would have gladly accepted Project Maven contracts if its own employees hadn't protested. If China does supersede the U.S. militarily, that may end up looking naive in retrospect.
- Sebguer 4y ago
  Ah, yes, the solution is to cede more of the country to corporations!
  - phdelightful 4y ago
    People who feel strongly that current procurement strategies are the wrong way to go about things should devote as much toil and treasure as they can to seeing their preferred solution materialize. In the mean time, I hope they will allow others to work within our existing system to keep our adversaries from replacing the US with something much worse for the entire world.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago

greatpostman 4y ago

I’m still confused by ai fear mongering. All the best models and advances come from the USA. Chinese research, while high in volume, never advances state of the art aside from incremental improvement. Incoming downvotes, but the fact remains most advanced have basically come from google, Fb and openai

ETHisso2017 4y ago
Simple, Scale AI is likely fishing for federal contracts now that its traditional enterprise customer set is throttling back on spending
- species9606 4y ago
  Exactly this. The "AI race" is yet another nuclear arms race, where the American public is terrified into believing in some sort of (nonexistent) capabilities gap, and the only way to avoid utter defeat is to funnel billions, eventually trillions, of dollars to the right companies.
  - zapataband1 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y the real question is do we still have a mineshaft gap? hope we figure out how to get along in our only home.
willbudd 4y ago
That's simply not true. There are numerous problem domains in AI where Chinese research groups are advancing the SOTA, or at least are well-presented at the forefront. Your comment reads like little more than casual racism to me.
- jackblemming 4y ago
  Such as?
- greatpostman 4y ago

superb-owl 4y ago

I've been skeptical of AI posing an existential risk. This article may have changed my mind.

ETHisso2017 4y ago

In 2021, Alex Wang of Scale (the author of the linked article) uncritically quoted the following from Eric Schmidt: "Eric states that the global growth of AI technology is a national security threat for the United States. In March, we believed we were ahead of China’s technological development in the AI sector, but they quickly showed us that we were wrong. By June, they’d demonstrated a model capable of producing human-like text that was comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-3 model in quality." https://scale.com/blog/Eric-Schmidt-Geopolitics-TransformX-Scale-AI https://scale.com/blog/Eric-Schmidt-Geopolitics-TransformX-S... As such, it's important to note that the author views the entire Chinese AI industry as a threat to the United States, and may believe that the growth of AI anywhere in the rest of the world is a threat to the United States.

remarkEon 4y ago
Is there a reason that I should think of Wang as uniquely qualified to comment on this space? He runs an AI startup, seems knowledgeable about AI in general, but what does he know about war?
- bloodyplonker22 4y ago
  Fair question, but I don't think one needs to be very skilled in the arts of war and military tactics to foresee that AI will be important in the future of war. I don't think it's worth throwing our dear Wang's blog out the window for this. The points he makes about AI's involvement in the future of war are very broad and high level. For example, he compares the amount of money that each country is spending on AI in the military and concludes that the US is lagging. It would be interesting if we had someone, like Palmer Luckey, who is actually involved in military AI speak in more detail about it.
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    Right, they are high level points, which is why I am having a hard time finding something specific to critique or even disagree with. For example, when I think of the question of “how will AI be used” the obvious answer, which Wang more or less addresses, is targeting systems. Basically, we’re just going to automate all of that and instead of a bunch of captains in the S2 shop cooking up target packets and deciding which one makes the most sense, the AI just does all of this for us. But what does this actually mean? Can we obsolete some/most/all of the S2 shop and replace it with a container of servers stacked with GPUs to do imagine processing? Take that manpower and add another infantry platoon? A drone operations platoon?

qualudeheart 4y ago

AI is strong enough to decide who wins the economic fight. Prediction: 10% gdp growth year over year as we approahc general ai. The AI Economy will be a new reality. It may not be a good reality. Will it be your reality?

