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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

"As a whole, China seems to treat AI as just another technology, rather than as some kind of singularity moment."

This is a refreshing perspective.

The CCP is very active in the matter of AI. In fact, the DeepSeek moment was responsible for Xi calling for a private meeting with tech bosses, including the exiled Alibaba founder Ma. Which is practically unheard of in China politics.

I don't have enough information to say whether the Chinese leadership sees AI "just as the next technology" or they are more cautious due to its double-sword nature. But the immense efforts for building their own AI/GPU chips plus government's billions fund pushed for AI build out, a directive for fast pace integration on large scale and a sweeping national education reform for AI, I don't think it can be seen as similar to other ordinary techs.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...

[1] https://www.globalneighbours.org/en/articles/china-unveils-n...

[2] https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202606/10/content_WS6a296017...

> I don't think it can be seen as similar to other ordinary techs.

Not saying its a bad thing, but US and EU limited exports of chips and litography equipment to China for decades.

There is literally nothing else China can do to secure their supply of chips. They would do it even without AI bubble.

Its military tech now and this is not just about LLMs. Autonomous flying killbots need GPUs too.

There's plenty to not like about the CCP, but their strategic investment in the country as a whole is impressive. It would be great to have that on our side as well but with the current state of things that is a non-starter.

We have a lot of propaganda to deprogram regarding it being evil to do that.

Imagine how much better the future could be if we broke away from the American cold war mentality, one that has made the world more dangerous and unstable, versus actual diplomacy and cooperation?

Is making the word unstable, it's actively happening. USA has the biggest and strongest propaganda machine.

> USA has the biggest and strongest propaganda machine

Historically, yes, but the current regime is so unhinged and detached from reality that there's no possibility for them to subtly influence people about their agenda.

Perhaps investing in things like affordable housing, infrastructure, clean energy, medicine for all, education, and so on results in a country and populace that ends up producing things like DeepSeek.

I am not remotely pro-CCP but I think we need to acknowledge they are doing better than we are in some of these areas.

"National attention is still on basic needs and infrastructure buildouts, and on providing more medicines for people. The “dreams of singularity" seem like a luxury or distant consideration."

Further on. Refreshing indeed.

China is probably more capitalist in many respects than the west these days. AI, robotics and automation is a way to push into the future. In the west we have endless researchers stuck in a psychosis that they are talking to a sentient being.

Especially here on HN, where AI anxiety (especially amongst those that are really nervous that it needs to succeed) is very, very tiresome.

I may have some explaination.

China is an atheist country. The whole "creation" thing didn't even mean anything special to normal Chinese people.

Chinese viewer have a meh reaction to Edward Scissorhands, they don't have a Frankenstein Complex.

The whole "AI race" is a construct of American startup founders trying to get more money. The government picked up that line because it seems fun and useful to be "wining a race" against China. It's all nonsense. China doesn't care if they get AI first or second, they can replicate anything in a few months. They know it's only an excuse to get more money in the hands of billionaires.

The CCP knows, whatever the heck this technology will bring with itself, the current power dynamic inside of the country is on their side, and AI will solidify it.

I hypothesize that, rather than slowly having it disperse in society and allow people to harness it in ways they don't want, they might as well accelerate everything until AI becomes the totalitarian swiss knife - which they can make use of in the best way of course.

Let's see what will happen.

I don't really see how open weights models further what you're talking about.

It's trivial for me to download one of their models and run it on my Spark, and there's all sorts of ways to strip out their Tiananmen-denialism or whatever.

If/when the memory price crunch dissipates, even more so. And so far it's only China I see as making moves to increase production capacity on memory, too.

If anything the centralization of capital into US-based Anthropic and OpenAI is far more terrifying from the perspective you're outlining.

US used AI (Claude on Maven) to determine a girl's elementary school as a target in war[0] and then triple tapped it and you're still more worried about hypothetical misuses of the single country responsible for this technology not being concentrated in the hands of a few powerful elite? ffs

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/11/...

Its horrible event, but it was hit because Iranian regime builds schools and hospitals across the street from military bases.

Nothing to do with AI and can happen in any war. Do some research, check sattelite imagery:

https://goo.gl/maps/ZoAXkw1iFwyF7exQ8?g_st=ac

PS: I not trying defend bombing schools, but posting that its "AI" resposible is opposite of what you need to do if you care.

Its military - there been specific people who found this location for the strike, then some senior officers who choose it without checking and specific people who executed it. And its all logged with "paper" trail in chain of command.

It was all people with specific names who are responsible to avoid bombing schools. They failed. Not "AI".

The U.S. operates over 160 public schools physically located on military installations

https://oldcc.gov/our-programs/public-schools-military-insta...

I never said AI is responsible. I pointed out the US is clearly the one using AI in dystopian ways.

This was obviously a story - a telltale 'admission' - devised by the military.

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