How did China get so good at chips and AI? Congressional investigation blames American venture capitalists

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?

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!
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
- Yeah na
  
  Every time a factory opens in 3rd world the knowledge partially stays.
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.
It's violence time 😎
- 🦀🎻🦀🎻

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!

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.

Stealing. The word is stealing not catching up. It really doesn't matter matter because China lacks the creativity and forethought to make the tech work. That's a cultural problem.
- Stealing is how you catch up. Imaginary property laws were also lax in the US as it was growing. By the way, the "they just steal, they have no creativity" line was the same old bullshit trotted out against Japan while Japan was outcompeting us. Unfortunately for Japan, they're a US ally and were bullied into adopting a financially-engineered ticking time bomb that exploded and left them with multiple lost decades.
- Absolute garbage comment. Our entire LIVES and upbringing is assimilation of thoughts and ideas. We literally have sayings like "imitation is the most sincere form of flattery".
  
  Capitalism comes in and decides that ideas, in and of themselves, need to be monetized and commodified. We create parents and trademarks and copyrights, all flying in the face of millennia of human cultural evolution. Using this, we decide that copying is stealing. Absolute insanity. Stealing is wrong because it DEPRIVES someone of the use of their property. Copying doesn't deprive anyone from shit!
  
  We have a system where if someone finds a good way of doing something, but doesn't play nice with others, we DEMAND other people to use INFERIOR ways of doing that thing so we don't make the original inventor mad. This might, maybe, make sense with people, but corporations own just about every useful patent we've ever made, corporations aren't people, we don't owe them shit. ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS! IDEAS ARE NOT PROPERTY! IMITATION ISN'T STEALING! How did we even get here?
- Oh yeah the famously uncreative and uninventive chinese culture. They've never done anything, I'm sure.
- Have you seen the last couple of years who your most brilliant minds are? Hint most of them are either Asians or descendants of Asian parents.
  
  Like it or not, but there are a lot of really smart people in maths, science and IT people in China and Asia who are much smarter than Europeans and/or white Americans.
  
  Coming from a European.
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.
Got to have our 3 2 minutes of hate and someone to direct it at!

Edit: I somehow extended the hatefest 50%. Corrected.

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.

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?

No fucking shit.

blames American venture capitalists

Me personally, I think the Chinese had something to do with it.

Of course... non-americans can't build chips and AI because they are inferior

Right? I don't known why some Americans think they're the only one capable of building AIs, and if someone else did it, they must be stealing it... (or more likely it's an excuse)

But regulations are bad and the free market is good! /s

China is better at capitalism than we are. They have actual competition in markets.

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

Not with top down, hierarchical societal conformation. No room to foster innovation.