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'It's all just computer code'

Are you saying no software has trade secrets?

Sure, you can go through some tutorials and learn to build a CNN, or even read more recent research papers and hit bleeding-edge ImageNet benchmarks, but nothing currently public is going to get you close to Google's SDC.

You can't pretend this is just about people either, India's at 1.3B and they're far from becoming a world leader.

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Most of the time, secrets and other forms of protectionism are techniques used for covering up incompetence, or hiding bad behaviour.

bold claim. citation needed for "most of the time".

common counterpoints: secrets can be operationally necessary, secrets can create economic value.

This really depends on what is the driver of the current rise of neural networks and other similar machine learning techniques... whats the contributions of data and method toward the new improvements in performance? If more data is main contribution I would venture to say that China can indeed beat USA.

It's a combination of recent innovations and more data. Having access to more annotated/labeled data has definitely propelled the state of the art in some disciplines like machine vision.

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