Even if it's true, the simpletons at the Economist don't understand that it's to China's favour. All it means is that as advanced as China has become, it still has enormous room for further growth and expansion.
Chinese semiconductor industry
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
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The author also writes this
" about a third of the world’s top ai talent is from China, only a tenth actually works there"
Smh
Lies, damned lies, statistics, and the Economist.
That metric is absolutely nothing. In China nowadays, coders are called "码农", coding farmers, it is a word derived from workers from the villages working in the blood and sweat factories, meaning low to no skills. If we take away the negativa aspect of the word, one can see that a plain coder isn't much of talent or competence, a high school teenager can be a good coder. The real competence is the ability to analyse the goal, break it down to individual tasks and organize the architecture that won't lead to a coding spaghetti in the product life cycle. The actual work of writing "if else then" is job for high school kid.
In my own work in a large western company that employs large number of engineers all over the world, I have not seen evidence that supports the article's conclusion.
When China was behind in the size of a statistical data, it was the scale that mattered the most. China sucked.
When China becomes the largest in size of the field, it is now all about the per capita average. China is losing.
By the time China will have passed over even in average per capita, that field will become irrelevent and disappear from their talks. China will not win still.
The Economist is awful, but it is true that only 1 in 10 top tier researchers in AI works in China, even though a third of them come from China. And overall, over half of top-tier researchers don't work in their home country. The US is great at leeching off top tier researchers from other countries. For China it's an issue of attracting top tier talent who may not be Chinese to come and work in China. Covid is certainly making things worse.
This is an ongoing issue which has been recently directly highlighted by Xi himself
From my understanding, tier-1 cities are ramping up their efforts for attracting top-talent
The frontrunner is Shanghai which has always been more international-oriented and thus easier for foreign talent to adapt
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