Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

>What is the goal?

Be the definitive first past the post in the budding "AI" industry.

Why? He who wins first writes the rules.

For an obvious example: The aviation industry uses feets and knots instead of metres because the US invented and commercialized aviation.

Another obvious example: Computers all speak ASCII (read: English) and even Unicode is based on ASCII because the US and UK commercialized computers.

If you want to write the rules you must win first, it is an absolute requirement. Runner-ups and below only get to obey the rules.

View on HN

The aviation and maritime industries use knots because the nautical mile is closely tied to longitude/latitude.

A vessel traveling at 1 knot along a meridian travels one minute of geographic latitude per hour.

okay, but what advantages do these rules bring to the winner? what would these look like in this context?

i guess what i'm asking is: what was the practical advantage of ascii or feet and knots that made them so important?

>what advantages do these rules bring to the winner?

An almost absolute incumbency advantage.

>what was the practical advantage of ascii or feet and knots

Familiarity. Americans and Britons speak English, and they wrote the rules in English. Everyone else after the fact needs to read English or GTFO.

Alternatively, think of it like this: Nvidia was the first to commercialize "AI" with CUDA. Now everyone in "AI" must speak CUDA or be irrelevant.

He who wins first writes the rules, runner-ups and below obey the rules.

This is why America and China are fiercely competing to be the first past the post so one of them will write the rules. This is why Japan and Europe insist they will write the rules, nevermind the fact they aren't even in the race (read: they won't write the rules).

okay, i think i get the cuda situation, but that is only for nvidia. amd is out of luck on that too, just like all companies from asia and europe.

on the previous examples i can see language gave native speakers and advantage in becoming familiar with the technology but on ai i'm not seeing an advantage that would give americans an advantage over everyone else, besides controlling access to the tech.

the reason i'm insisting on this is because i feel as if that argument has merit but i have yet to grasp how it applies to these technologies.

In this case the race is to win and secure the supply chains.

The microprocessors concerned are very high value goods, manufacturing and R&D for them can't be easily and quickly spun up on a whim. The country and companies first to start them up and win will secure the supply chains, and once secured it will take monumental money and effort to reconfigure them. A lot of money is at stake, in other words.

Geopolitically, it also means that the country who secures the supply chain also gets to quite literally write the rules regarding who and where the microprocessors can be sold to and exported. Either the US or China gets to decide who can buy the microprocessors depending on who wins the supply chain.

Just like Nvidia was the first past the post and now enjoys absolute incumbency advantage, whichever country (namely US or China) is first past the post in the "AI" industry will enjoy absolute incumbency advantage.

okay, i think i understand where the winner gets to control supply chains

i have to say the ascii, feet, and knots were a bit confusing though. these do not seem to be the same kinds of "wins" as what we're expecting to see with this race though. utf8 is mostly the default around the world and airbus is a serious competitor in international markets.

>these do not seem to be the same kinds of "wins"

America to this very day gets to dictate how computing and aviation work. Knots, feet, ASCII and so on are just the obvious signs of that.

>utf8

Case in point, UTF-8 (aka Unicode) has ASCII as its starting point. ASCII can be converted to UTF-8 without data loss easily and perfectly because the first entries in Unicode are literally ASCII mappings. This is the virtue of winning first and getting to write the rules.

>airbus is a serious competitor in international markets.

And yet everyone outside of China and Russia still fly using knots and feet, that includes Airbus.

Nautical miles are minutes of latitude and are useful for navigation on the sphere we live on. It’s not some conspiracy for English hegemony despite the previous posters insistence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com