I worked in a university research spinout US-China multinational AI hardware startup, and (without getting into confidential information, but only speaking of general engineering practice) I can mention that both nations' government concerns could be barriers.

And some rules can be counterproductive for the one making the rule, even from a competitive perspective -- not even turning a win-win into a lose-lose, but turning it into a lose-win where you are the "side" who loses.

Another thing I'd like like to say, as a US person, who interfaced throughout the org chart at the multinational startup, is that my colleagues in China, as well as those who were recent immigrants, were generally very smart and knowledgeable, and also very nice people.

It's especially tragic when nations feel they have to act adversarily on tensions, because (as seen in this case) the respective individual citizens are not natural enemies, but rather, they are natural friends. They are also valuable fellow contributors, to the shared wealth of our shared world.

In recent weeks, the world is fortunate that DeepSeek has shared some of its AI advancements, even in the context of themselves being denied the latest hardware with which to work. I hope that this sharing will continue and increase, in all directions.

December, flying out of Thailand I spent one night in Bangkok. Looking for a bar late for one or two drinks after I settled into my hotel I saw two guys, one Chinese and other Russian, stumbling out of a building a few doors down from my hotel. I asked, "Is that a bar or a brothel? I'm looking for a bar." They laughed saying they were looking for a bar too and it was a brothel which is why they were leaving. The Chinese guy said he knows where to find some bars and they invited me to join them. The Russian stopped in a ganja shop on the way.

The Russian in his late twenties left a few years ago to avoid conscription. Least I could do to show my appreciation for his dedication to world peace was buy him drinks for the rest of the night. So .... A Chinese, Russian, and American walk into a bar ... and the jokes write themselves. The shenanigans and tuk tuk rides that ensued continued till the sun came up.

One of the more interesting aspects of going to Stuyvesant High School in the 90s was a very large portion of my classmates and subsequently friends were born in communist China or Soviet Union who travelled on the F Train from either direction. I was reminded of some aspects of my teenage years like hanging out with a group friends who were born in either China or Russia.

In many parts of Thailand it's really not an either/or situation

It will continue until they pass us. They're coming from behind, and releasing models as open source essentially wipes the board of hundreds of American startups.

Growth hackers and solopreneurs like @levelsio can be nipping at the heels of $300M funded companies who poured all of their points into training models, making expensive mistakes, and overpaying for compute.

Companies like RunwayML are probably doomed at this point between Hunyuan, Wan, and the half dozen other open source foundation video models. They failed to raise their last round in 2024, and they definitely face a much bleaker world in 2025.

To expound on that some more, while China might not be leading in LLMs just yet, they definitely are with media. Their video models are the best in class. This poses some significant questions.

In some years, China might be able to unseat the US as the global cultural export powerhouse. As the price of content creation drops orders of magnitude, content creation will become hyper local. That'll be another ding to US soft power.

China will want to commoditize this.

If you sit on your laurels, someone will make a solution thats at least 70% as good for free.

DeepSeek's altruism has taken them far, but they have costs, too, and High Flyer / their personal warchest can only take them so far. And that's before any potential government intervention - it's very likely that this will become a natsec concern for all nations involved.

FLOSS software is slow, much slower than VC-funded explosive growth, but it's hard to compete with in the long term.

Your code assistant that can output a file's worth of code will pale in comparison to systems that can create entire projects in seconds. If it costs billions to reproduce the latter, who's going to do it and give it away for free?

There's a possible solution here in the form of distributed training, but that's still tentative and will always be at a lag to the centralised training the big players can do.

Why not Deepseek? Sometimes rich tech bros have billion dollar hobbies instead of billion dollar yachts or billion dollar foundations. Just takes a few not monetarily motivated but has more money then sense visionaries types willing to turn their very, very expensive hobbies into charities. Now if we enter the 100s of billions / trillions territory...

Spending way too much time trying to track down a very particular version of a GPU driver or similar just isn't going to be worth it if you can make an API call to some remote endpoint that's already done the heavy lifting.

Plenty of value in handling the hard part so your customer doesn't have to.

I don't know how much of the current focus on local models comes from privacy concerns, but at least some does. Once there's something like the gdpr but for data provided for inference, I think even more people will put down the docker containers and pick up the rest endpoints.

Good point regarding movie localization. But, there is still a network effect in entertainment - people want to watch what is popular. So the top content made with lot of money can still have a big market.