largbae 4y ago

I am definitely afraid of mass data collection and drones, both for warfare and law enforcement. They lower the cost of coercing and if need be killing, both emotionally and financially. AI will lower this cost further, and enable fewer and fewer powerful people to threaten or control the rest. The Chinese government has so far turned much of its technology inward toward the control of its own people, who seem either OK with it or unable to resist. Perhaps they are just early adopters, and one by one all governments will follow their example, first trusting their own judgment more than the will of their constituents, and then using technology to keep it that way. We may not need a world war 3, or even an external adversary to lose this race. How about we spend more time on defensive technologies for individuals and laws protecting their use?

rdevsrex 4y ago
I've seen a number of various voices speaking up about the possibility of a turn key totalitarian state in the US. Where everything is in place and waiting for some just to turn it on. That is the worst case scenario here. That said obviously we can resist, but it is worrying.

blacksqr 4y ago

It's funny that OP doesn't realize "the AI war" will be between the AI and all of humanity.

tetraca 4y ago
It won't. It'll be a war between the people and entrenched power structures who will use very primitive AIs to crystalize their position at the expense of everyone else. What rich man or government would ever fear riot or revolution when you can use data mining algorithms and precision drones to liquidate even the most minor whiff of dissent at the push of a button? They will eat everyone else with specialized drones as sapient as insects before truly human AI is a thing.

bugfix-66 4y ago

43 days ago I asked this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33215740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33215740 This question got voted down everywhere I discussed it on Hacker News, but somehow the submission itself got 11 points. Apparently, it is an offensive question to some silent, pro-censorship part of the population here. Today I'll ask it again, and I hope somebody will respond in a useful way: QUESTION: I write software for parallel processors at a hardware/software company you've heard of. I am located in California but many of my coworkers are located in China (roughly half the team). We are directly affected by the American government's severe new CPU/GPU export restrictions. It seems to me that America is preparing for a period of cold war, or worse. It's time to start thinking about contributing to the American war effort by writing high-performance military computing systems. For example, SIMD particle filters for hypersonic weapons, or low-latency convolutional neural networks for battlefield devices. So, Hacker News: What company is the best place to do this work? What team? Does anyone here already work in this field?

phdelightful 4y ago
If you can tolerate a .gov email address, there are high-performance computing, edge computing, and AI groups at DOE labs. My impression is that they're always starved for talent in these areas due to stiff competition from industry and lifestyle restrictions that come with a security clearance (being a US citizen, reduced international travel, no drugs other than alcohol and nicotine, your work may require on-site). Defense labs are probably similar.

capitalsigma 4y ago

Not super clear to me how useful computer vision algorithms are to the military. The important thing in the private sector is replacing (say) the lab tech who would otherwise be paid minimum wage to look through your data. If you have plenty of low skill labor available, what advantage do you get?

_carbyau_ 4y ago
Outright speed, speed of scalability. If you can submit what you want and have it within moments, it beats a fancy typing pool. That kind of speed alone lets you have a highly trained someone retry different variations and filter more on quality of result. Scalability. If you need to do it ten times faster. More hardware = done. More people could make it done too but training etc is required.

deleted 4y ago

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thoweiru3o43 4y ago

Half the kids in US grad-schools are Chinese. The other half are Indian. Neither are particularly fond of the racial-religious notions of 'US hegemony'. Good luck keeping your 'supremacy'.

