Domestically, we often put it this way: since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves. It’s only a matter of time — if not this year, then next year; if we can’t do it next year, we’ll just keep going. This is how we approach everything.
There is a small caveat, though. China was not actually that far behind in the semiconductor field in the past. The problem was that corruption and fraudulent projects were quite serious, which undermined the Chinese government’s confidence in these efforts. A few years ago, there was even a so-called “transparent computing” scam project that was awarded a national-level prize.
Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome. This is because it is not only a government policy, but also a Chinese way of thinking. Nothing can interrupt this process.
In fact, aside from high-end chips, China already dominates the mid- and low-end chip segments.
I don't disagree with you on the conclusion, but man I just wish people stopped believing in fairy tales about countries like this. America does it too. Why are people so allergic to materialism? I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.
To speak to this importance, it wasn't long ago that the sentiment I heard about the country was that it isn't, or wouldn't be, ascendant due to their "culture".
It's the Schrodinger's cat of cultures. Or maybe generalities about culture aren't to explain for economic and political velocity.
Yeah, also it shows the comment is ignorant of history.
In the immediate aftermath of the Korean war, the North was actually more prosperous than the South. That changed with time, dramatically so, but initially it'd be reasonable to see the north as having better economic prospects.
> I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.
I don't know that it's a fairy tale. Certainly, it helps nations project more influence than they really have. But it's not nothing, commonly-shared philosophy is useful. It matters, because it differs, and that impacts things.
(as an American) America definitely does not share this philosophy. The idea that "Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome." is not something most Americans would ever say about America as we struggle with mostly-unchecked corruption and fraud, and have zero enforcement over the consequences of such. It is absolutely effecting the final outcomes of the US, and in a massively negative way.
> Material conditions shape history
Sure, but not just material conditions. "Hope for the future" plays a bigger role than many people give it credit for.
At the risk of starting a fight... I would point at America's religious history, and the continuing threads of that today that increasingly see scientific/materialist thought as a direct threat to their ideas of how a society ought to be organized.
Because a shared cultural identity is vital to maintain a cohesive society that can muster the collective resources to get shit done?
The world is shaped by psychology and the actions of a very very few individuals at the peak of their respective societies. Material conditions merely enable success brought by cultural motivation.
Your argument really only holds water if you consider all humans to be fungible worker drones and that culture doesn't exist. The human factor is the critical factor in all of history. Material wealth does not magically produce innovation. The Romans could have started the industrial revolution a thousand years earlier, they had effectively unlimited resources. They simply lacked the cultural spark to pursue that line of research and industry. They even literally invented a steam engine a thousand years before modern times.
This is a country with its own written language, writing system, calendar, the internet, and so on; a country with the world’s largest single ethnic population; a country whose cultural traditions were established two thousand years ago; a country with an independent ideology. Are you saying that Western societies would rather believe this is a country of large-scale surveillance, that its people live under a social credit system with no individuality or freedom, than believe that its people possess a distinct and stronger sense of collective consciousness?
I think you are writing your comments conditioned on not just what you are responding to but also a lot of internal assumptions about their intentions. The person you are responding to said or implied nothing about surveillance or Western assumptions about China. They are making the claim (apologies to them if I am misrepresenting) that societies or governments achieve extraordinary goals (i.e. goals that they were not expected to achieve within a certain time-frame) because of the physical, economic and social conditions and not because of cultural elements. Cultural explanations are post-hoc i.e. they are used after the fact to boost morale or give a sense of unity. More concretely, if China, the US, the EU, Japan, India, Russia can launch spacecrafts to the moon, so can Nigeria and Kenya given enough time, resources and the right incentive structure even if they are culturally very different from the countries above.
They are made so in the Angloamerican West. The establishment wants them to focus on 'values' instead. Because if the people started thinking about material conditions, they would topple the system that concentrates 99% of the wealth in the hands of the 0.1%.
Does this include the material conditions of human bio diversity? You deny "way of thinking" is itself a material differentiation but could that not be an expression of material conditions over time reshaping separate groups of people to act and think differently, who were through differing selective pressures, environments, adaptations and historical contingencies themselves "shaped" differently?
Or do you yourself have a religious belief in strict human blank slate equality?
I'm not saying relevance of culture, human bio-diversity, etc. are zeroes in terms of impact. I just get frustrated because they seem to be the only things talked about at the expense of any discussion about actual material conditions or control and distribution of resources
Well if you have pay attention this user you would realize he is a very classic example of an educated and proud Chinese. No offense but an unusual amount of Chinese uniformly think and talk like that thanks to the education.
