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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

> And what's China done? It's invested in infrastructure and its people. China's vision for AI isn't to maximize shareholder value at all costs. It will be strictly regulated so society as a whole gets to benefit.

China is not in an ideal place right now, youth unemployment is way up, lots of dead end jobs, a 35 age employment limit that isn't just a meme. China has disparate visions for AI but maximizing owner (erm, sort of like shareholder) value is definitely one of them. Don’t get me wrong, China could get this right in the end, but it’s not a forgone conclusion right now.

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I absolutely agree that China has problems and youth unemployment is absolutely on that list.

Here's the difference though: in the US that would be treated as a personal moral failure ("git gud", if you will) whereas China is actively dealing with such issues.

You see all this play out with how China and the US treat AI models. The US is busy trying to build a moat around AI for the benefit of the investors in OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, etc. Chinese labs are essentially destroying "shareholder value" by releasing open weight models. China wants to commoditize (even democratize) the models themselves so society itself benefits and, geopolitically, the US doesn't become an AI monopoly.

We really should avoid putting China on a pedestal here because as soon as its position flips with the USA (inevitable at this point), they are going to look a lot less appealing to the rest of us. Alibaba, Tencent, etc… are absolutely not more moral than American big techs, they aren’t being altruistic even if acts to check the American big techs.

The logical fallacy here is that we can't use a hypothetical future harm to justify a current real harm because you can justify anything that way.

Open weight models, for example, are forever. Proprietary models are intentionally building a moat to extract more value from people. I know which one I prefer.

A lot of China fearmongering (in general, not you in particular) is just xenophobia. You will see the argument that the US has to do imperialism because if it doesn't, then China will become dominant and do the exact same sins. It's also a bit of a self-report: we tend to assume other people will act like us if given the chance so any accusation is really a confession.

China is neither good nor bad, it will do whatever is in its best interests. They are, however, smart, smarter than the current USG (which isn't hard), so maybe they will pull out more win-wins? Take their investments in new energy and EV, it’s completely due to self interest, but has the potential to lift up the rest of the world. But then they are also already a mass surveillance state, face recognition and cameras are everywhere, it’s like flock on steroids, that is tech they are also exporting to the rest of the world. Better AI is just going to make that issue worse.

When it becomes dominant, China’s sins will probably be very different from the USA’s, but they are still going to be there.

The thing people need to understand about China is that they tell you exactly what they're doing and why. There's no mystery in it. They have five year plans. They have doctrines. They love writing stuff down. And you will better understand and be able to predict China than 95% of Western analysts if you simply take what China says at face value. Seriously.

Consider Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization doctrine [1]. At the UN Summit on Biodiversity in 2020 Xi Jinping said [2]. He is saying that the world cannot support the developing world living in a resource-intensive way that Western societies currently do and you need a more ecological way of living. So when China massively pushes solar and other renewables, it's just the natural extension of their political philosophy.

The US, on the other hand, is just 5 companies in a trench coat.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought_on_Ecologic...

[2]: https://en.chinadiplomacy.org.cn/2021-01/27/content_77158874...

Like I said, China is smart, compared to the USA which just makes dumb decision after dumb decision based on momentum alone. That can be good and bad. Let’s put it this way: imagine how much more damage the Americans could do to the world if they were actually smart? That will be China in a decade or two.

China at least has a demonstrable capacity to serve anything other than bottom line of the shareholders. It is not perfect, but it at least has capacity for improvement.

This! China is full of problems. But at the very least, it manages to serve its people over capital (as flawed as that service is). America can’t seem to do anything to hold capital to account, which is why people are terrified of AI taking their shitty jobs.

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