Not sure of the attribution of this quote.

> In the 1970s Julius Nyerere (then the President of Tanzania) used this proverb in a speech at the United Nations in New York. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire) Ambassador to Great Britain used this same proverb in a talk to a group of Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) in London. The meaning was the same: In the Cold War between the (then) two great super powers — the United States and Russia — it was the poor Third World countries such as those in Africa who suffered and were victimized.

so that's probably why we've heard it; but it's probably much older than that. i didn't dig in to it too hard because that site was really slow, i got the attribution, though.

you'll note it has a slightly different connotation - the "reeds" aren't the citizens of the warring countries - the "grass" is Africans.

The context I heard it was politics

(When the city gate burns, fish in the moat suffer disaster.)

What’s interesting is that China is viewing AI tech as a technology vital to their security.

It's for autonomous drone warfare.

Invading a neighboring nation doesn't seem too appealing if it means sending tens/hundreds of thousands of your young people (a resource that's getting scarcer and scarcer most everywhere in the world) to the meat grinder. Millions of drones though...

> Not sure if many noticed, but the English put out by Chinese teams is often perfect these days

how are these two sentences connected?

I have learnt English for over 10 years, and so have most Chinese students in the past 20 years. This is a part of the Chinese education system. For every Chinese student in top universities, there's a 99.99% chance that he/she is very good at English.

how is this connected to "Online propaganda is insanely powerful too"

what's the context?

How does this relate to propaganda? Propaganda is often posted to look like organic and natural conversations online rather than government bulletins. It's a lot easier to do that if you are perfectly proficient in the language. LLM tech enables this.

This is not particular to the Chinese by the way, all the major players are doing this. Like I said, my family is Chinese, and my intent is not to convey a negative meaning.

ukraine: so true, dude, so true

Basically the reason is because there’s so little noise in the air. If it’s black and metal and flying and doesn’t match the iff signal than simple “if then” logic can verify it’s a bogey.

I disagree you can simply automate it via IFF though... basically because IFF is easy grounds for counter drone attacks. Establishing IFF just makes your enemies job easier unless you have heavy anti drone tech which no country does yet.

Automating "this person holding a gun in a given GPS grid is hopefully not holding a stick and is hopefully not a friendly/civilian... and calculate odds they should be executed" is not something easily done by a drone. Especially when there's electronic warfare and drones don't have the luxury of spending lots of time looking.

In Ukraine for example people wear 50 different uniforms because they buy them on the internet or come from random countries. And they carry similar AK rifles. What's an LLM going to do? Kill random people with ~50% accuracy using a very finite supply of drones? Or just have humans fly them from the rear.

Which is silly, because other Chinese companies have already done that, and America is pioneering it (cf Anduril)

Thus China knows there’s activity in this area and has issued a warning. Other than that the technology isn’t vital it’s more hype.

A scientist from London visiting Berlin (and vice versa) could well expect to be surveilled by the opposite country and possibly even considered a traitor by their own.

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

Who knows if Ukraine will ever play such a historic role as the Netherlands, but it's nice to dream about

Taiwan could defo step up since they are already in their Golden Age

(And where shall the asylum seekers from US stopover?)

*big for the Dutch

Yes.

But Indoubt China’s key AI CEOs that need to be warned not to travel to the U.S. will be the ones doing espionage for the Chinese government. If they were, then the govt wouldn’t need to announce not traveling publicly…they’d just pass on the message through their handlers.

The point is that the Chinese (and now, even allies) governments would be justified in thinking that the U.S. despite its reputation for a fair legal system, will arrest or detain a Chinese citizen for no legitimate reason at all.

Is the opposite also true? Should the US government be warning its AI CEOs not to travel to China? Absolutely.

But it’s disappointing that the US’s reputation has fallen so far over the past decade.

It makes sense that this happens.

I'm curious why they haven't attempted to tighten the screws on Tesla since Elon's position has weakened and they can really put him in a bad spot if they force him to give up something to them.

Its possible they believe he will destroy Tesla left to his own devices and their best course of action is to sit back and let it happen naturally with no meddling exposure for themselves and then maybe they can even poach some of his employees in the aftermath.

Considering that the administration Elon is gleefully making himself the "chainsaw" figurehead for is actively working to cripple the EV market in the US, this doesn't seem like a bad plan to me.

From where I’m sitting, Elon is very lucky the US government is protecting his business with tariffs, but that only affects US sales. They haven’t made a new car since 2020 either (cyber truck doesn’t count).

