5 ms·
The only thing the West is achieving here is that sooner or later China will be able to compete on their own terms rather than ours. It may buy some time but th
by jacquesm 12d ago
The only thing the West is achieving here is that sooner or later China will be able to compete on their own terms rather than ours. It may buy some time but the end result is very predictable.
- stingraycharles 12d agoIt baffles me how shortsighted the policymaking here is. Like, what did they expect to happen?
- mrheosuper 12d agothey expect the Chinese to bend their knee and beg for the sweet, sweet chip
- qaq 12d agothey were sold an idea the AGI is right around the corner so even a slight delay might be critical to secure the "win"
- adrianN 12d agoThey expect to retire with a decent amount of money before things go down hill.
- odo1242 12d agoThey probably weren't expecting AI foundation models / model research to be quite as fungible as they are
- safety1st 12d agoYes. Over the last 20 years the economy has become dysfunctional. It no longer really resembles a free market; monopolies have established barriers to entry everywhere. And the biggest investors are awash with helicopter money that's been doled out for favors by the political class. So those investors have tons of cash to burn and surprisingly few opportunities. Even within Silicon Valley/VC there are surprisingly few who seem to really understand the fundamental economics of software. Or perhaps those economics just aren't that important when you have billions of dollars on hand and cash is obviously not going to get you a return. Any whisper of possible exponential growth is worth throwing money at. Crypto? Why not. AI? Why not. Datacenters? Why not. Tulips? Why not. This is by all definitions an empire in decline. Everything is broken or fake. Everyone is afraid to do what needs to be done. Power forbids it. So we're all just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Our secret police aren't as bad as the late stage USSR's yet, but hold Uncle Sam's beer... (That's not a recommendation to try and time the nadir, by the way, as it could easily be 50 years away.)
- piva00 12d agoIt started way before the last 20 years, the past 40 years have created the conditions for this to happen. Overfinancialisation of the economy while removing safeguards to keep markets functional, like anti-trust enforcement, are the main forces behind this erosion. Through finance the focus of companies is completely shifted away from producing good products and services, and into how to extract more paper wealth from existing structures to the detriment of products. Not enforcing anti-trust and letting behemoths to form which cannot be competed against since with their amount of capital they can either buy their competition outright or just price dump for long enough to make competition non-viable. It's the failure of neoliberalism, and that agenda has been pushed into Western countries since the 1980s-1990s, it made enormous wealth for the few at the top while eroding whole societies, economically and socially, it's all dysfunctional.
- odo1242 11d agoI feel like my point is being over extrapolated a bit. All I was saying is that people in 2020 believed AI companies had much more of a moat then they actually do - that other companies would struggle to obtain enough data (y’know, downloading the internet to train models wasn’t legal back then) or resources to compete
- piva00 11d agoI replied to the extrapolation, not to your comment directly, I think your point might be more fitting under that comment than mine, I just drilled down from the points above mine.
- user43928 11d agoDatacenters and AI obviously work and come with a credible value proposition and path to profitability. Comparing this to crypto or turnips makes me doubt the merit of any other opinions your comment offers.
- pixl97 11d ago
- ekianjo 12d agoif you sell them ASML equipment your market gets destroyed tomorrow instead of 10 years later so what options do they have?
- DeepSeaTortoise 12d agoNo longer strangling their own economy would be a good start. Take a look at the magnificance that was the ESRS. A 300 A4 pages long list of yearly reporting duties. And the best thing is: Just because they're no longer nicely summarized in one place, doesn't mean the underlying duties went away.
- georgemcbay 12d ago> It baffles me how shortsighted the policymaking here is. Like, what did they expect to happen? As someone who is myself 'old af' by tech standards (I'll be 53 very soon) the main problem is that the policymakers are all 70+ years old. Their concept of what China even is is forever stuck in pre-2004 thinking from back when they still had significant neuroplasticity. Vote these fucking fossils out, kids, before it is entirely too late. (And, yeah, before someone inevitably brings it up, some exceptions-that-prove-the-rule older policymakers/politicians do avoid this trap of getting stuck in the past, but most don't)
- skeptic_ai 12d agoI think eventually The west will want to kneecap China, so I guess this is the best time to do so.