Why would you assume culture is immaterial? And to make this less emotional let’s take the micro scale; don’t you think the culture of doing engineering doesn’t affect outcomes team to team within the same company, or company to company within the same country or even country to country within the same company?
I understand your point about misattribution but it cuts both ways. How about when a company is better than competitors because they executed better because they had a superior organizational culture. Or not successful and this is due to poor culture.
YC sets the prime examples. It is never product at the expense of who the team is and in what proven way they have worked together and plan to execute at scale.
> Domestically, we often put it this way: since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves. It’s only a matter of time — if not this year, then next year; if we can’t do it next year, we’ll just keep going. This is how we approach everything.
That's how everyone who industrialized/advanced approaches everything. China isn't the only country with the "can do" or "if you can do it, we can do it" attitude. The US is a prime example of the "can do" attitude. Do you think when britain industrialized, the US decided only britain is capable of industrializing and gave up? Of course not. Heck, china isn't even the first asian country with the "can do" attitude. The japanese, during the 1800s, decided that if europeans can industrialize, so can they. So on and so forth.
> Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome. This is because it is not only a government policy, but also a Chinese way of thinking. Nothing can interrupt this process.
It isn't a "chinese way of thinking". It is assumed everywhere that some level "corruption and fraud" is baked into any large scale investment or endeavor. It's simply a matter of managing it so as not to consume the whole project.
The PRC motto is not about "can do", it's about "able to do". Can Palau build a commercial airliner when Boeing and Airbus workforce is 10x their population? No that's simply out of their reach.
That's really the crux behind the original statement, there are not many (really currently any) country in the world other than PRC who has the complete industrial chains and workforce numbers to build anything that already exist if they pour enough resources into it. They're the only country whose manufacturing sector has every industrial category classified by UN. That's the context behind the quote (directed at domestic doubters), every other country in the world has to pick and choose what to specialize in, PRC doesn't, so as long as item is not made by god, PRC can figure out how to build it.
The geopolitical reality today (i.e. the amount aggregate S&T complexity that has accumulated from past 100 years) is there may not be anything others can build that PRC eventually can't due to size of PRC talent and industrial base, the reverse is not necessarily true. There's a shit load of advanced industries that are simply out of most small/medium even large countries reach because their size precludes them from coordinating enough people or industrial resources for undertaking.
> The PRC motto is not about "can do", it's about "able to do".
Who cares? "Can do" assumes "able to do".
> Can Palau build a commercial airliner when Boeing and Airbus workforce is 10x their population? No that's simply out of their reach.
That's why I limited it to : "That's how everyone who industrialized/advanced approaches everything.".
> That's really the crux behind the original statement, there are not many (really currently any) country in the world other than PRC who has the complete industrial chains and workforce numbers to build anything that already exist if they pour enough resources into it.
China is a subset of the american world order. The PRC's industrialization is a creation of the US/Japan/EU.
> PRC can figure out how to build it.
So can the US. Are you saying china can create something we can't figure out?
> The geopolitical reality today (i.e. the amount aggregate S&T complexity that has accumulated from past 100 years) is there may not be anything others can build that PRC eventually can't due to size of PRC talent and industrial base, the reverse is not necessarily true
I'd say there is nothing that china cannot build.
> There's a shit load of advanced industries that are simply out of most small/medium even large countries reach because their size precludes them from coordinating enough people or industrial resources for undertaking.
That just means small/medium countries will collaborate.
FYI: China is smaller than the west. China is much smaller than the west and its allies combined. There is no denying china has some advantages. But china also has disadvantages. Linguistically, politically, culturally, geographically, historically, etc. China's industrialization, just like japan's industrialization, was predicated entirely on western knowledge/tech and access to western trade routes.
Can do, does not in fact translate to able to do, for advanced/industrialized economies. It takes about 150k workforce to build long body civil aviation industry. US as country can muster that critical mass. EU has to muster that as a bloc (as you recognized). Developed economy <200m pop without bloc can't. That precludes most of the world. 50 years ago, there was less complexity, and many more smaller players "can do" their way to long body civil aviation, now they can't, they are not "able to do", the scale has grown and those smaller economies don't even approach/"can do" in the first place.
>So can the US. Are you saying china can create something we can't figure out?
