Also worth noting is Steve Hsu's recent discussion of his meetings with China VC, government, researchers etc. reporting from on the ground in Shanghai and Beijing etc: https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/letter-from-shanghai-reflections-on-china-in-2024-73/transcript (which parallels Dwarkesh Patel's recent trip to China).

Hsu (better known for other work) is a long-time China hawk and has been talking up the scientific & technological capabilities of the CCP for a long time, saying they were going to surpass the West any moment now, so I found this interesting when Hsu explains that:

the scientific culture of China is 'mafia' like (Hsu's term, not mine) and focused on legible easily-cited incremental research, and is against making any daring research leaps or controversial breakthroughs...

but is capable of extremely high quality world-class followup and large scientific investments given a clear objective target and government marching orders
there is no interest or investment in an AI arms race, in part because of a "quiet confidence" (ie. apathy/lying-flat) that if anything important happens, fast-follower China can just catch up a few years later and win the real race. They just aren't doing it. There is no Chinese Manhattan Project. There is no race. They aren't dumping the money into it, and other things, like chips and Taiwan and demographics, are the big concerns which have the focus from the top of the government, and no one is interested in sticking their necks out for wacky things like 'spending a billion dollars on a single training run' without explicit enthusiastic endorsement from the very top.

Let the crazy Americans with their fantasies of AGI in a few years race ahead and knock themselves out, and China will stroll along, and scoop up the results, and scale it all out cost-effectively and outcompete any Western AGI-related stuff (ie. be the BYD to the Tesla). The Westerners may make the history books, but the Chinese will make the huge bucks.

So, this raises an important question for the arms race people: if you believe it's OK to race, because even if your race winds up creating the very race you claimed you were trying to avoid, you are still going to beat China to AGI (which is highly plausible, inasmuch as it is easy to win a race when only one side is racing), and you have AGI a year (or two at the most) before China and you supposedly "win"... Then what?

race to AGI and win
trigger a bunch of other countries racing to their own AGI (now that they know it's doable, increasingly much about how to do it, can borrow/steal/imitate the first AGI, and have to do so "before it's too late")
???
profit!

What does winning look like? What do you do next? How do you "bury the body"? You get AGI and you show it off publicly, Xi blows his stack as he realizes how badly he screwed up strategically and declares a national emergency and the CCP starts racing towards its own AGI in a year, and... then what? What do you do in this 1 year period, while you still enjoy AGI supremacy? You have millions of AGIs which can do... stuff. What is this stuff? Are you going to start massive weaponized hacking to subvert CCP AI programs as much as possible short of nuclear war? Lobby the UN to ban rival AGIs and approve US carrier group air strikes on the Chinese mainland? License it to the CCP to buy them off? Just... do nothing and enjoy 10%+ GDP growth for one year before the rival CCP AGIs all start getting deployed? Do you have any idea at all? If you don't, what is the point of 'winning the race'?

(This is a question the leaders of the Manhattan Project should have been asking themselves when it became obvious that there were no genuine rival projects in Japan or Germany, and the original "we have to beat Hitler to the bomb" rationale had become totally irrelevant and indeed, an outright propaganda lie. The US got The Bomb, immediately ensuring that everyone else would be interested in getting the bomb, particularly the USSR, in the foreseeable future... and then what? Then what? "I'll ask the AGIs for an idea how to get us out of this mess" is an unserious response, and it is not a plan if all of the remaining viable plans the AGIs could implement are one of those previous plans which you are unwilling to execute - similar to how 'nuke Moscow before noon today' was a viable plan to maintain nuclear supremacy, but wasn't going to happen, and it would have been better to not put yourself in that position in the first place.)

EDIT: because people are accusing me of lying or being insane or maliciously distorting what Hsu said, let me excerpt the relevant Hsu parts, and highlight the key parts which I am condensing as 'there are large, conventional-style investments in AI and chipmaking, but there is no Chinese Manhattan Project, because of a government-level strategic assessment that a fast-follower strategy is adequate and ensures a long-term favorable outcome, focused primarily on chip manufacturing':

...While I was in Beijing, I also met with some top venture capitalists and technologists. I again can't say too much about it. I just want to say that there's quiet confidence throughout all, among all the people in China, whether it was academic scientists, technologists, investors, venture capitalists, business people, just quiet confidence that nothing the outside world, specifically the U. S., can do is really going to stop the rise of China.

And in particular, a lot of conversation was about AI and the chip war. And there's a sense of quiet confidence here that China's going to get the AI training done that it needs to do. It's not going to fall way behind in the race for AGI or ASI. There are government national level plans in place to build the data centers, to produce domestically the chips necessary to run those data centers, to power those data centers, and to stay abreast of developments in AI and also in frontier chip manufacturing.

Let's just say that there's quiet confidence here. That, you know, they may not fully catch up. They may not get their EUV machine for some number of years, but they're not really worried. And so, and many people have said to me that the very stupid Biden Jake Sullivan chip war against China has only helped Chinese companies. This is something I've discussed in other podcasts, when the U. S. cuts off access for Chinese companies to key products and technologies used in the semiconductor supply chain from the U. S. and say Dutch companies like ASML, Japanese companies as well. When the U. S. starts to threaten that, it only causes a coalescence of effort here in China. It creates a necessary coordination of effort here that then lets the Chinese supply chain ecosystem for semiconductors advance very rapidly.

And so it was, it was a stupid policy by the Biden administration. And it was also based on a miscalibrated estimate of how fast we were going to get to AGI. They thought, Oh, if we just, if we just kneecap the Chinese right now, since we're [sure?] AGI is right around the corner, this will let America get to super AGI and the Chinese will be behind and then they'll be screwed. And it doesn't look like it's playing out that way. Let's just put it that way.

I can't say much more about the details of what I learned on this trip.

But I think quiet confidence and a sense of inevitability in that sector, but across all sectors here. No, people here are just confident that like, oh, if there's some product that needs to be produced, batteries, photovoltaics, cars, robotics, factory automation, 5G, 6G, whatever it is, even leading edge CPUs, leading edge semiconductor nodes. There's just a quiet confidence that China's going to get there or is already there. And actually, in many of these things, they just don't feel like Westerners can compete. They just don't feel like it, if it's something that has to be made in a factory, it's eventually going to be made by Chinese companies, not by Western companies that the Westerners just can't compete with.

I mean, literally that, that may sound very jarring for you to hear that, but between two Chinese people who are technologists and know their stuff, it's a very common sentiment. You know, it's just a very common sentiment. Once China figures out how to produce it, [then] they can generally produce it much more efficiently than Western companies.

And it's not just a matter of labor costs. There is a labor cost advantage here, but it's much more than that. It's the power of the infrastructure here. It's the ability of the government and the companies to work together to be efficient. It's the willingness of the teams to work really hard here. Okay, I'll comment a little bit more about that when I talk about, say, SMIC and other stuff.

Further:

...They're not against big breakthroughs in PRC, esp. obvious ones. The bureaucracy bases promotions, raises, etc. on metrics like publications in top journals, citations, ... However there are very obvious wins that they will go after in a coordinated way - including AI, semiconductors, new energy tech, etc.

...There is coordinated planning btw govt and industry in PRC to stay at the frontier in AI/AGI/ASI. They are less susceptible to "visionaries" (ie grifters) so you'll find fewer doomers or singularitarians, etc. Certainly not in the top govt positions. The quiet confidence I mentioned extends to AI, not just semiconductors and other key technologies.

Adrian Garcia

Adrian Garcia

Adrian Garcia

Adrian Garcia