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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

I think we are talking about the medium term for China to pull ahead. They just released a new domestic AI chip which seems in important ways to have caught up to Nvidias previous generation. They have a LOT more manufacturing capacity. They are collaborating via open source by default. They have better materials access and much more energy capacity. They have many more people overall and more researchers.

There is a strong chance most of the researchers are pulled out of the US and Europe if WWIII really kicks off or even if there is just more global crisis and concern.

One other thing about the power needs. Within a few years, the power efficiency of AI chips is likely to improve by a factor of 20, 50 or more times by switching to true compute-in-memory architecture with new materials that have made rapid progress lately.

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Its also pretty telling that the release of the new Chinese chip wasn't met with an intense discussion here on HN. And it's arguably way, way more important than a version bump on some benchmaxxed model or two. The advances in Chinese chipmaking are super exciting.

> There is a strong chance most of the researchers are pulled out of the US and Europe if WWIII really kicks off

for wwiii it would likely imply a war in asia too, so it's not as if PRC will be a safe place for those researches to run away to.

I think you underestimate what a massive country China is and the scale of their military. Russia is already quite an adversary, but China is at an even higher level. By some metrics, they have already surpassed the US military.

So it is very unlikely that a neighbor will have the audacity to attack them, and even if this happens, i'd expect the war to be over rapidly. Just like if Canada or Mexico tried to attack the US.

I think the consensus is that Russia proved itself barely capable against just Ukraine. Also I didn't say someone has to attack prc, it's more likely to go the other way round and as many historic examples showed no matter how big you are people defending their home land will not make it easy.

Russia is more than twice the size of China. Hasn’t helped them to stay protected from drones.

The scenario we are all dancing around is if there is a war over reunification. That would be between the worlds two superpowers. No one would walk into a nuclear Holocaust on purpose I bthink, but miscommunication happens. Even if no other nations intervened, the reunification would definitely destroy all the worlds leading fabs, and even if it didn't, I read ASML can and would shut their machines down remotely. So those researchers would shift to figuring out what they can do at the 28nm node... Meanwhile the rest of us ponder why old powerful men can't let things be.

> They are collaborating via open source by default.

It's almost as if collaboration is the foundation of scientific progress. Too bad US has lost the notes.

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