I see someone read that li yuan article in the nytimesNGL the progress of the A.I industry and China's response to it has left me jaded and realize that there's definitely an issue with Chinese innovation. Like China is still behind America in many areas, space, semiconductors, engines etc etc. But that's fine, China is catching up, there's no way such a poor nation could complete with America, it's already been amazing the progress China has made in this mature fields when 30 years ago the country was struggling to feed itself, those are the usual excuses.
But A.I? China was supposed to be neck and neck with America in that area. Even western institutions and mainstream media admits that, china is equal or even surpassing America in A.I. There's so many important A.I research papers with chinese authors, so many money poured into computing/data centers, tech companies and A.I labs. So why is it that every important A.I model released in the last 5 years has been American? Aplhafold, GTP series and it's LLM clones by google/microsoft, video generation models, deepfakes, stable diffusion and other A.I art models etc etc. Sure china catches up within a matter of months, and sometimes releases better versions, but why can't they be first and capture the market? It's not helping their image when they're always on the backfoot, it very much looks like copying. They clearly have the talent, expertise and manpower, LLM were greatly improved with some chinese developed transformer architecture and ChatGTP's development involved some chinese scientists.
Just look at the response to ChatGTP. The entire chinese A.I industry was clearly caught off guard by the success and power of it. Dozens of companies and research labs have announced that they are starting programs to create their own ChatGTP version in the last 5 months. Companies that have already worked on LLMs like Baidu with ERNIE are rushing to improve it and integrate it with their digital ecosystem. But why? LLMs aren't new and GTP-3 was already making big waves back in 2020.
Even an average joe like me could see that GTP-3 was a game-changer that had big potential. You would think that the chinese tech and A.I companies on the forefront of A.I research and development would have seen the potential of GTP-3 and started R&D of similar LLM years ago. But nope, it's clear that most of the companies trying to develop a LLM only just started development only after the success of ChatGTP. The room was already on fire since GTP-3, but they had to wait until they themselves caught fire with ChatGTP and now GTP-4 before running for the fire extinguisher . Even companies that were working LLMs before ChatGTP came out like Baidu admitted that their LLMs are nowhere close to ChatGTP or GTP-4, but even then, why did Baidu not even think of integrating even an average LLM into their digital ecosystem? Why wait until the open AI and microsoft deal to integrate chatGTP into Bing and other microsoft services before Baidu suddenly had the same idea?
It's honestly pathetic to see. What are all those chinese tech companies and A.I labs doing? Were they in some alternate universe when GTP-3 was released back in 2020? Did they not think that GTP-3 wasn't going to be a big deal, or that GTP-4 wasn't going to be a major improvement? Judging by their development speed, it wouldn't take long to catch up, but it's clear that if some aspects of the A.I industry and development were different, China wouldn't have to play catch up at all and would be the ones driving the industry forwards instead of the other way around. It's so frustrating, they clearly have the money, talent, computing power and technical knowledge but something is clearly holding them back. I don't know if it's leadership issues, culture, management issues or censorship.
And like I said, it's not just LLMs. Does China have an answer to AlphaFold? Dalle-2 kickstarted the wave of A.I we're all seeing.
It this always going to be the trend? America releases some brand new novel A.I development, like a self driving A.I that can drive better than any human, or a new A.I architecture that needs a hundred times less data and computing power to train while China always scrambles to play catch up and always be a few months to a year behind?
I hope that the success of ChatGTP and GTP-4 makes the chinese A.I sector take a good hard look at itself and what changes it can make to innovate better. Or actually release their products instead of letting it rot inside of a sever farm.
News on China's scientific and technological development.
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I see someone read that li yuan article in the nytimes
Please, lets stop with this "China no soft power haha!" topic. It has been debated multiple times, at multiple threads. The end conclusion has always been the same, soft power is enabled by hard power.
Lets focus on the actual topic of scientific and tech advances instead
Lets focus on the actual topic of scientific and tech advances instead
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Yeah, and where do you think the Japanese learned Japanese from?
As for A.I., there is no doubt China is way ahead of the United States in that field.
All we have to do is look at the facial recognition software, and the autonomous driving, and automatically we know who is ahead and who is behind.
That chat-bot thingy does not even work! From something that does not even work we can jump to the conclusion who is ahead and who is behind.
Chinese facial recognition software works. Autonomous driving is being scaled across China, possible integrating with the 5G network (which we do not really know the state of that because no one would report on it).
Who is building all the smart cities across the Middle East? Powered by A.I.