>small/medium countries will collaborate
US has projected technical talent shortage in semi in 100,000s. Hence US only try to reshore fabs vs PRC semi brrrting talent to execute industrial policy to indigenize entire semi supply chain i.e. it's something US maybe can figure out, but can't execute, again not able to do on it's own, so it doesn't even try. That's really the crux behind original quote, EUV is made by people... but the broader context is EUV (and supply chains) is made by consortium of countries, i.e. common rhetoric is EUV is made by the world, how can PRC replicate global effort? The answer is EUV is made by a small handful of countries with fraction of PRC population, PRC talent pool and industry large enough to single hand speed run global coordination. Hence PRC is able to do everything, even things that require others to do as bloc.
>China is a subset
>predicated entirely on western knowledge/tech
>I'd say there is nothing that china cannot build.
Was a subsect. Now much of their dependencies are gone. That dependency made clear by export controls is why many PRC industry doubters existed 5-10 years ago who definitely thought there were things China could not replicate, EUV supply chain is one of these. The other is a competent national football team. But domestic industrial chain and talent generation has expanded so much so fast that much of doubt gone. The motto, was specifically made in this context. PRC techno-optimist look at all the other concurrent major indigenization projects and the underlying meaning morphed to PRC can build not just what another country can build, what another bloc can build, but everything... simultaneously, i.e. post war US hyper hegemony type of sole player. It is not your generic can do attitude, it's can do anything, and everything at the same time. Continental scale, industrial sovereignty/autarky tier of ambition.
>smaller than the west and its allies
It's roughly the same size by pop, unless you through in 3rd party India then when might as well as through in global south for PRC. But if we're talking about useful indicators, PRC produce more talent i.e. about same as OECD which is more than US+co. Industrially, PRC produce as much as core US+co block, US+co produce more by value add. Both are flow measures. But if we look in raw output / actual material production / output, PRC can be substantially larger than west combined. Many raw inputs (ree steel aluminum etc) small intermediate goods PRC make more than RoW combined. The exception is of course the pinnacle that PRC hasn't figured out, thrown industrial printing press at. But things like auto, spacelaunch, semi, civil aviation can go the way of PRC shipbuilding, one of the mature strategic industries where PRC now produces more than RoW combined.
I understood OP's saying more as "appetite for doing".
Ignoring the practical reality that you need resources, capacity, good planning, and so on to actually do something. I understood OP as saying the mindset in China is that they want to do it all. They are willing to invest even in things that would have poor ROI, if they can come into an industry and undercut by taking a smaller margin they will.
If so, that is a difference in attitude. In the west, we are only interested in returns that beat our alternatives. Capital is divested based on maximizing return on investment. This is why we even allowed many industries in the first place to move to China and we exited those segments domestically.
> That's how everyone who industrialized/advanced approaches everything. China isn't the only country with the "can do" or "if you can do it, we can do it" attitude. The US is a prime example of the "can do" attitude. Do you think when britain industrialized, the US decided only britain is capable of industrializing and gave up? Of course not. Heck, china isn't even the first asian country with the "can do" attitude. The japanese, during the 1800s, decided that if europeans can industrialize, so can they. So on and so forth.
A reminder: the difference is that Japan has already failed in areas such as mobile internet, robotics, Fifth-generation computers, and space technology....LLM and so on. Japan is still clinging to the substantial profits of its internal combustion vehicle industry, and in battery technology it has fallen far behind.
States may disappear, nations may vanish, and once-advanced countries can become backward. Most of them will never return to their former national glory. “If others can do it, we can do it” only becomes a true national characteristic if it is persistently pursued, strictly implemented, and internalized into the national mindset. Japan clearly does not fall into this category.
In fact, only China and the United States possess this mindset. Germany and Japan have small national territories, making it easy for them to fall into early industrial leadership and then rest on high-profit laurels without further ambition. Essentially, it is not a national character. Look at Japan’s reliance on fax machines and Yahoo, or the chaos in Germany’s train system—it shows that this is an advantage created by a particular population with a special disposition, useful only for a limited time. The pace of deindustrialization in these two countries is also very fast: Japan now heavily depends on tourism, and Germany has become something of a joke.
If you browse YouTube or other video platforms, you can see that the people of China and the United States have, and continue to have, the national confidence and “hands-on” culture of the world’s largest industrial powers. In the U.S., there are many farm owners and ordinary laborers who are skilled at making and producing things—they are the foundation of the country. Capitalism merely led the U.S. down a different path.
> A reminder: the difference is that Japan has already failed in areas such as mobile internet, robotics, Fifth-generation computers, and space technology....LLM and so on. Japan is still clinging to the substantial profits of its internal combustion vehicle industry, and in battery technology it has fallen far behind.
