Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

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For China, the answer is fairly simple: talent.

An example: At the moment, 9 of the top 10 algorithms for Stanford Question Answering Dataset, including all of the top 5, are by Chinese teams. (2 of them by Microsoft Asia which is based in Beijing and the other 7 are by Chinese companies).

https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/

I wrote this about 3 months ago and the trend becomes quite concrete faster than I thought:

> Key competitive advantages of China are their strength in quantitative skills, a huge population, and the hard working and competitive culture of the populace.

> ...

> My back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming above figures, is the proportion will be about five times as large. But China has more than 4 times the population of the US, so the difference in potential numbers of AI-capable natives could be around 20 times. ...

> ...

> The distinct advantage of the US is that it is the magnet for top talents and ambitious people from all over the world, including the Chinese, so it might continue to lead for a while. However, if the US becomes inhospitable to talents or potential talents, it is clear that China with its quality and quantity of human resources will soon take the lead.

Full comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15569339

So why isn't Google lobbying for free and better college education in the US, if they foresee a decreasing pool of talent in the US in the future?

Because that's not Google's job, that's the job of the local, State and Federal Government of the United States.

Edit: they do fund a lot of PhD research in US universities, including fellowship for PhD students. But one can't expect a company, even Google, to overhaul the entire system

The government's job is to lobby itself into spending more money on public education?

The government's job should be to not be swayed by lobbyists, do their own analysis and make policies that best serve the country long term.

I prefer to deal with the world as it is, rather than as I wish it to be. The US government has never worked the way you describe.

Unfortunately, when it comes to legislation and budget considerations (including education), lobbying works.

The parent said lobbying, not paying for it themselves. I do believe it's a government's job to provide and support equal opportunity when it comes to educations though; that is, allow anyone, regardless of background or wealth or whatever, to attend a school matching their intelligence and ambitions.

As it stands, US education is all over the place, and worse, it's more and more only becoming available to the elite; social mobility is low, that is, if you're born poor chances are you'll end up poor yourself.

This is unlike where I came from, where my dad was a low paid metalworker but I got an effectively free college education and repaid that government funding multiple times over in income taxes in just a few years, whilst simultaneously bringing a lot more money home than my parents did (to oppose any "but income taxes screw with my income" claims).

Anyway, since the government isn't doing it, I do think it's up to the big companies to offer it. That's what the US is all about, isn't it? Changing it to a capitalist government, where it's big companies that rule the people, not the government.

Your experience is exactly why investing in education by the Government is a good idea. Education is a super-long term investment, whose returns can only be reaped over a long period of time, via taxation. And that is only viewing it from a purely investment perspective; the gains to society by skilled and educated workforce is priceless.

It is for this reason that I don't think private companies can significantly change that, even in the US. Even the most innovative/successful companies don't last that long in the US to make a significant change in the Education system.

> Because that's not Google's job, that's the job of the local, State and Federal Government of the United States.

And to an even larger extent it's up to the citizens of the U.S. Most don't care enough to support/reward such efforts at the ballot booth, so the politicians aren't motivated, and things don't get done.

It's simple math really. Expanding their regions expands the talent pool by reaching talent in new populations who may not want to move. If they get kicked out by the regime they don't lose the tech, it's exported immediately no doubt.

Not everyone wants to study and/or work in the US, not only for financial reasons.

They are, as are many people. They have been for quite some time though with limited effectiveness it would seem, and it isn't likely to get any better in the immediate future because US politics is currently, to use presidential terminology, a shithole.

They will continue to lobby I'm sure, as they will prefer to find the talent they need near their existing infrastructure instead of needing to build new - but they are at the point where plan B (building infrastructure elsewhere) is looking like competitive value for the investment in time and money.

Another argument (of several, large investments like this are very far from simple single-variable issues) may also be that their competitors don't have a foothold there: so by investing first they get access to that talent pool more exclusively than they do the pools elsewhere, at least initially.

There is a lot of top talent in the US as well, but they'd rather make their own start up or make 7/8 figures doing prop trading. This isn't an option for most Chinese people.

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