China has eclipsed US in AI, robotics and VC funding | Hacker News Reader

China has eclipsed US in AI, robotics and VC funding

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52 pointstzm59 comments

I'm not sure the Y axis in either chart gives any truly meaningful implication. The first one gives USD$ millions spent and the second gives just the number of publications. Lets look at the first one. Lots of article state that the efficiency of capital use (ie: how much return you get for putting in $1) in China is much lower than that in the US. Googling even shows that China's capital efficiency, because of the lack of transparency and a command-control government-economy, is even lower than competitive developing countries like Vietnam, India and Thailand. [1] , [2] .

The number of publications, I'm going to have to search to find backing statements but I believe that it is not reflective of true contribution.

[1] https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-outlook-beyond-capit...

[2] http://foreignpolicy.com/2003/07/01/can-india-overtake-china...

Yeah the charts can be quite easily critiqued (what charts don't?). Would be great to see for example a clearer definition of the dollars spent.

But you also need to remember that the statement here is a comparative one. Higher ampunt od publications is a fact and npt unreasonable to then deduce that more research is done in china than in USA.

Now that I think about this, its just a terrible article: Graphs should never be posted Without a grounded analysis.

Most of HN is still repeating the mantra "china can't innovate" et al. For all the talk in HN about this idea of the incumbent not seeing the faster startup until it's too late, you'd imagine you'd wisen up faster.

Below I'm collecting from this thread examples of people just repeating the "don't worry guys, they still aren't doing that well"-type talking points:

> china can't innovate

> ah, but the best chinese students move to the US

> oh, but their corporate debt is really high!

> they are held back by an authoritarian regime

> they are culturally and linguistically not homogenous

It's hubris. It's hubris about democracy. It's hubris about freedom. It's hubris all inspired by privilege. Built on the back of immigrants. Most people doing research in America, on backs of which American business prospers are immigrants. But really Americans are not taught to appreciate what props up the elite in the country. They simply focus on getting what they feel is their birthright. That sort of thing works for a while. Then entropy kicks in. Along with real competition. And that really shows what you are a made of. Get ready for it. It's coming and coming up fast. A billion hungry Chinese, just itching to get a piece.

Hubris which is kept in place by the strongest propaganda machine the world has ever seen.

> strongest propaganda machine the world has ever seen.

I doubt that

To characterize "Americans" with such a broad brush is silly

Observation from being at NIPS in Barcelona this week: almost half of the hallway conversations are in Chinese. How many are in Hindi? I've heard maybe 2 groups of people speaking it. English? Sure, everyone speaks English. But close to 50% of the people here also speak Chinese.

Think about that if you're in the group that only speaks English.

This doesn't mean anything. Most of those (the good ones, at least) are Chinese grad students at western universities. The cream of the crop are grad students at American universities (or Montreal). Most would jump at a chance to work in US academia or at Google/FB.

Don't know man. Lived in China for years and people that made it to the US, tended to stay there. You just have to look at the lines that form in Shanghai in West Nanjing Rd for student/tourist visas. Of course there is a lot of people that also return, but the people I knew, just went into the banking sector and ended up depending on family connections more than education itself.

As for the cream of the crop, I can tell you I saw a couple of guys that were really outstanding in the startup scene, and one was from the Max Planck institute in Germany and the other was from a Chinese university (and not precisely Tsinghua, Fudan or Jiao Tong).

It seems we are in agreement? The Chinese grad students (who are presumably the best students, since the western universities are the best for CS) that make it to the US stay there.

We agree on the part that they stay there, but they are hardly the best students. In fact, the vast majority of people that actually do go abroad is directly connected to the fact that they could not make it in the very difficult Chinese high school test. And since a privileged kid will have more resources, they just go abroad and skip the line so to speak. But the level of social mobility that you see in China is incredible, because that test truly favors the best to go to the best universities.

But we disagree that in a conference like the one mentioned, most of the Chinese people you would encounter are going to be US educated.

Baidu also attracts lots of people.

Sure, but not the best talent. In fact Baidu got a pretty bad rep for cheating in ImageNet.

> Most of those (the good ones, at least)

2 questions: 'good' by what metric, and where are you getting your data from?