So what?
> Japan clearly does not fall into this category.
A country that rose to become a major power in the 1800s. Got destroyed during ww2. Then rose again to be a mjor power.
> In fact, only China and the United States possess this mindset.
If that was the case, post ww2 germany and japan would not exist.
> Germany and Japan have small national territories, making it easy for them to fall into early industrial leadership and then rest on high-profit laurels without further ambition.
Have you no understanding of history prior to the last 10 years?
It's always felt pretty intuitive to me that shared goals in a culture should have some real effect on outcomes.
It doesn't mean absolutely everyone takes part, of course, but it does mean it's a 'thing' that people may take part in with support from many of those around them if they choose.
Looking at the inverse: If you're going against the cultural wind, you're just going to have a much harder time doing whatever it is.
It just seems like this must show up in outcomes, it would be strange if it didn't.
I don't agree. I think this comes out of necessity. What else a developing country can do in order to develop itself? Everyone believes they are unique and different, I don't agree.
That's what I was asking. I was replying to a commenter who used "how we approach everything" and "Chinese way of thinking" when explaining China's economic dominance, which at least implies it. I was questioning that, is all.
It's rooted in neither. Care to explain why you came to that conclusion? Fyi I'm neither American nor Chinese.
I was replying to a commenter who used "how we approach everything" and "Chinese way of thinking" when explaining China's economic dominance. I was questioning whether there is any such "national thinking" in any society, still less in a society of ~1.4bn people.
Fwiw I think that China's achievement, since the mid 20th century, of lifting so many people out of extreme poverty in such a short time is extremely creditable. As is its recent action on deploying clean energy technology. I'm much less impressed with its authoritarian political system. And of course I worry about military conflict.
It's the story the new generations tell themselves that's taken hold last few years. IIRC context is SMEE chairman (maker of PRC litho machine) said EUV is made by man, not god. Became rally for PRC industry and national confidence. X is made by man, not god for anything PRC needs to catchup on. Which circles back to Qian Xuesen, foreign people can build rockets, why can't we. Or more recently, foreign people are good at XYZ events, why can't we. AKA anything they can do we can do.
The bigger undercurrent is divide between faction of people who think EUV impossible or possible. Between boomer/doomers (older, never do better than west types) and young techno-optimists, faction generation/education divided. TLDR PRC technical talent skews young, and techwar as spurned wave of scifi optimists, techno nationalists and industrialist party way of thinking. It's not homogeneous but it's dominant, especially in S&T after quick ascendancy.
As a non-American, I think that Americans are special in that they have the right combination of hard work and personal initiative and efficiency. To oversimplify, Europeans are efficient workers, but unlike Americans, they use their efficiency not to produce more but to work less and enjoy life. East Asians are hard workers but they tend to favor group cohesion over maximizing individual potential, which is not as efficient.
I am not saying that one culture is better than another, but I think the American way is particularly productive, particularly stressful too.
I feel this is true of Americans and Europeans. And as an American, I've been migrating myself more and more into the European mindset. I put in my 8 hours, and I'm done, then I do non-work related activities for the next 8 hours, then I sleep for the next.
As a non-American, but one who worked in US companies for decades, I feel Americans are influenced by economic gigantism.
The American experience is of triumphing with audacious, go big or go home schemes that others wouldn't or couldn't attempt.
To cherry pick one example, during WWII the US created airstrips on tiny pacific islands to fight the Japanese. Few people imagined it was possible to freight in the bulldozers, machines and materials to accomplish this, and it was game changing.
And of course we have the Manhattan project. Railroads. Gigantic IT companies like Oracle, IBM, Apple and more lately Google.
These successes fed into American exceptionalism.
This has its pros and cons.
In a world on the cusp of incredible discoveries, it let audacious American megacorps capture the high ground.
But explosive capitalist success has costs and masks underlying issues. Many people have had the experience of starting work at US Megacorp and being astonished at the waste, ineptitude and back stabbing that happens - yet somehow the corporate continues to thrive and throw off mountains of money.
The experience of that easy money breeds an unhealthy version of American exceptionalism where people start to believe they will and should succeed - just because American.
Things are different elsewhere in the world.
Up and comers make do with what they have and struggle upwards while the USA cruises.
Just one example are the thriving Chinese fabbing companies like JLCPCB. Every tech product contains a PCB. It's pretty obvious now that PCB manufacture is an absolute core competency in tech going forward.
