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Comment by maremmano | Hacker News Reader

Why I feel that China will not slow down AI progress?

They won’t but mainland China hasn’t shown a very good track record of keeping up, much less inventing new methods that gain any sort of traction.

They do seem to produce plenty of good researchers, who sometimes proceed to do good research with proper funding from western institutions.

I would be more worried about Europe.

> I would be more worried about Europe.

Not really a concern. The AI phobia here in Europe is pretty bad, to the point where governments are shooting themselves in the foot by legislating progress on advancing tech out.

Not only are a rather decent number of AI developers and researchers who are Chinese, perhaps, and likely, some of the best in the world. but not only this but they are also the only manufacturing center for the GPU/CPUs needed to run the things. Tight collaboration between AI researchers and the manufactures of the hardware? No other country (absent their direct neighbors) have any chance at growing manufacturing facilities fast enough to catch up, especially with that combination.

> Not only are a rather decent number of AI developers and researchers who are Chinese, perhaps, and likely, some of the best in the world

I didn't dispute that. In fact, I brought it up.

> only manufacturing center for the GPU/CPUs needed to run the things

they don't have the designs and sanctions by American companies are surprisingly already in place and historically effective.

Finally, you are presupposing that "slowing down" in America means moving slower than China. Not only is that not necessarily the case, I don't think it's even really possible. This research can be done on readily available gaming GPU's if needed. Do you really think the US will intentionally cripple these markets in this fashion? More likely, companies will lobby for the opposite.

Any slowing down done by the US will amount to virtue signaling.

I really don't think you're right there, many new models come from companies like Tencent and WeChat. Chinese investment in AI is increasing massively.

A huge percentage of AI researchers are Chinese, if PRC can convince them to work there instead of the US they won't have any trouble.

It is infuriating how the West keeps sabotaging itself. Both China and Yandex/Russia are moving ahead while the West is self-sabotaging with all the "responsible AI" bullshit.

Does China have similar level, viable models?

Yes. Yi-34b is competitive with Llama2-70b which is often competitive with gpt 3.5. GPT-4 is on its own level atm but the point is that China has already created a good model that effectively beats Meta's current best.

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