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Once Deng Xiaoping did his reforms and opening up, it removed much of the impediments that Mao's CCP caused, and China was able to develop super fast. But recen

Once Deng Xiaoping did his reforms and opening up, it removed much of the impediments that Mao's CCP caused, and China was able to develop super fast. But recently I am a little concerned that Xi Jinping's rule is a bit of a return to some Mao-style authoritarian principles that are likely to hamper growth. * Economic growth slowed down significantly under Xi Jinping compared to his predecessor Hu Jintao. Also, while Xi handled the start of the Covid pandemic well, he sort of fumbled the recovery afterwards with too heavy-handed quarantine/daily testing policies. * China has demonstrated that it's super good at AI stuff, publishing lots of papers, having extremely talented engineers at Deepseek, etc, but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity. * China continues to have a brain drain of talented scientists and engineers to the US and other parts of the world. A large proportion of the top talent at Google, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, etc, are Chinese-American. * From my anecdotal experience, many young people in China feel helpless and unmotivated due to the hyper-competitive environment and lack of opportunities. It is common to find healthy young adults who would rather "lie flat" than work. Together with an extremely aging population due to the one-child policy, this does not bode well for the future. Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall. In the age of information it is lame that information flow in and out of the country is so restricted. On one hand, as this article points out, the rest of the world is ignorant of the advances in China. On the other hand, the Chinese people are also ignorant of many things outside.

seanicus 1y ago
That firewall isn't going away anytime soon. Americans are inundated with a deluge of foreign influence campaigns from a variety of foreign powers and no way China wants that pain revisited upon themselves.
- yonisto 1y ago
  Sure. This why they block google search, amazon and onlyfans. LOL. The wall always had two functions, the obvious blocking from getting people in, but it also blocks from getting your people out
  - Yeul 1y ago
    Chinese people who get out have to face the reality of a very racist Western world who will never appreciate them. As China develops and becomes richer eventually the idea of moving from Shanghai to New York no longer looks as attractive.
    - bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
      Huh? If there's one place (outside of China) that doesn't discriminate against the Chinese, it'd have to be New York.
      - lazyeye 1y ago
        Id also argue if China was open to the world we would see the level of Chinese racism against foreigners is very high indeed. Likely higher given their closed media systems unable to tolerate foreign opinion.
      - jacquesm 1y ago
        I'd pick Vancouver.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - netsharc 1y ago
    Seems like Onlyfans-like content also exists in China. They banned "erotic eating of bananas on livestreams" 1), so if they're fire-fighting, there must be a fire... 1) https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/china-is-banning-erotic-banana-eating-on-live-streams https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/china-is-banning-eroti...
    - dkiebd 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - 1y ago
storus 1y ago
China did reinforcement learning at scale in the real world. They essentially dedicated a decade for exploration, inviting experts from all countries to some local area (each expert/country of origin combo in a different one) and developed it according to what experts advised. Then they evaluated the changes, took the best performing ones and went into full exploitation mode, spreading those lessons throughout the China. They also had a large part of Africa for additional experiments on what worked.
hnhn34 1y ago
>but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity. I'm pretty sure this isn't what happened. DeepSeek just hasn't released a big model upate. But in the meantime, Qwen, Bytedance, Ziphu and Moonshot AI have released extremely impressive models, some of which are SOTA or close to it. The open source/open weight world is still in love with Chinese labs as they keep releasing cool stuff and filling the void left by Meta and Mistral.
- freilanzer 1y ago
  Qwen3-Embedding is really good, imo. It allows me to release a global feature that would have been extremely difficult otherwise.
- Sammi 1y ago
  None of these are SOTA in any benchmark I've seen. Some of them get in the top 10 or top 5 some times. What these Chinese models have that is interesting is that they are much cheaper to run and they are open source. This has pushed the other closed source SOTA models to make all the big updates we have seen the last few months. I guess we can thank these Chinese models for creating some competitive pressure, which has pushed the forefront, but they aren't doing so by leading the forefront.
  - freilanzer 1y ago
    Qwen scores very high in the MTEB: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard
cpursley 1y ago
You missed how they quickly caught up (even surpassed the west in some cases) in vehicle manufacturing, electronics like phones and 5G, drones. Where they haven’t quite yet, they are very very close.
neonrider 1y ago
> Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall. To become the next Rome, China would have to open up and let itself be infected by the rest of the world. It's a rite of passage, with no guarantee that it will have the constitution to endure the culture shock and the subsequent fever. How do you expose 1.4 billion minds to new perspectives, while also keeping everyone paddling in the same direction?

seanicus 1y ago

That firewall isn't going away anytime soon. Americans are inundated with a deluge of foreign influence campaigns from a variety of foreign powers and no way China wants that pain revisited upon themselves.

yonisto 1y ago
Sure. This why they block google search, amazon and onlyfans. LOL. The wall always had two functions, the obvious blocking from getting people in, but it also blocks from getting your people out
- Yeul 1y ago
  Chinese people who get out have to face the reality of a very racist Western world who will never appreciate them. As China develops and becomes richer eventually the idea of moving from Shanghai to New York no longer looks as attractive.
  - bobbylarrybobby 1y ago
    Huh? If there's one place (outside of China) that doesn't discriminate against the Chinese, it'd have to be New York.
    - lazyeye 1y ago
      Id also argue if China was open to the world we would see the level of Chinese racism against foreigners is very high indeed. Likely higher given their closed media systems unable to tolerate foreign opinion.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      I'd pick Vancouver.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- netsharc 1y ago
  Seems like Onlyfans-like content also exists in China. They banned "erotic eating of bananas on livestreams" 1), so if they're fire-fighting, there must be a fire... 1) https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/china-is-banning-erotic-banana-eating-on-live-streams https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/china-is-banning-eroti...
  - dkiebd 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - 1y ago

storus 1y ago

China did reinforcement learning at scale in the real world. They essentially dedicated a decade for exploration, inviting experts from all countries to some local area (each expert/country of origin combo in a different one) and developed it according to what experts advised. Then they evaluated the changes, took the best performing ones and went into full exploitation mode, spreading those lessons throughout the China. They also had a large part of Africa for additional experiments on what worked.

hnhn34 1y ago

>but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity. I'm pretty sure this isn't what happened. DeepSeek just hasn't released a big model upate. But in the meantime, Qwen, Bytedance, Ziphu and Moonshot AI have released extremely impressive models, some of which are SOTA or close to it. The open source/open weight world is still in love with Chinese labs as they keep releasing cool stuff and filling the void left by Meta and Mistral.

freilanzer 1y ago
Qwen3-Embedding is really good, imo. It allows me to release a global feature that would have been extremely difficult otherwise.
Sammi 1y ago
None of these are SOTA in any benchmark I've seen. Some of them get in the top 10 or top 5 some times. What these Chinese models have that is interesting is that they are much cheaper to run and they are open source. This has pushed the other closed source SOTA models to make all the big updates we have seen the last few months. I guess we can thank these Chinese models for creating some competitive pressure, which has pushed the forefront, but they aren't doing so by leading the forefront.
- freilanzer 1y ago
  Qwen scores very high in the MTEB: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard

cpursley 1y ago

You missed how they quickly caught up (even surpassed the west in some cases) in vehicle manufacturing, electronics like phones and 5G, drones. Where they haven’t quite yet, they are very very close.

neonrider 1y ago

> Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall. To become the next Rome, China would have to open up and let itself be infected by the rest of the world. It's a rite of passage, with no guarantee that it will have the constitution to endure the culture shock and the subsequent fever. How do you expose 1.4 billion minds to new perspectives, while also keeping everyone paddling in the same direction?