My own personal experience with research at a first-ranked CS uni; which is no more or less valid than frisco's anecdote ;)

China has spent billions on lots of different things, some of which made a spectacular flops. From the Fortune article quoted as a source:

    > The government is riding on the hope that entrepreneurship will help boost the market, but not 
    > everyone agrees the plan will work.

    > “They have a fantasy that if they give everyone money they’ll create entrepreneurs,” Gary 
    > Rieschel, the founder of Qiming Venture Partners told Bloomberg. “What it will result in is 
    > catastrophic losses for the government.”

    > Rieschel’s comments could have some merit: the funds are experimental and China has no 
    > standardized method for its 780 funds to be managed or funded.

Just an aside: I too use this method to insert quotes as monospaced font text for contrast - but then I take the time to insert manual line breaks. You don't want readers to have to do manual horizontal scrolling, and here it even has to be done three times, for each sentence.

It can be done quickly:

- If you use Chrome you can resize the text field. Set it to a width that seems just right for where you want to insert line breaks.

- Insert the initial " > " (I put a ">" in front of each line but that's just me), select it, copy it.

- Now just using keys END, DOWN-ARROW, RETURN, CTRL-V insert all necessary line-breaks. Setting the text field width causes the END key to go to exactly the right position automatically, no need to navigate the words manually. then RETURN and CTRL-V to insert the line-break and the quote-start. Repeat.

This way you can manually format even long quotes very quickly.

This still requires horizontal scrolling on mobile and other narrow displays.

Don't overload monospace formatting for block quotes. It is bad at them because they are not what it is for. Just quote with a leading > and let the user agent reflow text as it needs to. Everyone will know what you mean.

The actual solution would be for HN to introduce a way to add quotes. Just having > in front of regular lines sucks - the many attempts at making quotes stand out more show that this is not just a single opinion. I "overload" monospaced because there is no proper option.

If you want quotes to stand out, italicize them. Again, everyone will know what you mean, and you won't break UX in a way that makes some readers more likely to ignore your comment because it's such a pain to read.

Italicizing is not a good solution for quotes IMHO.

I don't add the following links because that's where I got my opinion from, it's only in support. I came to my own opinion by reading a lot on the web :-)

In addition, only very few people in this forum use that method for large quotes, so without consulting a style guide, it seems to me most people feel that way.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100502220045A...

http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/punctuation/when/when-to-i...

Your options are to italicize, to introduce with a leading >, or to abuse monospace formatting in a way that breaks the user experience. Either of the former two is better than the latter, and my experience of several years on HN is that leading > is by far most common for quoting, but if abusing monospace formatting is the way you want to do it, then by all means abuse monospace formatting to your heart's content.

Thanks for the tip, updated.

I mean China has 1.3 billion people. It's just a matter of time.

But not really...They are culturally and linguistically not that similar. They are held together by an authoritarian regime.

USA is successful because of other reasons.

Not true at all. China has lots of local dialects and nuance, but is over 90% Han ethnically and believes strongly in "one China," and has for literally millennia.

I also believe that if China did not have a powerful central government it would break into several republics, starting with Xinjiang and Tibet.

But the interesting part of this is that the central authority not only works to stop secession movements, but also to make sure minorities have a place in modern China. In general they try to favor minorities getting into college, by lowering the grades (from the overkill high school test) a minority student needs to enter college. That and general promotion of a minority's culture in primary school (like dances, language, etc) tend to ease the friction that both the Han have towards some minorities and the minorities have towards the Han Chinese.

China is far more homogeneous than most western countries.

its arguable either way. imo China is less ethnically diverse but more culturally diverse. eg. a large portion of the country speaks in a language unintelligible to the rest.

regional differences are more pronounced in China. I'd be hard pressed to figure out where I am if dropped into a random city in the US, compared to China

So? Are all americans equal? EDIT: Bottom line is: I sell products over here. You sell over there. I got 12 people here, you got 3.

Demography is destiny. Almost. You can fight it like India does, but China surpassing the US in absolute numbers (which numbers? All of them) was inevitable.

“Let China sleep; when she wakes she will shake the world.”

- Napoleon

The West didn't listen. It poked the giant a lot. During the 19th and 20th centuries, many European countries initiated wars in China, carving it into foreign spheres of influence.

And became fabulously wealthy doing so. Part of the reason there was excess capital in England to fund the industrial revolution was because of the Canton trade.