This is new industrial revoulation, space race and nuclear arms race all rolled up into one. If there's any fields that China doesn't want to fall behind in, it's this one.
Oh don't worry, you can tailor LLMs to speak however you want, Trump style, and have a text to voice A.I play it back in Trump's voice and have a deepfake A.I generate a ultra realistic model of Trump speaking those words. But this A.I models are totally not a game changer guys. It's no more than fun toys for office work.Oh yeah because talking like a literature professor is how Trump got such a large following
Hahaha, I feel like I'm talking to a bunch of boomers talking about how the internet is totally not big deal in the 80s, because it can only mimic human interaction and that talking to people over the phone/radio, sending a message via carrier pigeon or talking in person is always going to be better.
You think Americans are gonna use it against themselves? How about using it in other countries to sway public opinion. I already suspect that a lot of the "CHINA BAD" redditors and youtubers are bots. Nukes may be bad, but it's better that you have them rather than your enemy, or failing that, you both have them rather than your enemy having them while you don't.
Those people who are impressed are basically 100% of china's A.I sector. I feel like there's a new ChatGTP-style LLM going into development every week in China since November. ChatGTP clearly rattled them.
And China is still failing at that. Baidu was one of the few that had a LLM developed since 2019. For whatever reason, they had to wait until mircosoft and OpenA.I teaming up to integrate Bing with GTP-4 and google doing the same, for them to bring out ERNIE and integrate it into their digital ecosystem.
Yeah I call bullshit. A.I was supposed to be one of the few areas that China were neck and neck with America. Me, an average joe was already aware of what a game changer GTP-3 could be, OpenA.I was hyping up GTP-4 for years, dropping hints that they were close to AGI with it, they were bullshitting a lot but there was so much hype behind GTP-4 because of that. LLM were mainstream news even before ChatGTP came out. Remember the google engineer that said that google lamda was sentient and alive and got fired for doing so? That was huge news at the time. Everybody was talking about it.
But actual A.I researchers in China don't listen to the news, let alone keep up with advancements in their field of study I guess. Hell, there was a couple of chinese researchers helping in the actual development of ChatGTP and yet the entire industry only got blindsided after it came out for public use. Talk about embarrassing.
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Computer vision has definitely become a big technology "blind spot" for the US and West as a whole. The downfall of Argo AI, its client startups like Nuro, and complete withdrawal of Ford, VW automakers from autonomous driving, are signaling a retreat from hard, real time, physical world AI use.
Autonomous driving is currently the holy grail of physical world AI, not because it's the most useful, but because it provides a clearly defined problem that is also difficult to solve. This is due to the complex decision making, large quantity of unique, high quality training data needed, human, terrain and environmental hazards and edge cases, millisecond interpretation of real time data streams from multiple sensor types, and miniscule margin of error allowed for use. Mastering AV will provide immensely valuable lessons that will be crucial to China's human friendly robotics, deep sea remote sensing, military hardware, and deep space endeavors.
Due to de-industrialization, US lacks the digital infrastructure and electronics production capability to make use of AI. The ceiling of AI potential is simply astronomically higher for China. Research in all directions is needed to find where AI's true future lies.
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This will also give a big advantage in more autonomous weapon platform like hypersonic missiles and secure the last part of the kill chain where electronic warfare will be the most intense. You probably can't call back home to have a big server park help with decision making or get a timely response back given the speed hyper sonic missiles are moving at.
you are way too high strung for your own good.
utterly incomparable because it is physically measurable that the internet is superior to phone/radio in terms of bytes of information transceived per unit time even in its early iterations. It is not physically measurable that a chatbot does anything other than chat.
they're rattled because they want money and someone else got first mover advantage with the investor money. A chatbot is impressive to investors. holy shit lol. is this surprising to you or something?
Then why weren't they rattled by GTP-2, GTP-3, or anyone of the dozen LLM clones created by google/deepmind/mircosoft/facebook in the years before? It's like not worrying about a nation developing a nuke until they detonate it, ignoring clear signs of uranium enrichment for years. There were clear signs that the A.I industry was going this way years before ChatGTP shook things up.
There's already developments in combining various A.I models into one multi-modal model that can do shit like generate high quality videos, images voices, text in one package. Type "A ultra realistic video of Xi killing someone" and you get a 2 second clip with sound that's sure to make the news cycle for a while before getting debunked. There was the whole thing about the Pope the other day.
Rather than saying they are in different development stages, I think it's possible they're diverging completely in development paths. U.S. chose deindustrialization and financialization to become a service-driven economy. I think (and hope) China has ruled out that path.