Any two man upstart tech company can use JLCPCB's free online tools to design a PCB, then click to have the factory fabricate the board, solder on all the components and connectors, and have it in the customer's hands a few days later. True on demand manufacturing.
What would have cost thousands of dollars, taken months and required a team of experts a few years ago now takes days and costs a few bucks.
The US is nowhere in this relatively new but critical industry. The only US competitors are stuck in a local minimum where they get assured business at generous prices from security-sensitive govt agencies who can't outsource to China, but they can't remotely compete on price with their Chinese competitors on price or even quality and timeliness.
I often think of the USA as a melting pot in the truest sense. You have a little bit of different cultures percolating and bubbling in the fondue pot. Interesting things can come out of it...
But when the fondue "decides" to melt in a certain way, you get the unified ideas which seem impossible (like your airstrip example). Perspectives from all cultures aligned under one roof, while also aligned in direction.
As an American every self made millionaire I've known outside of software is the opposite of this. American success was about the small business made big. It's leaders were people who often built the company themselves. Who started with an idea themselves, who who grew in the kind of environment you outlined in the last part of your post. But those people are all old now, and the environment barely exists anymore. And they normally made their success in a non-glamorous industry making non-glamorous things.
You outline Jack Welch style American business, but that was a reinventing of American business to 'save it' (stock market 'keep the line going up' saving it, not actual saving it as long term GE was left worse off). This isn't the successful American business style that built the country originally.
Your airstrip to me sounds like basically what any American agriculture guy would have done, and in fact probably did do, all the time. My 2002 white Chevy pickup driving 70s millionaire neighbor does this sort of thing all the time in the forest he manages. He does more road work than the local government in crazy remote forrest
Everybody wants (western) Europe's QoL and American's money. What lies in the middle is tiny and every such place is top notch - Switzerland, maybe Singapore, maybe some more.
Small to tiny, highly cohesive, dont shy hard work and dont have unsustainable social utopias
Everybody wants (western) Europe's QoL and American's money. What lies in the middle is tiny and every such place is top notch - Switzerland, maybe Singapore.
You’re not addressing the parent’s question about how any of this is about the “Chinese way of thinking”. In fact, in offering a purely material explanation for China’s success, that it simply has more people and resources, you’re actively arguing against the idea.
I think the places where American inefficiency is most visible is in construction, urban planning, and healthcare.
America blows a significant amount of its money by having its citizens drive everywhere with no option to take a train, bus, bicycle, or low-speed e-scooter. Americans take a crazy percentage of their income and just dump it into the stagnant automotive industry. Americans blow between $5,000-10,000 a year on transportation. It’s so crazy that there is a pretty long list of American cities where moving from the suburbs to the most walkable part of the metro area of that city will net you more square footage in your dwelling after removing the $750/month expense of owning a personal vehicle.
Then you can’t even really fix this problem in America because construction costs are wildly inflated. China can build a high speed rail network for the entire country for the price of a handful of miles of subway in manhattan. Projects take an insanely long time, e.g., California high speed rail. Multiple US cities have a housing cost crisis because houses aren’t being built fast enough, and that’s more money in the economy being blown on rent and financial products rather than productive endeavors.
Hangzhou metro has 12 subway lines. In 2014 they only had one.
Finally, healthcare. America just blows double the amount of money on healthcare of the next most expensive country, with worse outcomes in part because they sit in their cars all day.
I don’t even think some of the problems you’ve brought up with America like the school system are as big of problems. America has really good public schools and universities, so good that Chinese people still come to the US to get educated en masse, even at pretty standard and average state schools.
The current government doing stupid shit like discouraging research and immigration is certainly not helping though.
Regarding your last point, back when my political views were "evolving", I had thought about if, instead of handing foreigners diplomas and kicking them out of the country as fast as possible, we should do the opposite: have student visas require that the recipient stay in the US at least five years after graduation, and then fast-track them through the permanent residency -> citizenship pipeline. It made no sense to me why we'd educate someone to get a degree in chemical engineering, possibly from a rival nation, and then send them back to where they came from. We should "brain drain" other countries, not the other way around.
Those foreign students usually pay for the education they receive, they might not be willing to do so (or as much) if there are strings attached. Besides, I don't think any country should aim on brain draining any other country, that kind of selfishness will be counterproductive long-term. Who knows, might be what we're seeing right now (the US self-sabotaging). Karma's a bitch.
I like the idea of incentivizing people to stay, but I don’t know how we could “require” it. I don’t want the U.S. to implement exit visas or egress control.