By analogy: Apple doesn't sell the most smartphones but they are clearly the leader in the smartphone market.

https://www.statista.com/chart/33709/tesla-byd-electric-vehi...

Pretty much every time people mention BYD EV numbers, they add hybrids.

I see it as intent to mislead.

The same applies to other sectors as well. Top talent is genuinely valued in China.

This reminds me of something I read recently...

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/02/sergey-brin-says-agi-...

What data do you have for this conclusion?

Low crime is simply not true. Most crimes are not reported or swept under the rug as local statistics are reported back to the central government and no one wants to look bad. But wow if you have Weibo you can see some pretty horrible stuff daily before it’s deleted. Nothing worse than seeing 2 woman hacked to death with an axe because of road rage. Cheap food in China comes with a lot of trade offs such as quality. Many shops recycle left over hotpot for the following day. Gutter oil is a real thing. Fake meats or meats from other animals is a real thing.

The claim was:

> Urban life in China, excluding pandemic times, is better than urban life in the states.

“Showing off main cities” is a perfectly reasonable thing to do to support this claim.

Every country has homeless people. There are truly homeless people in China. You don't need to put it in quotes, either.

Truly homeless exist, but statistically and visibly much less problem, because typical local gov very proactive/interventionist in moving them off streets... truely urban homelessness is like... not a really a social option... no right to be homeless. VS in west where homeless don't get cleaned up unless for the occassional politically motivated reasons. In PRC it's default, homeless get detected fast -> get moved into local shelter system where system ids them and tries to guilt trip family into caretaker roles -> can come with modest stipend to cover costs.

The government wouldn't allow encampments, so how can you even tell?

I wonder if the true mark of civilization will eventually be clean public bathrooms. It cannot be that hard because some select countries have managed to do it. Too few though.

Not sure why we are making that mistake here.

Of course there are more rich people in China today than there were in decades past. That doesn't mean a rich kid of Red Note is good representation of the average Chinese, who is still poorer than the average Mexican, and trending in the wrong direction.

Funny, that's never on YouTube.

Meta, OpenAI employees aren’t living in Bakersfield. Google NY employees aren’t living in Clifton or something. Very dumb comparisons, obviously, but when you have a good comp in China, your quality of life is just great. There just isn’t that much of a reason to move.

Another note, it's correct that some people want to live in the states. But there's a nuance. From my personal observations, a good chunk of them don't want to live anywhere in the US, but they want the American passport/green card. It's just a hedge for the worst case scenario and to have an escape route if something bad happens. Like life in Tokyo is pretty decent if you're in top percentiles. But most people understand problems (like demographics), however until it becomes an actual issue, it's still preferable to live here.

That's the point. And who trying to lie about eliminating poverty in China (or making the US look much worse), and why are people repeating that lie?

Guess why most those recently emerged Chinese high tech companies (DeepSeek, Game Science, Unitree etc) are all located in Hangzhou? Because property prices are insane in tier-1 Chinese cities like Shanghai which is just 200km away from Hangzhou. You know it is a huge ponzi scheme when even those well paid high tech engineers couldn't afford a modest apartment in those major cities.

$3m USD buys you a 3 bedroom apartment in Shanghai next to a noisy main road, you have unlimited free supply of all types of pollutions. PM2.5 pollution was about 100 yesterday, any self respecting medical professional would suggest you to wear a mask when going outdoors in such environment well known for causing lung cancer. By moving to Hangzhou, you ONLY need to pay $1.5-$2m for the same shit.

Oh, btw, prices above are after the 30% drop. Just imagine how stupid it was before the crash. Of course you can jump up and lecture me how affordable it is to just spend like $1m to secure a nice family apartment of 40square meters built 60 years ago with disgusting everything inside of it.

by paying 100 years of local average salary for a modest apartment in a not that desirable location? that is not "pay premiums", that is modem slavery.

stop spreading your misinformation, life in China is like the Nightmare mode of DOOM2.

You're deluded. Hyperbole doesn't help either. When you resort to lying or exaggeration, it shows China must be starting to get even, if not ahead in the race.

