I prefer the garden vs the forest analogy when it comes to China vs the Rest. As our models of never ending growth break down, transitions to newer sustainable models require controls that China is in a better position to exercise than the current chaotic environments we see elsewhere. I see lot of confusion in the minds of leaders in the rest of the world of what they should transition too. And that confusion percolates down economic and r&d activities. It's not going to resolve it self any time soon given the clowns our freedom and idea spreading social media is propping up.

Ofcourse even the best gardeners can fuck up but if I was betting on the best outcomes in 10-20 years I would bet on China.

The *ACL conferences (major NLP venues) decided to allow presentations to be in Mandarin now; the rationale being that a lot of presentations were in such poor English already, might as well let half the audience be engaged.

It will take at least a few more years before submissions are allowed in Chinese: reviewers can't be assumed to know Chinese. The momentum is there though.

Of course, but especially in the applied sector of ML, it can happen that interesting blog posts and code examples are increasingly written in Mandarin.

Yet.