The US should care more about Europe. There are nations in Europe that do not want to be so tightly integrated with EU are very much open to cooperate more with the Americans and Commonwealth. But they are weak and need assistance first. Help them and they can help you.

China is going to remain to be a world within a world. Too few people will be willing to learn Chinese anyway.

There are literally millions of Europeans that are culturally more compatible with the US than with the germans / french.

I don't think so. Europeans that do not want to be integrated with Europe, because they want to be take their own decisions, don't want to be integrated with the US either.

The problem is not the culture, but decisions taken for them without their consent, for example Hungary or Austria being told by external powers(Germany) that they need to accept millions of Muslims. Not different from the US external power telling them that Russia is their new enemy and they have to go to nuclear war because the US tells them so.

I have traveled and know most European countries and I don't understand what you say about being more culturally compatible with the US than with Germans or French.

Europeans are very similar in culture. For me the difference is mainly in language or in having lived communism or not. I have lived in China and I know what a difference in culture it is.

It is not just the culture, but even the mountains are different in China, the trees are different.

I don't think European countries are compatible with anything but their own country's culture. Overall, I see way more homogeneity in Latin America or the US/Canada than in a United Europe. Germans tend to stick with Germans, French with French (and Parisians with Parisians while we are at that), maybe some Dutch and Germans, but I've been to Dutch parties where I was probably one of the few foreigners (and no I was not in the Netherlands).

I mean don't get me wrong, on the individual level and once you know a person, it does not matter where they are from, but nationalism/language differences is what allows for a place that is relatively small to have so many countries to remain separate entities and it's the driving force behind the euroskeptics. Exacerbating those feelings is what led to the World Wars.

> Too few people will be willing to learn Chinese anyway.

Probably won't matter in the future. English is cannibalizing all the other languages. English is the official language in Hong Kong. Not many Chinese know English yet, but they probably will.

English isn't "the" official language, it's one of the official languages. And, by a wide margin, you're better off knowing Cantonese.

No shit. For all the talk about Hong Kong being English based, I had a couple of times where I had to rely on my poor Mandarin to get my point across. Totally agree with parent post, better learn some Cantonese, especially for taxi drivers.

...if talking to third-world poor is your goal?

You're underestimating the amount of anti-americanism in europe.

Given corporate debt in China is roughly 250% of GDP, this doesn't surprise me.

3 minutes of research shows that in the USA it's over 300%. What was your point?

Edit: I was totally, utterly wrong. I looked at global corporate debt. Mea culpa!

You need to do more research. Corporate debt in the USA peaked in 2008-2009 at ~200%.

The most recent figure I could find for US corporate debt is $51 trillion: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/20/crexit-warning-as-corporate-d...

The USA's most recent GDP is $16.7T, so slightly over 300%.

Do you have some other figure?

That's global corporate debt. Half that article is about China's ballooning corporate debt load.

Regardless of what the numbers are, I'd still like to hear what your point was. You said you weren't surprised given that corporate debt to dbp = 250%. Is that some special number at which you can predict these kind of things happen?

In most economies this is indicative of a looming credit crisis. The best (almost up to date) summary I've read was http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/09/18/bis-flashes-r... .

@rahrahrah;

The title of the submission is "China has eclipsed US in AI, robotics and VC funding". The author of the article is using levels of investment to further his/her point about the relative superiority of two countries in AI, while completely ignoring the macroeconomic backdrop that are largely the drivers of these statistics in the first place.

Oh, and I think you're assuming I'm an American, which I'm not.

Ok so there's a looming credit crisis. How do you go from that to the implication "China is the new world power in AI, doesn't surprise me because of their corporate debt". What?

It seems to me that someone said something good about China and you snapped back by saying something bad. It's just your emotions talking.

From your article:

  Corporate debt alone has reached 171pc of GDP

Amusing that we both misread our own source articles...

Wow, I totally failed to grok that. Right you are. I'll edit my comment.

So we're using a gist now to share news?

It's a great idea. Aside from the ease of doing so with markdown, you get:

1) Instant ability to see all past revisions. 2) Commenting platform 3) Ease to share with one-click embed link 4) Ease to download the news article 5) Link to author's profile or other "news" items 6) Opportunity to see profiles of others who liked the news

What happened to no politics week?

I don't classify this as politics. It's data. People turn it into politics.

Good point. Please flag this, everyone.

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