I think the world would be better on the whole if such people returned home and improved their countries. The US cannot brain drain the entire world for its own benefit.
The top 5 or 10 of these you’re basically getting close to equivalent square footage or better once you replace your vehicle spending with housing spend.
Well, the video isn't available. And it's a big ask to make way out there claims and then expect people to watch whatever that video was to fully understand whether the claims are true or not. This is basically asymmetric warfare in trolling.
"Here's my wild claim, to verify it go spend your time watching a video!"
Interesting, I have never seen CityNerd take a video down. I’ll summarize it below my next couple of paragraphs.
Criticizing a source for being in video format and therefore taking time to digest is an invalid criticism. If I linked you a scientific study you’d still have to take time to read it to properly evaluate it. Just because a source in video form doesn’t make it not a source, and it’s not asymmetric trolling warfare. I’m literally just providing a source that aligns with my perspective and opinion, and trying to have a good faith discussion.
I will also point out that every YouTube video provides a full automated transcript on the desktop version of YouTube.
The gist of the video was that some selected American cities presented in a “worst to best” list have an interesting effect going on where people who live in suburban car-dependent areas can potentially live in their metro area’s most walkable neighborhoods with rich urban fabric without sacrificing a lot of square feet or potentially even gaining more space in their home by removing the cost of owning a car and putting that into their rent instead. Ray Delahanty, a (former?) professional city planner, ran through some data on this based on median rent in various neighborhoods and an assumed TCO of personal vehicle ownership of around $750 a month. Metro areas like New York City fared poorly but others presented an interesting trade-off potential.
Obviously, it was something of a simplified discussion that doesn’t take into account every life factor that determines whether car ownership is a requirement, but he is a guy who lived without a car in Las Vegas of all places, so I think the general point was to present a thought experiment on what kind of lifestyle you can get if you change your perspective to consider the idea of ditching your car entirely and no longer pay the very high average costs that Americans incur to own, operate, store, and maintain their vehicles.
Seriously, delusional take. I live in Manhattan and I’m considering a move to Westchester (large suburban county just north of NYC). Average cost per sq foot to buy in Manhattan is about $1500, and it’s about $400 in Westchester. That’s before you touch the other differences in cost of living (taxes, childcare, groceries, etc).
So some or even many people explain America’s success as a result of diversity. If that’s true then either China will need to import a diverse population (axis of diversity is uncertain), or else diversity is irrelevant and they will succeed as a more or less undiverse population (whether people are actually Han doesn’t matter so long as they believe and the government classifies them as Han). It’ll be interesting to see.
Diversity is just short hand for US needs to brain drain from around the world, the success is system that disproportionaly increase size of US skilled workforce vs rest, so people better play nice with each other (worked well until not). When PRC went from making 1% of of global technical talent to 50%, and able to retain them or in this case redrain them, they win talent game for generations (at least until 2070s). They will output more stem in next 20 years than US will increase population, births + immigration, i.e. their technical workforce will be 2-3x US. "Diversity" can't brain drain enough to make a dent on those ratios.
"diversity" is an overbroad concept that covers many disparate social practices, a lot of which have nothing to do with technological progress.
I guess that the more focused question is whether China needs to import some amount of tech talent to succeed, at least temporarily. The reporting on this EUV prototype does suggest that that is what they did, giving foreign researchers special visas and whatnot.
Long term is after you and I die, before that they'll reap the greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history that can put everyone else in a bad place long term first.
Hopefully, this century, we can shed some of the 'dominating' mindset that has led to technological exclusionism in the first place. Not that catching up to the state-of-the-art isn't warranted, but that progress will become pocketed once more if we keep falling for the same economic traps.
Fair enough, but the point still stands: innovation of equal benefit compared to isolationism once more with a hefty share of underhanded copying, which will ultimately result in similar technical capabilities anyways.
While historically this has been difficult to achieve, when innovation cycles shift there is an opportunity to shift ingrained practices too.
It’s only a matter of time, but time matters, as they say.
You should know that what China is doing was tried in the past. It is an old story. When the microchip was brand new (invented in the USA) the Soviets realized they needed the tech for military purposes. So they built a closed city devoted to silicon research called Zelenograd. It was staffed with very bright physicists and engineers.
But Zelenograd didn't make the Soviets a computing superpower. In fact they were always behind and fell further and further as time went on. The reason is that the Zelenograd scientists were given copies of US chips and told to clone them. By the time they finished cloning one chip the US had already invented several that were much more advanced. Unable or unwilling to forge their own path, even though they were smart enough to do so, they could not truly develop the in-house expertise needed to match the ever accelerating pace of innovation.
