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ninetyninenine 4 days ago

Is China dominating the US in terms of AI? Given that they currently have a model that beats the best models at all formal quantitative benchmarks?

What is the state of AI in China? My personal feeling is that it doesn't dominate the zeitgeist in China as it does in the US and despite this because of the massive amount of intellectual capital they have just a small portion of their software engineering talent working on this is enough to go head to head with us even though it only takes a fraction of their attention.

idiotsecant 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think the lesson of the Chinese catchup in AI is that there is a massive disadvantage in being first, in this domain. You can do all the hard work and your competitors can distill that work out of your model for pennies on the dollar. Why should anyone want to do the work?

MaxPock 4 days ago | parent [-]

This sounds like copium . If it was just about distillation,we'd be seeing many awesome models from Europe ,Japan and even India.

mike_hearn 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's certainly both a lot more than distillation and at least some Chinese labs have been cloning OpenAI via distillation. That's why they instituted much tighter ID verification requirements earlier this year.

No, the reason you don't see many open source models coming from the rest-of-world (other than Mistral in France) is that you still need a ton of capital to do it. China can compete because the CCP used a combination of the Great Firewall and lax copyright/patent enforcement to implement protectionism for internet services, which is a unique policy (one that obviously came with massive costs too). This allowed China to develop home grown tech companies which then have the datacenters, capital and talent density to train models. Rest of world didn't do this and wasn't able to build up domestic tech industries competitive with the USA.

MaxPock 4 days ago | parent [-]

There’s no Chinese lab that has been accused by OpenAI or anyone else of distillation. The accusations come from fringe right-wing media that are used to the “China only copies” trope. Training a model, by the way, is not about money, because many Western tech giants have more money than the CCP can allocate to Chinese labs. Apple, Meta, Amazon, SAP, IBM, and others have access to the same data as OpenAI and should thus be able to come up with a SOTA model in under a year, right? On lax copyright enforcement, I’d like to point out that it’s actually Western labs that have been taken to court for stealing content.

On matters protectionism,the Great Firewall was the best thing that China did.It prevented them from digital colonization like the rest of the world.

idiotsecant 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Oh, wow. 1) you're getting awfully defensive here. I didn't say there was some moral failing because Chinese shops distilled models from western ones. It's the smart play. I'm only commenting on how little of a moat first movers have. 2) if you can't admit that deepseek distilled their models from existing work I'm not sure what to tell you. The early models even identified themselves as chatGPT. It's widely known and has substantial evidence. This isn't team sports, you don't need to play defense. We deal with reality here.

mike_hearn 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They didn't make a big fuss about it but OpenAI have explained that they instituted ID and country verification because there were competitors distilling their models. Of their competitors do you really think Anthropic, Google or Meta were doing that? It's pretty clear who they were talking about.

Chinese labs are mostly (all?) privately funded, as far as I know. Alibaba isn't a SOE. That's why I didn't mention state subsidies, although that might be happening (and certainly is happening w.r.t. access to electricity).

I didn't mention lax copyright/patent enforcement in the context of AI, but rather, the prior years in which China was able to build up local tech firms capable of taking on the US tech firms. It's mostly in the past now, they don't need to do that stuff anymore.

seanmcdirmid 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

America continues to dominate in amount of money spent on AI resources but China has more value in the human and hardware resources it brings to bare.

China is also more willing to deploy AI apps that Americans would hesitate on, although I'm not sure I've seen much of it so far outside of Shenzhen cyberpunk clips. Let's see how this plays out in a decade.