I wonder about Japan and Europe these days. Back in the 80s, when Japan was pursuing the "Fifth-Generation Computers", EU and US scrambled to compete with Japan. Like, it was a big deal for strategists and decision-making high-level politicians of that era.

Now in 2020s, it seems only China is tailing US and in turn, US is wary of China. What gives?

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JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> in the 80s, when Japan was pursuing the "Fifth-Generation Computers"

“The Fifth Generation Computer Systems…was a 10-year initiative launched in 1982 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to develop computers based on massively parallel computing and logic programming” [1].

That sounds an awful lot like GPUs and HBM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...

	▲	CamperBob2 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Except this time it works. A lot of what's happening now is the (very) belated delivery of what everyone was talking about when they talked about "expert systems."

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applfanboysbgon 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you think Japan and the EU would be better off if our/their economies were centred around trillion dollar companies that make a product that is 20% better than the Chinese models at 1000x the cost?

The reality is LLMs are just tools, and not even close to as revolutionary of tools as computers themselves. Even Chinese companies understand that. It is the US alone that is in machine god mania, gambling their economy on this idea that the next model will let them rule the world if only we give it three more months.

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ducktective 11 hours ago | parent [-]

>Do you think Japan and the EU would be better off if our/their economies were centred around trillion dollar companies that make a product that is 20% better than the Chinese models at 1000x the cost?

Why Japan and Europe don't develop a model that is 20% worse at 0.001x the cost?

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jurschreuder 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm European and I am developing a model that's 20% worse and 0.001x the cost of Chinese models.

Personally I also always just use Gemini-3.5-Flash since for me it's actually a good search tool access that makes a model great.

But I'm not very typical European we have 2000x B300 and I'm in USA and China all the time, and work 16hrs a day without weekends and holidays.

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applfanboysbgon 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Chinese companies have at least three major advantages:

1. Price of electricity is low because of China's excellent energy policy. Admittedly this should absolutely be a priority of Japan/EU, but it isn't, so first you'd have to start there...

2. Because of #1, China already had massive infrastructure in place for eg. crypto mining that was readily repurposed. Japan/EU never engaged in this fad, so they have to start effectively from scratch in building out the GPU infrastructure.

3. Chinese talent is relatively isolated from the US economy. US-aligned economies must compete with the US for talent. It's hard to develop technology at a reasonable cost when all of your top talent is leaving to get paid 10x as much by speculative gamblers. If you don't have a very good reason to believe the gamblers are making a good bet, it's better to wait for them to go bust.

Added on to all of that... where is the upside? Chinese models are open anyways. There is nothing that merits this being a matter of urgent government intervention at all, it's basically pure downside.

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johnsmith1840 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Not really a price thing nor an infra thing.

US has really cheap energy and far more compute by a very large margin.

The real reason is chinese gov wants to crush US ai industries and own the market. Same thing they have successfully done multiple times in other industries now the difference is this time the US isn't seeming to back down.

	▲	applfanboysbgon 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm talking about EU/Japan. I'm aware the US also has cheap energy and loads of compute. I have yet to see any credible evidence that the Chinese government was involved with either the creation of DeepSeek or the open publication of it, in any way. Seems like usual yellow scare discourse, attributing everything to the bogeyman.