Let's see, in the 80s we rapidly moved much of our technology manufacturing to China, and now we're shocked that China has this knowledge?
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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But a lot of shareholder value was created! Won't anybody think of the poor shareholders?
"The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them"
but hey we crushed labor unions and nobody can afford anything anymore except rich people. Win-win-win
Look out! That Pikachu manufactures semiconductors!
Summoning demons can be risky eh Nanashi
That’s because the Chinese experience was very peculiar. When American and European investors and industry giants went abroad to outsource manufacturing, they brought in the capital and left with the profits. But the capital, and technology or knowledge, never spread in the colonies or neo-colonies. When China “opened up”, they were real clever about it. They said: “sure, you can open your factories here where there is an abundance of cheap labor. But in exchange, we want the knowledge and technology”. And since opening up China to foreign capital has been the wet dream of capitalists and proto-capitalists for the past several hundreds of years, they accepted the deal. So China was left with the know-how to be able to set-up their own national industries. And the profits of exporting manufactured goods was used for strategic industries and infrastructure, unlike most colonial and neo-colonial experiences where the profits are just pocketed by a national bourgeoisie.
And the profits of exporting manufactured goods was used for strategic industries and infrastructure, unlike most colonial and neo-colonial experiences
that's because most colonial/neo-colonial experiences are about raw resources extrativism
where the profits are just pocketed by a national bourgeoisie.
there quite a few billionaires in China
There sure are billionaires in China. But they don’t control the political structure like the billionaires do in the US. They are controlled by the political structure. When has it been the last time the US or EU executed a billionaire for harming the environment?
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But but they're supposed to be inferior humans! They shouldn't be able to compete with superior Americans!
Capitalists blame capitalist for capitalism. More news at 11
Dammit! He’s greedier than me!
Capitalism and neoliberal globalization is great as long as your capitalist organizations are dominating the system. But that inevitably results in the emergence of other competitive capitalist organizations. Then it’s back to trade barriers, and when that fails, military conflict.
It also leads to enshittification, Google Twitter and previous intel stagnation before rizen cpus were invented, subscription services everywhere and they always try to cut content and rise the prices, even subscription based cars like bmw and Mercedes, GPU prices overpricing, and Apple price gouging with additional 8gb of ram costing 500$ and apple vision pro USB 2.0 strap costing 300$, any market competition is beneficial for us commoners, it keeps corporations and their lobbyists at bay
Don't forget here the Apple pro stand, that's literally a fancy monitor stand for the low price of 1099.
Or the printers that have toners with DRM and all the hardware parts having a DRM chip which invalidates perfectly capable third party components.
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Free market and competition. We don't like that now, huh?
Correct. The free market is only good when it's enriching them, if it's helping anyone else be it citizens or another country, then something is wrong and we can pay an economist to tell you so too!
The US creating and arming its own imagined enemies? What a shock.
Like leaving billions of dollars in war assets to the Taliban.
VCs? Regular Cs are enough.
Capitalists are only loyal to a big pile of money.
A whole bunch of assumptions with not a lot to back it up there. Who exactly says Chinese semiconductors and AI are world class all of the sudden? The source they linked doesn‘t imply any of that. It states a couple of traitors to the free world support the Chinese genocide with a couple billion. That‘s pretty vile but hardly makes China a powerhouse in those fields. It‘s a band-aid fix to a broken leg.
2 days ago there was a post here, presenting a LLM derived from Qwen. Qwen is basically Alibaba's counterpart to Meta's Llama.
ETA: Qwen on github
What that means for Chinese AI is not something I could say.
Qwen has been around for a while, but from what I can tell it didn't really stick out after it's initial hype. Alibaba claims it's open source when it isn't and people are naturally suspicious about it. User experiences also seem to be really mixed about it. And maybe the latest update caught up on the likes of Mixtra, but that's not breaking new grounds or makes China an AI powerhouse by any means.
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I am very confused about this ongoing thing regarding "stifling China's access to AI models". Does the US government think GPUs are magic? All you need to make a ML model is some tensor math and a web crawler, maybe some human processing on the later bits. You're not gonna stop China from making them. You're not gonna stop college kids with gaming rigs making them.
I'm guessing the endgame here is to make it slightly more expensive to do this in China to get American companies to have slightly better versions in the market and prevent a TikTok situation, rather than any legitimate strategic goal. Right? I mean, besides commercial protectionism I don't see how this type of language makes sense.
It’s a military defensive strategy. This is more about ending the supply of chips and chip machines to China than it is about the AI. Western designed chips are being put into advanced Chinese weaponry. And since Xi is telling the world that Taiwan will bend the knee during his lifetime, it might be a good idea to stop giving China the tech that will turn that scenario into a reality.
None of that makes any sense. "Western chips" all come from Taiwan in the first place. "Western designed chips" are also in laptops and mobile phones, including tons of Chinese devices, and that's assuming you mean to include South Korea as "Western", which is a bit of a stretch. Those are fundamentally interchangeable with military hardware. Nobody is putting 4090s and A100s in ICBMs.
Make it make sense. What specific hardware is this stopping from getting to China and for what application?
It doesn't matter, anyway. Sanctions like this can be easily sidestepped by China going through series of proxy vendors across the world and still receive whatever it is that they want.
Regardless, it's not so much the 4090s the US government cares a lot about, but rather the giant data center TPUs. They included the 4090s etc in the ban because Chinese government can easily afford to buy thousands of them to network together to accomplish the same thing as DC TPUs.
As for the military application of the chips: You could absolutely reengineer and use a 4090 GPU chipset in an ICBM, but no I don't think that's what they're really concerned with them doing. I'm betting they're more concerned with their cyber warfare and other espionage/surveillance capabilities, which a 4090 can easily be repurposed for (especially a lot of them).
Edit: And I don't disagree with your earlier point! I would guarantee there's a good deal of corporate protectionism going on. I honestly wouldn't even be surprised if that's 100% the real reason behind it. I was just trying to provide a plausible explanation for why it could be considered a military justification.
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It always amuses me just how much of a hate boner America has for China. The absolute fury and indignation that those guys on the other side of the pond are catching up to them is funny to me.
The US has had so much soft and hard power the idea of a new hyper power is baffling to those with authority
My big question is: if they've got this much of a hate boner, why not just build the chips in Taiwan? I hear they're even better than China at this shit. Or is this one of those "we're pretending there's only one China for the overlords" articles?
From a planning perspective, the West must assume Taiwan is already "lost" and merged into China. Therefore the rational action to take is to begin spinning up as much chip production as possible in the interim, while continuing to rely on Taiwan's manufacturing.
Fun fact, the guy who founded TSMC was an immigrant working in tech firms in the mid-late 1900s but was unable to get promotions due to American racism against asians. So he said, "Aight guess I'll go back and make my own company."
The US had the TSMC founder and drove him away with hate.
Please do yourself a favor and check out podcasts covering this topic, there are some good ones.
European Technology firms also fucked this up really hard. Philipps created ASML, NXP and had a founding 25% share in TSMC, but managed to win nothing from it. Due to Philipps short-sighted management none of these great wins in the semiconductor industry benefited the company at all and all three firms are now completly spum out and worth way more than Philipps. The TSMC share alone is now worth much more than Philipps Market Cap.
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No fucking shit.
blames American venture capitalists
Me personally, I think the Chinese had something to do with it.
But regulations are bad and the free market is good! /s
Not with top down, hierarchical societal conformation. No room to foster innovation.
Bro there’s like 6 comments in here and all of them are a masterclass in comedy 11/10 would accuse China of misgivings again
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