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Comment by pedrosorio | Hacker News Reader

"Schmidt provided examples to support his claim that China is poised to dominate the field of AI. While many assume that the Chinese educational system is inferior to the U.S., he pointed out that Chinese people "tend to win many of the top spots" in Google's coding competitions."

In the last 5 years, participants from China reached the Google Code Jam finals (top 25 contestants) 12 times. Russian participants did the same 40 times (notably last year there were 13 Russian contestants, half of the finalists).

If this is evidence that China is going to dominate AI, what does it say about Russia?

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He should measure that on proportion. China has way more people. So in that regard, the Russians are very good, in fact, probably the best, but they are constrained by their country and economy. The USA imports talent and uses that talent creatively in the economy. If we stop importing talent we are screwed. If we stop increasing our population size we are also basically screwed. China has a billion or so people to feed. They own global manufacturing. A push to robotics and AI based technologies will cause some major disruption to their internal economy.

Russia is probably doping their participants though.

This is evidence that the Chinese education system is not inferior. Nothing more.

The argument about AI lead is based on other facts, not particularly this one.

I don't think performance of the best on these contests says much about the education system (other than possibly how much exposure does the education system provide to this kind of contest from a young age).

And are participants equally likely from all countries globally?

It seems to me that people who lack other means of signalling excellence and are ambitious to become visible internationally are most likely to enter such competitions.

I'm pretty sure there's a handful of those that find meaningful work. Then a handful of those that find it in AI.

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