>Ah, so it was probably not necessary in hindsight for Apple to develop LLVM and Swift and for Google to develop Go and Jax? At the time those projects were cre

>Ah, so it was probably not necessary in hindsight for Apple to develop LLVM and Swift and for Google to develop Go and Jax? At the time those projects were created, there were already many compilers and programming languages. JAX is great, but it isn't a language as such. It's a kind of generalized tensorflow. I'd instead characterize it as a framework. Go, and probably Rust are languages that were needed before their invention, similarly with Erlang. But not they exist. Similarly, Google went for Linux when they wanted to develop Android, they didn't decide to make their own OS from scratch. LLVM I don't know what to say about-- it's probably critical to the companies that need specialized languages for their hardware to have something with the right license and the right modularity, so it's probably an enabler for things like CUDA and there may well be a path to performance through understanding compilers and processors together etc., so compiler understanding is probably quite important, but now that it exists NVIDIA doesn't make their own, they use LLVM. >Why are the publications good? I've seen some solve interesting problems, some that contain new mathematics, etc.-- they're good in the same way that ML publications from the US or Germany or any other country are good. There are even some good ones that no one cares about because they're written very badly. >Why would that be, apart from the one anecdotal example that you give? They seem to have actual effective competition between firms, even for fun stuff like synthetic crystals and to be trying to reach any market where they can sell them. This competition means that some industrial vitamins (weird things like synthetic crystals with specialized applications, etc) aren't locked up in B2B-only-and-we-have-to-be-partners relationships and can actually be bought for reasonable cost. If you sliced the crystal they make for jewellery applications you'll probably find that it has worse Q-values than what's made in Europe or Japan, but at least you can buy crystals to slice and fiddle with things yourself.