The Soviets never did catch up. Americans tightened security and they just fell ever further behind. By the 1980s they did not even have any attempt to develop an internal internet.
That China is running secret projects to try and clone ASML's machines isn't surprising because for all it has changed, it's still a communist state and its leaders still think in communist ways. They don't understand or appreciate distributed wisdom, so are mentally unable to truly understand how innovation works. Government projects like that are destined to fail - they will clone yesterday's machines tomorrow, and just like the Soviets, will fall further and further behind.
The thing that saves China is that its private sector actually does exist and is much more developed, so the Chinese government projects aren't the only way it can make progress.
The history of Soviet electronics manufacturing is fascinating, but there are some huge differences and I actually don't think the private sector is the largest. One is the pace and type of innovation. In the 70s and 80s the landscape was incredibly dynamic and technology went through several huge changes. If you wanted to run a clone of the US tech industry then, you would need a distributed, dynamic effort across many fields and not a top-down directed Manhattan Project. In 2025 we do have rapid technological change, but things are much more consolidated. In terms of strategically important recent innovations I can only think of EUV and AI. That's much more Manhattan-Project-able.
The other difference - which is even more significant - is that China is already far ahead in advanced manufacturing. The US was lightyears ahead of the Soviets in advanced manufacturing, which is what allowed us to win in the 70s and 80s. Now, we're so far behind it's not even funny. Sure, the West still makes some ultra-precise machines for EUV, but look where most of the components in those machines are made...
At the start of the microchip age, the US wasn't that far ahead. The techniques for manufacturing microchips weren't anything special and the Soviets could do so easily. The problem was the top-down mandate to clone, not lack of internal capability.
I don't know when you want to define as the start of the microchip age (50s? 60s?) but the Soviets were always behind the Americans in advanced manufacturing. In 1931 Stalin said "We are 50–100 years behind the advanced countries" [1.] In WW2 the Soviets relied on the US for advanced machine tools and in 1943 Stalin said: "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war." Khrushchev echoed this in his 1964 memoirs and there is a 1963 recording of Zhukov concurring. Now onto the 50s; the US invents NC machines, transistor manufacturing, chemical processing, miniaturization. The Soviets really only have the lead here in a few metal-related subjects: titanium production and rocket engine metallurgy. This is probably the closest the Soviets came; at this point they did indeed mass produce more tonnage of simple heavy machinery, but cannot mass-produce almost _anything_ cutting edge; look at their cars or consumer electronics of this time period. Onto the sixties; now the gap widens once more, the US pulls far ahead with ICs, microelectronics, CNC manufacturing, advanced alloys and composites, extreme precision manufacturing and precision manufacturing on a large scale. Look at the Saturn V vs the N1 or anything else in the aerospace/space industry at the time; the US was lightyears ahead. They could do things the Soviets could not even dream about. By the 70s the game was lost entirely; the US had advanced electronics manufacturing on a massive scale, laser cutting, even wider deployment of CAD/CAM, and was building the Space Shuttle. The Soviets essentially stagnated and were relegated to making cheap copies years later that looked similar but didn't work well in practice; see the Buran, TU-144, etc.
The reality is that the Soviets never really managed cutting-edge mass manufacturing. There are only a few countries that have: first Britain from the screw-cutting lathe in 1800, then the US, then later Japan, Germany, China, Taiwan and South Korea. In 225 years it's a fairly short list of countries, and most only made the list for a few decades!
The closest the Soviets ever came, of course, was aerospace, but to use that as an example of advanced manufacturing leadership would be a stretch. Sputnik was impressive, but advanced manufacturing it was certainly not; it was a simple sphere with a simple radio transmitter. Look at the tolerances, finishes, materials, manufacturing methods, etc of N1 vs Saturn V, Buran vs the Space Shuttle, TU-144 vs the Concorde.
The analogy with Russia is too obtuse to be useful. Russia never was an economic exporting powerhouse with tons of manufacturing know-how and willing engagement in the larger international capitalist economies. I am no fan of the PRC, but there is plenty of intellectual, innovation, and economic competition within China to make your analogy unlikely to be helpful.
That said, the U.S., if it wants to stay ahead, also needs to fight trends toward reducing competition via de facto monopolistic behaviors by mega corporations with co-opted governmental protections.
Soviet Russia at that time was a global superpower that had developed nuclear weapons and was winning the space race. It only exported heavily to other communist states, but it definitely could do advanced tech and manufacturing.
