Are you assuming the U.S. will sit stagnant during these 15-20 years? If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity. Their best hope is a cultural revolution.
Yes, no lesson from world history is more obvious and robust than "once in the lead, always in the lead".
The top Chinese talents (e.g. Kaming He, Fei Fei Li etc) all chose to move to the US. AFAIK, there are no Chinese institutions that employ elite foreign AI researchers. The US universities and companies still lead with a large margin in terms of high impact publications in NIPS, ICML, CVPR etc.
3 of the top 10 (all in the top 5 even) are Chinese in origin. This is a list of publications at the top venues in AI / ML for the past two years. If you extend it to past 5 years, you get a slightly better picture, but that doesn't change the 3 in top 5 comment either.
Take a look at recent major advances in deep learning: information bottle neck, mask-rcnn, transformer, normalizing flow, all originated from US/Canadian/EU institutions. Chinese academia has very serious systematic issues that discourages innovation and encourages quantity over quality.
In addition, I think the sheer number of students and resources at their disposal will ensure China have a continuous pool of talent to draw from. The US has become increasingly hostile and competitive for ML researchers in terms of academic pressure, and returning to China has been incentivized for a while now.
Can you elaborate on that?
You say this phrase, but I do not think it means what you hope it means.
There's a lot of talk about political censorship in China, but the majority of the content I've seen removed was not political, but in violation of copyright.
What China does not have is a legal system that is both able and willing to stop all instances of copyright infringement (or most other crimes, for that matter). So you get a lot of small-scale operations flying under the radar for as long as possible and vanishing as soon as they risk punishment.
So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe.
"Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.... ) "
All I see here is an agreement for AMD to transfer technology to China, for x86 chips destined for chinese-only server market. Further, that agreement appears stalled, since AMD will NOT transfer their Zen2 technologies in this agreement. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-licen...
"And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc."
More like their manufacturing may not be going anywhere...their market has been shrinking by leaps and bounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvem...
They can have Iran, AFAIC.
Do you have sources from non-"mainstream media" that indicate otherwise?
I think one could produce articles supporting either view quite easily, which them becomes a task of separating the agendas of its authors.
Watch Elon Musk try really hard not to cringe at the shit Jack Ma says on the topic of ML.
* https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.03903.pdf * https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8710885 but they are numerous, and the work done at Tsinghua University is very interesting
By the way down voting a comment based on facts is rather silly...
By the way, the site guidelines exhort us to
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
AMD partnered with a Chinese partner and produced /knowledge transfered an older chipstack.
Ps. Everyone can manufacture, so not sure what your mean with edge. There are a lot centralized/easy to be found in China, that's true.
Since 5g is technology with not much utility that nobody but the telcos want, that is probably wise on their part.