RivieraKid 4y ago
I want to live in a world where liberal democracies have the most power over the world. The power of China, Russia, Iran or North Korea should be minimized.
- bllguo 4y ago
  how liberal and democratic, where 1b westerners and their 350m american elites especially get to lord over the remaining 7b, and consume orders of magnitude more resources per person.
  - abeyer 4y ago
    Thanks for clarifying that, I never realized the leaders and elites of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have nothing but love, generosity, and good intentions towards those 7b. /s When you're done with the whataboutism, there are plenty of things that could be improved with the system if you choose to engage with that. Your comment history looks like you're more interested in pro-China/anti-West astroturfing, though.
    - bllguo 4y ago
      Of course, left unchecked the barbarians will destroy us all! Never mind that you surround them with military outposts, are the two major oceans away from Eurasia, and have been the instigator of every conflict with them. And you have the temerity to claim the West has love, generosity, and good intentions! I'd love to hear you explain what you think "whataboutism" means and how Western dominance over the global south is actually democratic, but something tells me continuing to engage would be pointless. It's alright, keep thinking of me as a paid shill if it comforts you.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Some of this could be interpreted as satire. For example, it's not necessary to improve AI capabilities in order to generate believeable propaganda - nation-states have been doing that ever since the printed press was invented, and before. It certainly reached a fever pitch in the 20th century, with radio, television, print and internet media all being the scene of numerous pitched propaganda battles, with social media being (perhaps) the dominant information-warfare battleground of the 21st century. As far as the Ukraine drone war, that's not really different from the Afghan drone war, the main difference being the relative lack of energy infrastructure or heavy armor to attack in Afghanistan. Whatever one can say about Russia vs NATO-backed Ukraine, or the USA vs Afghanistan, neither serves much purpose for making predictions about an 'all-out war' between China and the United States. One glaring omission is the failure to recognize that China is a nuclear power (as its ally North Korea), and it's not hard to imagine a serious naval conflict between the USA and China going nuclear - what better way to eliminate an offshore aircraft carrier battle group, for example? This article mentions nuclear once (in a 1942 context) and barely discusses what a real naval conflict would look like, other than to claim that 'autonomous adaptive drone swarms' would be harder targets to than aircraft carriers. That's a science fiction story line from, say, the Iain M. Banks Culture novels, not a realistic scenario for naval warfare (and what about submarines?). All in all this reads like a bit of hyperventilation, or maybe a sales pitch put together by the AI warfare divisions of Lockheed and Northrup. It also ignores the rationale for 'having a human in the loop', but then maybe the author hasn't seen the 1980s movie War Games?

jasmer 4y ago
This is relevant document. The ability to automate and make 'good quality' content is decisive in the information space. The world is greatly moved by photos and video of horrible things, and if that can be faked with high fidelity it will make a huge difference. People won't have time for the truth - the 'video' of 'whatever' will make it's impact. The drone war in Ukraine is completely different from that in Afghanistan. The Baryaktar drones are almost useless, have an average lifespan of just a few weeks. They're almost all destroyed and don't play an important role. FYI many of the Baryaktar videos we saw over the months were released over time, as the units were mostly destroyed. Russia has no equivalent. Small drones are used for recon, target acquisition, dropping small munitions, which is nothing like Afghanistan. And the scale of it as well. We're seeing the firs 'small drone war at scale'. I suggest China, being China, will try it at real scale, and during the invasion of Taiwan I expect to see swarms of thousands of drones on the offence - overwhelming numbers. Everyone is aware that 'nuclear weapons exist' and also that AI works to varying degrees of autonomy.

gavin_gee 4y ago

The prudent thing is to invest in the technology even if china isnt.

poopboob 4y ago

Let's see Alex is the CEO of Scale Scale is a DOD Contractor Scale is an AI company Alex suggests DOD allocate funds for AI Here's some news from someone who has seen the AI leaderboard game closely and led teams that won some Leaderboards like COCO that Alex cites are not a good indicator. They are flooded incremental performance improvements that hardly translate to any real world application

greatpostman 4y ago
Either he’s trying to be manipulative by using that data, or he doesn’t understand “ai”
ethbr0 4y ago
>> (from TFA) In the past 5 years, the United States has still not started, let alone operationalized, a major AI capability that could disrupt our current warfighter. When he misses or conveniently ignores the Skyborg UCAV program from the Air Force [0], I also question the author's knowledge of the current state of military programs. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyborg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyborg

madmax96 4y ago

Is it wise to compare spending within defense budgets between these countries? Much AI research in the US is conducted by private firms. How does the current defense budget compare to historical defense budgets, such as during the early days of the digital computer in the Cold War? On a related note: yes, Chinese researchers have models that perform certain tasks well. But are those models useful in the contexts the author mentions? To be sure, I don't disagree that AI research needs funded. I'm just genuinely curious about these points.