Modern PRC and USSR aren't exact analogues, but the approach of their governments is clearly similar in this case.
Soviets winning space race during microchip era? I think you have mildly mixed up decades. Soviets were leaders till US put people on the moon, that was so far beyond what soviets were capable of this race stopped, and they just focused on ICBMs.
Soviet tech was sturdy and more primitive (thus more sturdy), much cheaper and they were willing to deliver it to anybody.
I wasn't attempting to be extremely precise with dates. My point was only that the Soviets and the US were technologically comparable in that era. Yes, the US put in huge efforts and were able to overtake them in the space race, largely due to a stronger economy rather than some unique technological skill.
China is very good at industrialising stuff because they are very obedient and efficient on matters that are already known. Once the west has identified a worthwhile endeavor, they are quite quick at reproducing and churning out copies efficiently.
Sometimes they improve on it slightly but their game is mostly about making it cheaper.
This can readily be seen in the smartphone market. They have all the industrial base, large supply of engineers and large amount of cash. Yet they are unable to make a truly defining product once you remove the price out of the equation.
The first reason to buy a Chinese smartphone is lower price otherwise people still prefer to go with Apple, Google or Samsung. There are small details that make those devices generally just better; even when the Chinese manage to do better in a particular dimension, overall the western designed devices are just better.
They have tried increasing price (at least MSRP, to make their devices look more expensive) but there is no way one would pay Apple/Samsung prices for their smartphone. I actually think this is why smartphone haven't trended down on price much lately, the Chinese are trying to capture the design/engineering part of the pie but with limited success. Meanwhile, since competiton has reduced, the major western player can feel content selling the same stuff without reducing price.
And yes the private sector is quite developed but to me it seems like it is largely devoted to fulfill western needs because that's were the real money is. When they manage to do something special, there is always an enormous western influence, either through education (chinese who studied abroad) or via direct involvement of western people inside their business.
For the big projects, they are relying a lot on technology transfer from the west, buying the IP with consulting from western companies and then copying what they learned at scale.
I think a lot of people still don't understand what a profond influence having a communist mindset has. It looks successfull to them because they manage to afford a good lifestyle thanks to their massive industries but that is downstream of all their copying/mimicking the western inventions.
Western societies should think about what they are doing when they transfer their knowledge to this country on the cheap, because it strenghten them and China isn't a nice player in general.
What do you think would have happened if 1989 had went a different way, China today is already united with Taiwan and basically a billion+ person version of Taiwan.
IMO, the difference between East and West is money allocation. In west, especially in the US, there are a lot money in the private sector, they will take the risk and fund moonshot projects; in China, the state will (have to) play that role. Yes, 90% of the projects will fail in the portfolio, that's part of the game.
There’s a NYT’s interview several months back where the journalist phrased it as in America, you have to prove success first to get funded. But in China, funding comes first and the successful companies emerge.
Which isn't at all accurate. Venture capital specifically exists to fund first, in the pursuit of success later - and the US has been by a dramatic margin the leader in doing that for the past ~60-70 years.
China has this process at the city state level. They can leverage their pegged currency to keep their citizen’s purchasing power lower than it should be to fund anything.
A downside is that their consumption economy is low, all their geo neighbors view them as a threat (reducing exports long term), and this contributes to high unemployment as productivity increases.
VC still requires startups to find themselves and prove something first. China basically has a program to do X and anyone can sign up to be a part of that program. All are funded and the winners emerge. I’m broadly generalizing that process but that’s not how VC approaches it.
So instead of "Come pitch us your varied and unique ideas and convince us how our investment will 1000x the returns" it's more like "we need this capability in this industry. Here is a pool of money for you to start figuring it out. We'll focus on the more successful companies over time until they can stand on their own and compete internationally."
I can't imagine why China is so dominant in so many areas when they explicitly plan and invest in capabilities they want to have instead of just relying on the market to "naturally" provide these capabilities or constantly relying on the same handful of inept and corrupt companies to deliver on national needs.
I think thats misunderstanding. China studied the US and learned from the US, the funding is almost the same way except the state funding has objectives other than returns. US has the best financial system, (well most effective and powerful). There is no way China can do better than the US, what we are seeing is that the objectives are very different.
Europe is like the US, money is owned by private but they are old money, not new tech billionaires, and does not take the risks as the US. In China, money is owned by the state, and they are willing to take the risks as the US. In this way, I think China is more similar to US than Europe.
To be honest, maybe only Americans themselves really understand it. