News on China's scientific and technological development.

What is "transformative" and "breakthrough" for the West is not the same for China. I don't think anybody in the US cares about saltwater rice, but for China it's a huge win for food self-sufficiency. Same thing for 5G IoT + HarmonyOS -> Industry 4.0, which the US lags in.

The US has a lot of service and office worker jobs that can be automated by ChatGPT, of course it'd focus on automating those areas to a higher degree. As long as China is close enough to catch up, letting the US stumble through it first and learning from their mistakes works perfectly fine. Devote your energy to solving your own most important issues, not your enemy's.

Despite what I just said, China should always constantly be striving to be more creative. China has the potential to set the benchmark for innovation for centuries to come, why settle for being "good enough"?

xypher said:

And large natural language/multi-modal models like GPT/DALL-E would not be possible without Chinese image model ResNet which allowed to build such deep models in the first place by introducing the idea of residual/skip connections to effectively propagate gradients to deeper layers. This finally allowed to match the theory to practice because previous models all suffered from decaying performance with model growth despite the theory stating that deeper models should be at least as good as shallow models. It is the most cited DL research paper, far ahead of transformers - the basis of GPT and other modern NLP models (also uses residual connections btw).

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If that's the case, why didn't chinese researchers create the first usable large deep learning models? Maybe because research papers don't cost much but training A.I models with billions of parameters cost a lot.

Overbom said:

China is at a different developmental and wealth accumulation stage than the US

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If this was the case, than China won't be the runner up in most of this technologies, only a few months behind in some cases, beating out Europe. It tells me that China has the capabilities to actually be first, but won't actually put in resources until it's proven to be viable. If development and wealth accumulation was all that mattered, than european countries will be the runner up, with China a distant 3rd.

FairAndUnbiased said:

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. They didn't have to. If they simply took no action, SpaceX wouldn't have gone anywhere.

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. if they were truly internally profitable, why are they still looking for external investors? Let's go with their stated reasons: to invest in new tools and technology. Yet I don't see Intel begging VCs every time they buy a new lithography tool. First reusable rocket was the space shuttle's SRB.

Whether Boston Dynamics is transformative or not is yet to be seen, as they're mostly making money by being acquired from company to company, and so far I don't see many sales. Google bought them then sold them within a few years for a reason. I don't see how they're any more transformative than say, KUKA. KUKA actually makes money from selling their robots though, rather than their company's ownership. Perhaps you meant Boston Dynamics has a transformative business model in that regard, of selling ownership in hopium, rather than physical products.

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This need for profit is what is fucking over basic research. Technology is technology, even if it doesn't turn a profit. Why are we building nukes and aircraft carriers if it isn't making us money? Every technology in existence was a lost maker until developed enough, there was probably a tribe of cavemen who berated a group of other cavemen for messing around with trying to make fire with sticks when they could have spent the time hunting and foraging instead.

The area of humanoid robots is still very recent, of course they aren't making money yet. But 10 years in the future, whatever breakthough made it possible for me to buy a robot to do my chores, BD will probably have a hand in it. Was RNA vaccines making money during it's 30 year long development cycle? Is A.I useless because it wasn't making money for decades when people started developing it since WWII? Might as well stop all fusion energy research today, it isn't making any money and probably won't for the next 2 decades. Note, if NASA didn't helped to sponsor Spacex, than America wouldn't have seen them revolutionizing their space industry today, so it worked out in the end.

luminary said:

What is "transformative" and "breakthrough" for the West is not the same for China. I don't think anybody in the US cares about saltwater rice, but for China it's a huge win for food self-sufficiency. Same thing for 5G IoT + HarmonyOS -> Industry 4.0, which the US lags in.

The US has a lot of service and office worker jobs that can be automated by ChatGPT, of course it'd focus on automating those areas to a higher degree. As long as China is close enough to catch up, letting the US stumble through it first and learning from their mistakes works perfectly fine. Devote your energy to solving your most important issues, not your enemy's.

Despite what I just said, China should always constantly be striving to be more creative. China has the potential to set the benchmark for innovation for centuries to come, why settle for being "good enough"?

