As a former staffer, you are partially correct.

The issue is, most of the decisionmakers on the Hill still have an image of China that is comparable to where it was in the 1990s or 2000s.

Most decisionmakers started their careers in the 1980s to 2000s and only worked within the bubble that is the Hill, and most of their assumptions are predicated on the experiences of an American who was either in or adjacent to the academic and cultural elite of the 1990s and 2000s.

Those people with domain experience have limited incentive to work as staffers or within think tanks because they do not hire broadly, they pay horribly, and domain expertise is only developed through practical experience, which takes a decade to develop.

That is not to say this isn't an issue in other countries (even Chinese and Korean policymakers have fallen into similar traps), but most other countries also try to build an independent and formalized civil and administrative service. The American system is much more hodgepodge and hiring is opaque (eg. The nebulous "federal resume"), meaning most people hired will have went to schools where career services provide training to join government jobs (eg. Top private schools along with public universities in the DMV).

The issue in the US is a coordination issue - we have the right mixture of human, financial, and intellectual capital, but it is not being coordinated.

I concur with the outcome but not with the cause.

A big part of the problem is management at American firms. They are rarely, if ever, run by engineers at the helm. If you put arts and business majors in charge, it's no surprise that outputs look like art and business projects. These leaders pick people just like them at all tiers. Those who do boring and honest engineering work are shunned, excluded from promotions and left out of the leadership circle. It's little wonder that all of the real engineers depart for greener pastures.

Fix leadership and you will fix American industry.

Sklearn hasn’t been relevant for at least 5 years now. Anyone doing anything serious with it is committing malpractice since there are lots of far better, faster, alternatives to it. In particular, Nvidia RAPIDs cuML.

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A lot of that is predicated on the fact that a CS major in China (and other countries like India, Israel, the CEE) also studied CompArch, OS, and other "low level" disciplines which we in the US don't treat as CS anymore, which leads to a lack of understanding of how to integrate hardware with software.

The fact that DSP is a CSE major requirement abroad, but optional in much of the US aside from ECE programs (but even they have now gated DSP to those ECEs who want to specialize in EE) highlights this issue.

Can't reply so replying here:

> There are lots of young whippersnappers and “old timers” in the “west” who could easily do the Low level make it quick on small hardware stuff

Not to the same degree. The total number of CE graduates (from BS to PhD) is 19k per year in the US.

A large number of those were not introduced to table stakes CS classes like programming language design or theory of computation.

Conversely, for CS major, they are not introduced to intro circuits, digital logic design, DSP, comp arch, and in some cases even OS development because there was a pivot in how CS curricula for undergrads was designed over the past 10 years.

> in the context of adoption as opposed to frontier development.

For real world applications like military applications or dual use technology, frontier development is not relevant. It's important but it's not what wins wars or defines industries.

Being able to develop frontier models but being unable to productionize foundational models from scratch for sub-$2M like Deepseek did despite paying US level salaries highlights a major problem.

And this is the crux of the issue. The best engineers are those who recognize what is "good enough".

Americans who did their undergrad here over the past 10 years act more like "artists" who want to build to perfection irrespective of whether it actually meets tangible needs or is scalable.

> We aren’t actually engineers, we didn’t get to take classes in the engineering college, maybe we should have

Which is the crux of my argument.

CS is an engineering discipline, and some of the best CS undergrad programs in the US like Stanford, Cal, MIT, and UCLA make sure to enforce Engineering requirements for CS majors.

The shift of CS from being a department within a "College of Engineering" to being offered as a BA/BS in the "College of Arts and Sciences" sans engineering requirements is a recentish change from what I've seen.

> Incidentally a lot of AI movers are EEs, not even CSE or CEE.

Yep! Gotta love Information Theory and Optimization Theory. And a major reason I feel requiring a dual-use course like DSP for CS/CE majors is critical.

China is facing a demographic cliff that is potentially catastrophic.

I remember Japan talking about replacing its similar demographic problems with robots.

Didn't happen. Now ai and robotics is apparently progressed... But I'm guessing this will be some grand vision in the CCP to save their country, while at the same time fulfill the CCPs great desire for a totally controlled and subservient workforce.

Much like the Cold war, there's a lot of scare that can be built into that. Which corporations can use to get a whole lot of sweet government and military money.

But almost everything that was held up as an existential threat to democracy in the USSR turned out to be overblown in the best case, an outright fraud or smokescreen frequently.

As we can see from the Ukraine invasion, corruption in the military and control structures follows these authoritarian regimes. China also has this problem.

China was functioning well under reduced Deng Xiaoping rulership, but Xi is a typical purge and control authoritarian, which implies bad things about China's long term economic health.

Between the authoritarianism, demographic cliff, and possibly a massive real estate/finance bomb, China will probably have to become expansionist.

But they have nuclear frenemies all on their borders: Japan (effectively), Russia, Pakistan, India. They can be blockaded from petroleum access with a single us carrier group, which will happen if they invade Taiwan and I don't think they can help themselves.

But what do I know.