lsy 4y ago

This is a very urgent-sounding article about China's supposed AI superpowers and how they will dominate the battlefield, coincidentally written by the head of an American "AI" company who would likely personally benefit from shifting $150B into AI research, as suggested. Complete with AI-industry standard claims about technology that is "less than 10 years away", and sci-fi about "autonomous, adaptive drone swarms". War is so much more complicated than the author wants readers to think. Raw technological dominance does not assure victory, as the US found after 20 years in Afghanistan. AI, for all its impressive feats, continues to operate without flexibility or common sense, and foundational concepts like geography or economic influence remain the most important contributors to success in the military sphere. Even if one takes the continuance of the DoD's aims as an unalloyed good, what areas of its budget would go unserved with 25% redirected to AI research? How do those cuts or reprioritizations affect US military capability? I don't suspect the author has thought about this very much, and yet he feels qualified to write yet another AI/China scare article, which more and more seem designed to terrify politicians who determine funding rather than to convince military experts.

300bps 4y ago
To your point, I literally laughed out loud at this in the article: Based on the pace of progress with AI technology today, I believe this is less than 10 years away. How does anyone write things like this and expect to be taken seriously with the track record of AI regarding real world things like autonomous driving?
- notjoemama 4y ago
  Surely someone has a "law" that states generalized AI is always 10 years away.
  - qbrass 4y ago
    It's usually predicted as 25-50 years away because of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maes%E2%80%93Garreau_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maes%E2%80%93Garreau_law A 10 year prediction is because this is the CEO of a company saying it. So the lifespan used in the prediction is that of the company and not the person.

pellucide 4y ago

Summary: China bad, because.... AI

bee_rider 4y ago

I dunno. I mean, yeah technology will be used in war, and counties ahead in technology will usually be able to design better weapons. But like: > Technologies including drones, AI-based targeting and imagery intelligence, and Javelin missiles have allowed for a shocking defense of Ukraine against Russia What is “AI-based targeting and imagery intelligence,” is it being used in Ukraine, and why is it sandwiched between two media-darling weapon systems? This kinda reduces my faith in the honestly of the author here. Does anyone know about weapons development, is he pulling a fast one?

salamo 4y ago

I tend to worry about the opposite problem: what if the United States is successful in deploying artificial intelligence? In the article, the author uses the United States interchangeably with the concept of liberal democracy, which I believe is a fair assumption today. However, I worry that many of the author's calls to soak up more and more information for the purposes of military supremacy will cause irreparable damage to our political system. Artificial intelligence has the tendency to centralize power in the hands of a small number of people, and breakthroughs in AI are likely to exacerbate this trend. In short, the US might win this hypothetical war, but at what cost? The way I see it, there are three kinds of technologies: A) those which tend to centralize information or control B) those which are essentially neutral and C) those which democratize information and control. Group A artificial intelligence capabilities are not hard to imagine. Ubiquitous surveillance is a good example. Many current AI technologies are great for surveillance and can dramatically reduce the marginal cost of surveilling a person. For an autocracy this is great. For a liberal democracy, it threatens civil liberties and reduces trust. Group B technologies are things like self-driving cars, precision agriculture, and AI-facilitated entertainment (e.g. recommender systems, Dall-E). These are things which I don't see as fundamentally helpful or harmful to liberal democracy. Another way to look at these technologies is that both autocracies and democracies should be equally amenable to developing and using them. I can't think of any Group C technologies and this worries me. These are AI-enabled technologies whose effects are disproportionately democratizing. A democracy should seek these out while an autocracy will ban them.