Yeah, PRC RE in T1/2 cities stupid expensive, but highly compensated PRC talent always have option to rent for dirt cheap in T1 and buy something nice in T2/T3 city with a few years wage. Many highly paid Hangzhou tech workers renting in nice districts while buying equally nice in less expensive cities close by, i.e. renting nice condos in Binjiang for $2000 USD and buying 150sqm apartments for 400k USD in Yanghzou on single salary. Let's be real shitty T2 and nice T3 cities that puts most north American cities to shame, factor in cost of living relative to wage and it's much better QoL than most tier1 north American cities if you prefer urban life. Living really well in PRC on high end tech salary (i.e."AI leaders") is babymode if you're not a retard insisting on living in tapped out T1. Granted tech wage cucks in some western cities get to live in large houses which isn't available in PRC, which has it's appeal.

When I was bumming around US, I kept telling people how my best time in NA was living in a 800sq ft. apartment, in the best neighbourhood in the continent (also subjective), and I never upsized because it was subjectively the best choice for my lifestyle. Most of the responses were something like “you made yourself to believe in that”. Or “if you moved lived in X state you would have a better life”. But those were just not true for me, and will never will be. And from my personal circles, the same applies. People are just having a hard time to understand that if you make decent income, the life for some people is just better in other countries than US.

Hangzhou is horrible place to live, if you check the PM2.5 of Jan and Feb 2025, a total of 5 days had PM2.5 readings below 75. That causes China to have the highest rate of lung cancer in the entire world. Interestingly, this is suddenly not even considered as "QoL".

Your entire argument that people on wages 10x to 20x times of the local average are still being priced out of the city should just buy into places further 400km out is the exact proof that there is no QoL whatsoever. Why should any "AI leader" be forced to buy in a city 400km away from his workplace if the whole propaganda is about QoL.

Smoking less good stuff than you - there's countries with way higher per capita lung cancer rates. PRC ASR higher than US, but skewed only because men smoke like chimney. Female lung cancer ASR is same as US. Not to mention life expectancy recently passed US... interestingly, this suddently not even considered as indicator for "QoL" blah blah.

Hangzhous a great place to live. Most PRC T1 cities are (well BJ boring)... if you have money. AQI is fine, it's like ~100 average... which is moderate, aka barely perceptible vs 20 years ago when urban AQI was like 200-500, i.e. actual struggle to breathe tier bad. ~100 is like bad day in Toronto, AKA it's fucking nothing.

Who gives a shit about locals average. Let's not pretend average bay area tech workers can afford nice local property. This thread is on elite earners, i.e. >2M RMB / ~300k USD per year . Of course they can afford obscene T1 property if they want to grind. But they have many great options if they chose not to. I'm merely illustrating high earners have obscenely high QoL urban easy mode if they wanted it. Like you're not going to find many countries in this world where 400k USD buys you a nice 150sqm / 3br / 2bath apartment in a nice district of a ~10m+ large modern city with world class infra and stupid cheap daily costs that one can likely retire after a few years. Oh while being surrounded in home cultural and not be treated as 2nd class citizen (if anything treated as elite).

Family friend at has this setup working at one of the giants, had nice housing allowance as part of total compensation (~3000 usd per month) where he lived downtown in nice T1 city for free, bought a sweet villa in a T2 city with ~2 years of savings (got a few million RMB of interest free housing loan from company)... it's what he chose instead of the T1 RE, which was attainable but a grind. In the meantime he's basically living for free. Like what's his comparable option in the states? Spend $6000 USD per month on rent around SF and then fuck off to pittsburgh, cleveland, buffalo, kansas etc with their 300k homes, and 2 million population that's worse than a T3 city where he's treated like a foreigner and have to deal with shit tier urban decay on the regular. Maybe if he likes SUVs and big yards. Austin also nice too.

TLDR it's batshit insane to think a high earner don't have a lot of very nice options in PRC especially once you throw in cost of living where that 300k stretches to 600-900k depending on where you go.

Prices are high in Shanghai because everyone wants to live there.

This year China's advice just sounds reasonable TBH.

Really? There have been 2 months of reasons accumulating by now. One of which being that the government is made of fascists who make nazi salutes and oligarchs.

It is insane.

Many people just talk nonsense on this topic with China vs the US. Anyone who hasn't read America Against America by Wang Huning basically has no idea what they are talking about on this subject. Of course, total ignorance on a topic has never been something to slow down the opinion of a westerner.

A WW3 may indeed come to fruition if we continue on this path. It won’t be the older folks paying for this but rather our children or grandchildren.

Future is bleak.

Or, rather, thanks to Russia.