- nonethewiser 12d agoThey always had the option to do that
- nixon_why69 12d agoBut not the necessity, so it wasn't getting funded with the same urgency as now.
- nonethewiser 11d agoBut if it was always an option and they didnt do it then they didnt think it was in their best interest
- bigcat12345678 12d agoAs other comments pointed out, that was always China's plan, the value here is really that when the Chinese overlord annillate the world's industrial competition, they'll have the moral high ground of being out of self-reliance and hostility by western monopolists. Edit: And, that, my fellow keyboard high-minded thinker but powerless corp peons, was also part of the China's plan all along.
- fangspire 12d agoWas it also the Chinese plan all along to annihilate their own birh rate? Was the Great Leap Forward part of the plan too?
- vkou 12d ago> Was it also the Chinese plan all along to annihilate their own birh rate? No, that's generally what happens when countries stop being poor. Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, all have similar fertility rates.
- rmunn 12d agoBut none of them had a government-mandated one-child policy (maximum, not minimum) for over three decades. That's a pretty major difference between China and neighboring countries.
- vkou 11d agoAnd yet all of them have an even lower fertility rate than China. On the one hand, you're proving my point. On the other hand, if you think that China's headed for a demographic disaster, so are all of those countries, and your thesis of blaming the CCP for everything... Falls a bit flat.
- badpun 11d agoChina has extremely low fertitily rate given that they haven't yet reached the status of a developed country (which Taiwan, SK and Singapore have reached).
- ekianjo 12d agopeople have been claiming Nvidia will get competition too for years but you guys seem to be forgetting that the current leaders are not asleep at the wheel in the meantime.
- SadErn 12d agoWhen China eventually catches up on conventional lithography, the goalposts will shift to silicon photonics and optical logic, a transition DARPA laid the publicly visible groundwork for decades ago through programs like POEM and PIPES while keeping the mature implementations strictly classified until needed.
- deepsun 12d agoWell Soviet Union tried to be self-sufficient, but the truth is such strategy loses to global free trade. Whether we want it or not, global trade is what keeps the world from WW3 for now, not the nuclear MAD.
- klrefg 12d agoFew countries rely more economically on global trade than China though.
- hiddencost 12d agoYou understand that the US has alienated almost all of its trading partners and is aggressively attempting to kill free global trade, right? Whereas China is developing a powerful network of rapidly developing trading partners like Africa and the Middle East?
- jacquesm 12d agoThe Soviet Union never was the manufacturing power behind a very significant fraction of the worlds products.
- KurSix 12d agoSanctions can absolutely create the incentive to build a domestic supply chain, but incentive doesn't automatically translate into catching up on the same timeline
- audunw 12d agoWhat the West is doing is forcing China into a situation which is impossible to sustain when their economic dividend runs out. Especially considering these investments are fuelled by an extremely high level of debt. And it’s not a given that they’ll catch up. I think it’s fair to say that their development of jet engines is on track to be obsolete before they’re competitive. They may in principle have established the technologies to be self sustained but that’s only relevant and sustainable if they develop an economy based on domestic consumption rather than exports. Which they are struggling with as well.
- pinkmuffinere 12d ago> They may in principle have established the technologies to be self sustained but that’s only relevant and sustainable if they develop an economy based on domestic consumption rather than exports. Which they are struggling with as well. Is this really true? Can't they just keep exporting "forever"? What requires them to find a domestic audience? I can think of some other countries that have done quite well mostly without finding a domestic audience (eg, Switzerland comes to mind, and frankly Europe might largely be in the same bucket).
- T-A 12d agohttps://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2023/06/superpowers-are-forsaking-free-trade-ngaire-woods https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2023/06/sup...
- 12d ago
- iwontberude 12d ago[dead]