Comment by teleforce | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teleforce | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's has escaped most of the HN crowds that Liang Wenfeng has a solid background (bachelor and master) in Electronics and Information Engineering that encompassed hardware and software.

It's really a shame that in the current world, the art of hardware is dying out, where hardware people are not properly compensated and appreciated [1].

Liang Wenfeng belongs to this breed of engineers with hybrid hardware and software background that have money and at the same time founding and leading and companies (similar to two Steves of Apple), they're a force to reckon with with even with severe limitations, in case of Chinese companies computing resources sanctions CPU/RAM/GPU/FPGA/etc. But unlike two Steves these new hybrid engineers that raised in Linux era are the big believers of open source, as Google rightly predicted in case of LLM none of the proprietary LLM solutions has the moat [2],[3].

[1] UK's hardware talent is being wasted (1131 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763386

[2] Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” (1039 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322

[3] Google "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" (2023) (42 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838112

A machine learning researcher I had the pleasure of knowing when I was at MSR had a background in EE, in particular digital signal processing is a very useful skill in the field. He was the first person I heard mention the quantized model approach (back in 2012 I think?) and compared it to old 1-bit quantized noise reduction in CD players.

A bit of irony was that this researcher (from Europe) used to work in the same lab as me in Beijing. But these days the talent doesn’t flow so easily as it did a decade+ ago (but maybe it will again? Researchers aren’t very nationalistic and will look for the best toys to play with).

> 1-bit quantized noise reduction in CD players

Maybe you're thinking of 1-bit DACs with oversampling and noise shaping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-sigma_modulation

We find that our models (cv & DNN) produce greater performance (accuracy + speed) than originally expected specifically because a number of our team members have a gpu hardware development background at NVIDIA & Qualcomm.

> as Google rightly predicted

I agree with everything you said but this part is "broken clock will be right twice a day". It is what Google would have said regardless. A moat is never impossible to cross, it's just a passive superpower making the "enemy's" job that much more difficult. By Google's suggested interpretation of a moat, moats simply do not exist. They can all be crossed eventually, when ingenuity catches up to big budgets, so it's like they were never there?

I don't buy it that they knew or predicted anything. If Google knew something about hidden optimization available to everyone or had more reason to suspect this is the case beyond "every technology progresses", they'd already be built into their models by now (it's been 2 years since the "prediction") but there's no evidence they were even close. And there's still a HW moat. The amount of high performance HW BigAI has or affords can still make a huge difference everything else being equal, after building in all those "free" optimizations.

At the least the big companies have the ability to widen the moat when they feel pressure of the small competitors closing in. It's clear now that more money can do that. If ingenuity can replace money, then money can replace ingenuity, even if via buying out startups, paying for the best people, and so on. They've shown it again and again.

It's falling out in America precisely because we don't pay for good talent. So most talent flows into China. So, no surprise they are kicking the Us's butt in hardware while they are only now starting to build Silicon manufacturing plants domestically.

That's alway the issue with outsourcing. You rely exclusively on middlemen, middlemen will realize they can cut out their middlemen and just go directly to the customers.

>> It's falling out in America precisely because we don't pay for good talent. So most talent flows into China.

These claims are quite hard to square with the long waits for H1B visas, extremely high salaries in the technology sector and net immigration to the US from China.

I’m not aware of any Americans or Europeans in my network who have gone the other direction to China.

Perhaps you have different data about the demand for tech worker visas in China.

I think we're focusing on the wrong degrees. Replies assume I was focusing on "information engineering" when I was instead talking about the "electrical engineering".

EE as a US career is night and day from Software centered engineers. Night and day from 20 years ago as well.

http://www.talentsquare.info/blog/fall-engineering-jobs-elec...

I don't think it's much of a controversial take to suggest that China is kicking the US's butt in silicon chip production. EE's are one of the primary fields traditionally seeked to work with this.

> I don't think it's much of a controversial take to suggest that China is kicking the US's butt in silicon chip production. EE's are one of the primary fields traditionally seeked to work with this.

That will be controversial until mainland China produces modern process chips economically (they can do one or the other so far). Rather Taiwan and South Korea are not the EE powerhouses. China though pays better than Taiwan (a lot of the hardware researchers in my Beijing lab were from Taiwan and Korea).

If (or when) mainland China gets up to speed with modern silicon process, it'll slot in nicely with the rest of the hardware work chain involved in producing electronics, which they pretty much own at this point.

Yes, and it is only a matter of when. But the material science and the lithography, there aren't any shortcuts for them to take there, it will still take awhile.

Grandparent was talking about hardware. Despite hardware being deep tech, the compensation is so different that it's practically a non-sequitur to refer to "high salaries in the technology sector" in a discussion about hardware. I don't know how many of those H1Bs are coming as electrical engineers; some, I'm sure, but I don't know how it measures against counterflows back into China.

China doesn't really pay hardware people well (even compared to local standard) either.

Most of the talent that flows into China is Chinese, their biggest challenge has always been keeping talent flowing out of China rather than attracting talent in. I don’t think any of these new AI efforts include non-Chinese principals, while western efforts almost certainly include more than a few.

It's not really about AI, it's about silicon. America sized down and dismantled the domestic silicon factories to the point where Biden had to star an initiative in early 2023 to get them back.

I think the plan was to have it built by 2027, but who knows now. Meanwhile, Trump called the CHIPS act "ridiculous" (very optimistic future, clearly) and just imposed tariffs on Taiwan.

I didn't hear about tariffs on Taiwan yet before this morning, I can't believe Trump is this dumb.

I just bought a new laptop last night just in case. A refurbished M3 Max with enough memory to run DeepSeek 70b :).

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