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"However, in the long term 15-20 years, I would imagine, China would have fully caught up with the US particularly on semiconductor design and fabrication. Once that happens, the dominance of the US tech stack will start to falter and eventually erode away. "

Are you assuming the U.S. will sit stagnant during these 15-20 years? If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity. Their best hope is a cultural revolution.



> If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity.

Yes, no lesson from world history is more obvious and robust than "once in the lead, always in the lead".


Like all the historic civilizations that peaked and fell apart ?


The comment you replied to was sarcastic.


I thought it might be since it's so obvious but discussing a similar topic with coworkers a few days back had a similar situation where someone just frames the argument in a time window that explains their narrative - I wouldn't be surprised if someone argued this because of the US economic dominance post WW2


my reading of the OP is that was exactly the point


Apparently China is already leading the world as far as AI goes (I first saw this in Mary Meeker’s internet report this year I think it was and she usually links to the research in her slides). I read somewhere that Chinese scientists found it easier to get Chinese government funding for bold and ambitious research (and I imagine they’d also have other “advantages” given how the country is governed). So I wouldn’t be surprised if China would overtake the US in a whole bunch of technical sectors.


This is not completely true. China lead in terms of AI startup funding, but due to the huge shortage of talents, a good number of startups don't hold much water.

The top Chinese talents (e.g. Kaming He, Fei Fei Li etc) all chose to move to the US. AFAIK, there are no Chinese institutions that employ elite foreign AI researchers. The US universities and companies still lead with a large margin in terms of high impact publications in NIPS, ICML, CVPR etc.


You're wrong with the "large margin" terms. A lot of Chinese universities have stepped up in the recent past. You can take a look here : http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2019/index?ai&v...

3 of the top 10 (all in the top 5 even) are Chinese in origin. This is a list of publications at the top venues in AI / ML for the past two years. If you extend it to past 5 years, you get a slightly better picture, but that doesn't change the 3 in top 5 comment either.


The keyword is "high impact". The link you provided is only ranked by publication count, it doesn't consider the impact factor of journal/conferences. If you look at stats from ICML this year[0], the only Chinese institution TsingHua is ranked #13 in the top #20 list.

Take a look at recent major advances in deep learning: information bottle neck, mask-rcnn, transformer, normalizing flow, all originated from US/Canadian/EU institutions. Chinese academia has very serious systematic issues that discourages innovation and encourages quantity over quality.

https://medium.com/@dcharrezt/icml-2019-stats-4ba18fbc6543


Sure, but at the same time there is a real bias towards established methods and research groups. It's hard to find traction as a newly established group doing original research - and "impact factors" are highly overrated since what ends up happening is the paper with most publicity and flash surrounding it is deemed more impactful. The fact that they went from almost zero representation at the international venues to such a high number should be indication that they are on the rise.

In addition, I think the sheer number of students and resources at their disposal will ensure China have a continuous pool of talent to draw from. The US has become increasingly hostile and competitive for ML researchers in terms of academic pressure, and returning to China has been incentivized for a while now.


>Chinese academia has very serious systematic issues that discourages innovation and encourages quantity over quality.

Can you elaborate on that?


> Their best hope is a cultural revolution.

You say this phrase, but I do not think it means what you hope it means.


Am I being whooshed? They had a Cultural Revolution..


The lack of IP law in china will allow them to progress much much faster.


China does have IP law, and the big companies sue each other for copyright infringement all the time, e.g. https://technode.com/2019/04/26/baidu-bytedance-lawsuits-con...

There's a lot of talk about political censorship in China, but the majority of the content I've seen removed was not political, but in violation of copyright.

What China does not have is a legal system that is both able and willing to stop all instances of copyright infringement (or most other crimes, for that matter). So you get a lot of small-scale operations flying under the radar for as long as possible and vanishing as soon as they risk punishment.


US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up. Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent... ) . These moves are there to slow it down. But China can make other moves like moving tech knowledge from one company to others and play all sorts of games. Fact is knowledge despite what Americans want the world to believe, replicates and distributes powers in ways which are very difficult to stop. If China is not building it, they will move the knowledge to some ally which can build it. It's almost guaranteed at this point that we are already living in a bifurcated world where US will need to manufacture everything in other countries than China. And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc.


"US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up."

So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe.

"Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.... ) "

All I see here is an agreement for AMD to transfer technology to China, for x86 chips destined for chinese-only server market. Further, that agreement appears stalled, since AMD will NOT transfer their Zen2 technologies in this agreement. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-licen...

"And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc."

More like their manufacturing may not be going anywhere...their market has been shrinking by leaps and bounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvem...

They can have Iran, AFAIC.


I don't know but from a science point of view all our last research are based on paper coming from people at China companies (Alibaba, Tencent), that currently have the edge in our specific domain (machine learning). So yes in domains that mainly require your brain they have caught up if not ahead.


Machine learning is a wide field. Could you give some examples of research you've done based on papers that came out of Alibaba, Tencent, etc.? I'm curious.


of course ML is a wide field but for instance these paper were quite relevant to our work:

* https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.03903.pdf * https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8710885 but they are numerous, and the work done at Tsinghua University is very interesting

By the way down voting a comment based on facts is rather silly...


Thanks for the links.

By the way, the site guidelines exhort us to

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.


Alibaba has an edge in machine learning? The CEO of Alibaba is palpably clueless about anything relating to do with machine learning and I haven't seen any evidence that anyone else at the helm of the org is any better.

Watch Elon Musk try really hard not to cringe at the shit Jack Ma says on the topic of ML.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3lUEnMaiAU


Daniel zhang is the ceo, get your facts right and daniel is way savy in tech than jack ma.


Jack Ma stepped down just a month ago and was CEO at the time of the interview. He's completely clueless and he was at the helm. Those are facts.


> So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe.

Do you have sources from non-"mainstream media" that indicate otherwise?


Presently, I'd consider The Verge to be mainstream, but Nilay was on point with his skepticism: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leade...

I think one could produce articles supporting either view quite easily, which them becomes a task of separating the agendas of its authors.


I’m pretty sure the poster you replied to was talking not about deployment of 5G but the fact that Huawei is supposed to be far ahead of its non Chinese peers when it comes to 5G tech. That’s basically why the US has to ban the supply of tech to them, because otherwise nearly every 5G deployment would be Huawei.


Is that the case or is it that the Chinese government is subsidizing the 5g products that Huawei makes so that western countries will purchasing them?


Yeah it's a national security concern because if someone is leading so heavily they will destroy your lead and then you will never catch up. Just look at what happened to so many European tech companies.


China did not help AMD.

AMD partnered with a Chinese partner and produced /knowledge transfered an older chipstack.

Ps. Everyone can manufacture, so not sure what your mean with edge. There are a lot centralized/easy to be found in China, that's true.


>US was already shown to be behind in 5g

Since 5g is technology with not much utility that nobody but the telcos want, that is probably wise on their part.




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