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exactly this. China solves Chinese problems, such as setting the industrial standards for 5G, and to reduce burden on doctors, , , , etc.

but no China can't innovate cuz chatbot is a few months behind or something. Need to redo entire system of science and tech. lmao holy shit.

FairAndUnbiased said:

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and

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. They didn't have to. If they simply took no action, SpaceX wouldn't have gone anywhere.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. if they were truly internally profitable, why are they still looking for external investors? Let's go with their stated reasons: to invest in new tools and technology. Yet I don't see Intel begging VCs every time they buy a new lithography tool. First reusable rocket was the space shuttle's SRB.

Whether Boston Dynamics is transformative or not is yet to be seen, as they're mostly making money by being acquired from company to company, and so far I don't see many sales. Google bought them then sold them within a few years for a reason. I don't see how they're any more transformative than say, KUKA. KUKA actually makes money from selling their robots though, rather than their company's ownership. Perhaps you meant Boston Dynamics has a transformative business model in that regard, of selling ownership in hopium, rather than physical products.

Then you have Enron, FTX, Theranos, etc that all claimed to be transformative.

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A lot of this stuff is just US influencer networks keeping these kind of thing alive and at the top of world information streams.
China just doesn't have the reach or has a big enough share in the world information stream outside of its borders.

What does it usually produce is more data in the metaverse but is chatgpt used to boost real economic productive forces because what i can follow from China is that they usually use tech improvement to boost productive forces and care less about boosting the metaverse.

mossen said:

Besides, if you study the history of Silicon Valley, then it's pretty clear it was birthed thanks to US govt intervention. First funding from universities which in turn got their grants from Uncle Sam and later Pentagon buying the bulk of semiconductors early on. The pivot to the private market didn't happen in earnest until decades after being established in the 1940s.

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Actually，the US semiconductor industry blossom thanks to video games

BlackWindMnt said:

A lot of this stuff is just US influencer networks keeping these kind of thing alive and at the top of world information streams.
China just doesn't have the reach or has a big enough share in the world information stream outside of its borders.

What does it usually produce is more data in the metaverse but is chatgpt used to boost real economic productive forces because what i can follow from China is that they usually use tech improvement to boost productive forces and care less about boosting the metaverse.

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I'm convinced that ChatGPT is less of an immediate product and more of a media stunt to prop up public confidence and investment in flagging tech companies. Right now Silicon Valley is still hemorrhaging layoffs with no end in sight.

MSM has been going on about "paradigm shift" and "replace all human programmers" but there are dedicated AI services like GitHub Copilot that have been around since 2021...

FairAndUnbiased said:

I bet if China came out with the chatbot and some certain country came out with the art bot, they'd say "China made some glorified customer service interface while that certain country made the digital Leonard Da Vinci."

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Why doesn't Chinese companies come out with some novel algorithms？Google come out with the Transformer，OpenAI come out with GPT，where is Chinese companies algorithms？

tonyget said:

Why doesn't Chinese companies come out with some novel algorithms？Google come out with the Transformer，OpenAI come out with GPT，where is Chinese companies algorithms？

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They probably do?

But it might not be out for the public use, or they could have something out like how @FairAndUnbiased gave an example in this post:

But it's just not reported about or known outside of China (even in China, only some 'few' people might know about it).

FairAndUnbiased said:

Whether Boston Dynamics is transformative or not is yet to be seen, as they're mostly making money by being acquired from company to company, and so far I don't see many sales. Google bought them then sold them within a few years for a reason. I don't see how they're any more transformative than say, KUKA. KUKA actually makes money from selling their robots though, rather than their company's ownership. Perhaps you meant Boston Dynamics has a transformative business model in that regard, of selling ownership in hopium, rather than physical products.

Then you have Enron, FTX, Theranos, etc that all claimed to be transformative.

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Boston Dynamics robots may look cool and are technically quite impressive, however those videos that demonstrate those robots in a pre-programmed and highly controlled environment. If you try to put any one of those robots in a real-world scenario 99% of them will fail. What those videos do not show you are all the fails and retakes they had to do to get that one good video.

Overbom said:

Same response as always:
China is at a different developmental and wealth accumulation stage than the US

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Yes, that’s a reasonable answer. The US simply has more wealth than China，they can afford to test all kind of new stuff even without clear commercial value at the beginning.