pshc 4y ago
The consensus algorithms used by cryptocurrency fit into group C. Smart contracts are programmable incentive mechanisms. I am hoping we figure out how to use them to coordinate productively, rather than for financial schemes.
- airgapstopgap 4y ago
zapataband1 4y ago
I feel like it's just to difficult to pin down what area of ai will improve. For example what about an AI that is relatively powerful at brute force decryption(not sure if this violates some thermodynamic principle). Or even just an AI that can easily find exploitable websites. Things like that destroy trust in systems and probably large systems like gov or corporations have more to lose if information is up for grabs. But maybe it's the opposite way around. Hard to tell imo

abeyer 4y ago

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

somenameforme 4y ago

This article seemingly handwaves away the single most important factor in modern war between major powers: nukes. If two major powers go to war, and it's a real war in the sense of one trying to directly conquer the other's land then that's going to, near immediately, escalate to mutual nuclear annihilation. AI doesn't change this basic and now decades old formula in any way, shape, or fashion. I'd also add that the article fails to mention that the wargames we keep losing are not outright nation vs nation war, but instead over things like Taiwan. We're trying to win a war at a location 10,000 miles away against a country 100 miles away. Overextension is at the heart of the decline of all great Empires.

machiaweliczny 4y ago

Article is fancy money begging but has some truth in it. From my layman understanding core defence rests on GPS and hypersonic misiles. China has their own GPS and good satelite tech. US has Starlink, space millitary branch. So that’s enough to prevent all-in war. The Taiwan war if happens will be more boring than you think. Probably it will be chinese embargo for Taiwan and US. But that’s not profitable unless you secure other core customer (EU). Win would guarantee higher currency value against dollar but you get embargo anyway so again no profit. Also with economic issues means less export. Drones probably will be important but US has laser tech to fight them. Can invest into better/faster image recognition. I think communication systems could be improved. You still find that command is often poor (soldiers act autonomically but dont have enough context info - AI could help with broadcasting). Not relevant for Taiwan issue. Cybersecurity is obvious AI target, because the point is for things to go wrong ;) Taiwan war would need to be siege or total destruction as assault by sea is not feasible AFAIK. Siege means economic war or stupid attrition war. If chinese would be stupid enough to go for attrition war then US has advantage in the sea and air. In such case air defence would matter in Taiwan and then also logistics, that why Starship delivery is needed tech. Economic is also not that sure as US can block Singapur choke point and then you need to go around Brazil to trade by sea.

machiaweliczny 4y ago
If I was Chinese I would invest into energy and food and ignore every other country (as they have most rare-earth). When it comes to computation then photonic computing could be the leap needed.
bee_rider 4y ago
I’m also not involved in weapons development, but I’m pretty sure by hypersonic missiles, you mean ICBMs. Technically ICBMs are hypersonic and missiles, but when people say hypersonic missiles, they mean something more like a hypersonic cruise missile or glide vehicle. The idea being, they don’t follow a ballistic trajectory and can maneuver a bit, harder to shoot down, and so scarier to our carrier groups. In the end of course, the final “core defense,” as you put it, for major powers rests on the fact that we have a bunch of nuclear ICBMs, so, a real existential war between us can’t actually end in real victory for either party (the “loser” in a nuclear war just gets to be first in line in Hell, where we all be for destroying civilization). Anyway, the reason I bring up the distinction is that ICBMs are old tech, relatively simple, while hypersonic missiles are a recent thing, never tested in battle. Less interesting to the US I think, they are mostly for scaring away carriers, so obviously China would like them!