There is no substitute for foreign language press, at a minimum add Le Monde Diplomatique, or Der Spiegel to your digest if not Al Jazeera, RT and Xinhua.

At first they'll seem propagandist with stilted English writing but you'll learn so much more about what's actually going on in the world and why countries do what they do.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/china-tells-its-ai-lea...

Text-only:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1A1EdF

When you read the reasoning of people that defected from UK/US to soviet with nuclear secrets it's kinda hard to grasp now, but back then I can definitely understand that a mix of "the soviets are not that bad" and "are we really that good?" could've made people switch, vise-versa.

I feel like that have for the past decades mostly been a one-way street (China to US) but given the recent trends, (chiense scientist leaving US)[1] I could kinda see how some people might start to debate that question internally.

[1]https://youtu.be/voUcv7ydC9o?feature=shared

Absolutely hilarious opinion man, why not suggest the UK or hell, a defection to New Zealand. China on a moral basis? Comedy.

This isn't the first time. In the 1950s, the founder of Berkeley JPL, an MIT professor who was one of the forefathers of NASA and Manhattan Project contributor, and who Theodore von Karman called a generational genius, Chinese educated Qian Xuesen was humiliated with accusations of being a communist spy and given a multi-year house arrest where he couldn't work so that his knowledge would fall behind the state of the art. He was then deported, and went back to China where he created the Chinese space program entirely from scratch. In China today, he's widely known as a national hero and the "father of Chinese rocketry". If you really want your mind blown, look up his family tree and see how many Nobels and National Science Medals are related to him.

The past few years alone has seen some really high profile scientists taking their knowledge and experience with them to China. These are people who've spent 30+ years building lives here in the US, and were initially being forced out, but now are actually being lured with better pay packages and working conditions since the first wave was treated so well. It's absolutely insane.

https://www.justsecurity.org/82948/anti-asian-prejudice

While some of what you write is accurate, there’s also plenty of hyperbole and omission in what you said.

According to research by Stanford: ”19,955 scientists of Chinese descent who began their careers in the U.S. but left for other countries, including China, between 2010 and 2021.”

And: ”Among the scientists of Chinese descent who left the U.S. in 2010, 48% moved to mainland China and Hong Kong, and 52% moved to other countries.”

https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/reverse-brain-dr...

No. The US will experience a brain drain to Europe, Canada, and Australia, but not to China. Trump still has a ways to go to match the excesses of the Xi regime.

But as I read scientific paper regularly, I can't ignore how vast majority of the author names (well at least in STEM, ML/Robotics, latter is my interest) are Chinese. I don't think those young talents would mind moving to China, especially when anti-asian sentiment have been on the rise since Covid. But since many renown European universities/research center also have those bright young Chinese mind, I guess the Chinese in US can also just move to the more friendly part of Europe (Switzerland etc).

There's also HK, where you can get by with English just fine. And they're making new research centers as we speak. (although my HK friends tell me it is getting more Mainland Chinese day by day and expats are leaving).

For comparison, Canada has 73k citizens living in the UK, 90k in France, and 800k in the US.

I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_diaspora

    Hong Kong 300,000 Zhang and DeGolyer, 2011
    China 19,990 Chinese Census 2010

Why is it a good thing to put someone into a tiny cage for victimless possession crimes?

Why must I convince you why whatever I do is good to preserve my rights? Fuck all that.

Secondly, none of your points are pertinent to the day-to-day of anyone in academic research/science. Perhaps only to the irrationally paranoid.

So it turns out that with safety comes real freedom, the freedom to go on with your life without fear. Their words, not mine.

So please, tell me again why having guns is a good idea.

There are plenty of nice things about Japan. Most Americans who are capable of moving to Japan do not, for one reason or another. The ones capable of doing so generally self select because it jives with their desired way of life. I know of Japanese who moved here and are now gun toting Americans.

Perhaps the spice of life is if you value certain liberties more than life itself, maybe America is an option for you. I'm not totally convinced this is even the case with guns in the long run -- it does seem disarmament buys some short term safety for some people at the expense of long term vulnerability that their government, or external or internal forces, can exploit their disarmed state. This has happened in the US to the Indians, to the Jews in Europe, and to the Filipinos by the Japanese.

I'm saying there is a place with some of the most liberal non commercial speech and strongest gun rights in the world, certain people value this, and if they are like me they're not living their life in fear that these liberties might come with certain additional risks.