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Comment by isamuel | Hacker News Reader

There is a great deal of orientalism --- it is genuinely unthinkable to a lot of American tech dullards that the Chinese could be better at anything requiring what they think of as "intelligence." Aren't they Communist? Backward? Don't they eat weird stuff at wet markets?

It reminds me, in an encouraging way, of the way that German military planners regarded the Soviet Union in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa. The Slavs are an obviously inferior race; their Bolshevism dooms them; we have the will to power; we will succeed. Even now, when you ask questions like what you ask of that era, the answers you get are genuinely not better than "yes, this should have been obvious at the time if you were not completely blinded by ethnic and especially ideological prejudice."

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Back when deepseek came out and people were tripping over themselves shouting it was so much better than what was out there, it just wasn’t good.

It might be this model is super good, I haven’t tried it, but to say the Chinese models are better is just not true.

What I really love though is that I can run them (open models) on my own machine. The other day I categorised images locally using Qwen, what a time to be alive.

Further even than local hardware, open models make it possible to run on providers of choice, such as European ones. Which is great!

So I love everything about the competitive nature of this.

If you thought DeepSeek "just wasn't good," there's a good chance you were running it wrong.

For instance, a lot of people thought they were running "DeepSeek" when they were really running some random distillation on ollama.

WDYM? Isn't https://chat.deepseek.com/ the real DeepSeek?

Good point, I was assuming the GP was running local for some reason. Hard to argue when it's the official providers who are being compared.

I ran the 1.58-bit Unsloth quant locally at the time it came out, and even at such low precision, it was super rare for it to get something wrong that o1 and GPT4 got right. I have never actually used a hosted version of the full DS.

Early stages of Barbarossa were very successful and much of the Soviet Air Force, which had been forward positioned for invasion, was destroyed. Given the Red Army’s attitude toward consent, I would keep the praise carefully measured. TV has taught us there are good guys and bad guys when the reality is closer to just bad guys and bad guys

I don't think that anyone, much less someone working in tech or engineering in 2025, could still hold beliefs about Chinese not being capable scientists or engineers. I could maybe give (the naive) pass to someone in 1990 thinking China will never build more than junk. But in 2025 their product capacity, scientific advancement, and just the amount of us who have worked with extremely talented Chinese colleagues should dispel those notions. I think you are jumping to racism a bit fast here.

Germany was right in some ways and wrong in others for the soviet unions strength. USSR failed to conquer Finland because of the military purges. German intelligence vastly under-estimated the amount of tanks and general preparedness of the Soviet army (Hitler was shocked the soviets had 40k tanks already). Lend Lease act really sent an astronomical amount of goods to the USSR which allowed them to fully commit to the war and really focus on increasing their weapon production, the numbers on the amount of tractors, food, trains, ammunition, etc. that the US sent to the USSR is staggering.

I don't think anyone seriously believes that the Chinese aren't capable, it's more like people believe no matter what happens, USA will still dominate in "high tech" fields. A variant of "American Exceptionalism" so to speak.

This is kinda reflected in the stock market, where the AI stocks are surging to new heights every day, yet their Chinese equivalents are relatively lagging behind in stock price, which suggests that investors are betting heavily on the US companies to "win" this "AI race" (if there's any gains to be made by winning).

Also, in the past couple years (or maybe a couple decades), there had also been a lot of crap talk about how China has to democratize and free up their markets in order to be competitive with the other first world countries, together with a bunch of "doomsday" predictions for authoritarianism in China. This narrative has completely lost any credibility, but the sentiment dies slowly...

but didn't Chinese already surpass the rest of the world in Solar, batteries, EVs among other things ?

They did, but the goalposts keep moving, so to speak. We're approximately here : advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, reusable rockets, quantum computing, etc. Chinese will never catch up. /s

Not sure how the entire Nazi comparison plays out, but at the time there were good reasons to imagine the Soviets will fall apart (as they initially did)

Stalin just finished purging his entire officer corps, which is not a good omen for war, and the USSR failed miserably against the Finnish who were not the strongest of nations, while Germany just steamrolled France, a country that was much more impressive in WW1 than the Russians (who collapsed against Germany)

"It reminds me, in an encouraging way, of the way that German military planners regarded the Soviet Union in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa. The Slavs are an obviously inferior race; ..."

Ideology played a role, but the data they worked with, was the finnish war, that was disastrous for the sowjet side. Hitler later famously said, it was all a intentionally distraction to make them believe the sowjet army was worth nothing. (Real reasons were more complex, like previous purging).

> It reminds me, in an encouraging way, of the way that German military planners regarded the Soviet Union in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa. The Slavs are an obviously inferior race; their Bolshevism dooms them; we have the will to power; we will succeed

Though, because Stalin had decimated the red army leadership (including most of the veteran officer who had Russian civil war experience) during the Moscow trials purges, the German almost succeeded.

> Though, because Stalin had decimated the red army leadership (including most of the veteran officer who had Russian civil war experience) during the Moscow trials purges, the German almost succeeded.

There were many counter revolutionaries among the leadership, even those conducting the purges. Stalin was like "ah fuck we're hella compromised." Many revolutions fail in this step and often end up facing a CIA backed coup. The USSR was under constant siege and attempted infiltration since inception.

> There were many counter revolutionaries among the leadership

Well, Stalin was, by far, the biggest counter-revolutionary in the Politburo.

> Stalin was like "ah fuck we're hella compromised."

There's no evidence that anything significant was compromised at that point, and clear evidence that Stalin was in fact medically paranoid.

> Many revolutions fail in this step and often end up facing a CIA backed coup. The USSR was under constant siege and attempted infiltration since inception.

Can we please not recycle 90-years old soviet propaganda? The Moscow trial being irrational self-harm was acknowledged by the USSR leadership as early as the fifties…

These Americans have no comprehension of intelligence being used to benefit humanity instead of being used to fund a CEO's new yacht. I encourage them to visit China to see how far the USA lags behind.

Lags behind meaning we haven't covered our buildings in LEDs?

America is mostly suburbs and car sewers but that's because the voters like it that way.

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