huijzer 4y ago

I always wonder how China can "dominate" AI while there still are no noteworthy Chinese compilers, programming languages, chip building tools, software collaboration tools, and more. It is likely that "dominance" claims are inflated just like China’s GDP [1]. And for people thinking that China will in the future dominate AI, there is the problem that the demographics are unfavourable and that the foreign policy has been extremely hostile in the last 10 years [3] which partially contributed to nobody willing to collaborate on high tech. For example, China has 0 fabs with EUV machines [2] meaning that no chips below 5 nm can be produced domestically. [1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/aug19/official-statistics-overstate-chinas-growth-rate https://www.nber.org/digest/aug19/official-statistics-overst.... [2]: https://www.lightreading.com/semiconductorsnetwork-platforms/asmls-china-business-endangered-by-us-sanctions/d/d-id/781094 https://www.lightreading.com/semiconductorsnetwork-platforms... [3]: https://youtu.be/y87R3Lp0jd0 https://youtu.be/y87R3Lp0jd0

impossiblefork 4y ago
There's little reason to develop compilers or programming languages when so many already exist. China's total population will indeed not be growing, but they'll soon be getting their first third- and fourth-generation engineers. It takes time to establish an engineering culture from nothing, and I think their capability is likely to increase even if their population decreases. There'll be quite many people in China anyway. When it comes to ML there really are very many publications by Chinese authors, and many are very good. I'd even say that some of their work is underappreciated. I can't judge as carefully when it comes to materials science, but it seems similar there. I think Chinese industry is very different from that in Europe, the US or Russia-- jumping to something I understand, for example, they're competing on volume in things like synthetic crystals. They're selling what seems like good hydrothermal quartz in dimensions 20x30x30 mm for 56.5 USD. When I contacted Western and Russian companies about that kind of thing, they have neither an interest in selling nor gave me a price. Meanwhile, these guys are selling it on the internet for basically no money. I think they'll only get better at technology and volume is its own thing.
- huijzer 4y ago

nazgulnarsil 4y ago

Uses the term "very clear" a lot for something with such hand wavy reasoning. Probably not a coincidence.

mornanding 4y ago

The future of AI is not US vs. China. The future of AI is to empower a minority to control the majority.

ArielYang0102 4y ago

It feels like China is always overstated by the west

WhiteBlueSkies 4y ago

Quick, give me money or China will destroy us. I also have only a high-school degree but I'll pretend I'm an AI expert.

anarticle 4y ago

The underestimation of US realpolitik in this article seems off. Russian tactics in Ukraine are not US doctrine. Ref: Desert Storm for an example of how the US vs a standing army can go. Never mind discounting aircraft carriers, which no other country fields in the way the US does: blue water navy, logistics, TRAINING (caps, because readiness is most important, look at stats between US carrier and anyone else, nearly 10x less error rate), and scale. If we try to strong man this argument, let's say it is over for carriers. Exocet/Harpoon equivalent missiles have 100% hit rate in this scenario. Does that make it more or less likely for China to be able to take Taiwan? I'd argue it doesn't matter because China does not have an expeditionary force. Full stop. I'd like to be wrong, but my guess is they are not trained like US. Either missiles can stop ships and Chinese landing forces are stopped by a hail of Harpoon missiles, or they can't, and US conventional warfare sinks them in the East China Sea. I would guess China has to go for culture victory, somehow convincing Taiwan that they should come back into the fold. Taiwan does not sound like they are interested. If we think US military is not working on AI drones, I'd offer US invented the best global network of drones with the highest body count. Turkey is doing a great job with their TB2, but that's no predator/reaper, and those are the drones we can see. It's more than one thing I think, and this article glosses over that. You can say many bad things about the US military, it's bloated, they overspend, etc. However, they have logistics absolutely down. It is the greatest bomb FedEx ever created on Earth. They work tirelessly whether there is a peer or not. Not a bet I would take.

generativeai 4y ago

Says the guy who sold products to the Chinese company (Baidu) and tried to sell more to china in the early days. Such hypocrisy. http://web.archive.org/web/20190805191959/https://scale.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190805191959/https://scale.com/