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It's not that niche, if you've been online a little bit you'd know this expression.
No way. You'd need to be pretty well versed in gamer lingo. Even more specifically, combative, likely FPS gamer lingo.
Sarcasm aside, gaming and FPS terminology are so tightly coupled with online culture that it's just assumed everyone knows it. Spawn camping is among the oldest examples of gaming terms that broke out into common online usage and it dates back to Quake some time around 1997.
[0] anyone older than 39 at this point
What is online culture? Is someone who is heavily into instagram for fashion, facebook for family contact and news, maybe Google for mail and search, part of online culture? Because I know people who are like that and there's no way they know what "spawn" or "camping" mean in gamer context and certainly wouldn't be able to piece together what "spawn camping" is.
To put it simply, it's a Venn diagram with two overlapping, non-coincident circles. The amount of overlap has varied with time but that doesn't mean online culture doesn't exist or conversely that everything is part of online culture.
Strong consensus bias in this statement. I have no doubt it is true in your circle (and to a lot of people). But there are plenty of online-24/7 cultures that don’t have any overlap with gaming.
I've been online since circa 1995 (earlier if you count BBSs), and I can't say I did. It's possible to infer its meaning but assuming everyone is on the same circles as one is, is silly.
It shows that the author hasn't thought about their audience and has assumed that everyone knew and used the same terminology as them. And, worse, assumed that they'd understand immediately why they were using that terminology.
The opening is If you read the news headlines these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Western labs are getting spawn-camped by Chinese labs en masse. If you don't know what spawn-camping is you're lost; if you do it's not obvious what that means in this context. Good writing brings the reader along with the writer.
It would have been clearer if they'd written: If you read the news headlines these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that Western AI labs are being outplayed by Chinese AI labs using something similar to the gamer technique of "spawn-camping". The Chinese appear to be waiting for each Western release and then instantly distilling it. A little like gamers waiting for their opponents to reappear (from the dead) at their camp and then kill them off immediately.
This is better because a reader unfamiliar with the idea of spawn-camping learns something and it explains the metaphor. But I could be wrong in my interpretation of why they are using spawn-camping since they fail to explain it.
The premise in this article is: Western companies do a ton of expensive work building new models, meanwhile the Chinese companies just wait for a Western release and then they immediately grab and distill it and announce it as their own model. That’s the spawn-camp.
Do you have many mini tantrums like this per day? Probably makes you very difficult to work with Mr I was a CTO.
"spawn-camping" is the process of taking out your enemies at the point they spawn (or appear) in a game without giving them a chance to regroup. In this case I think the writer is saying that the news implies that western models are getting distilled on release. Not the perfect analogy but it gives some color.
In a PvP (player vs player) game, if you kill a player the moment they spawn into the game arena, that's called "spawn-camping".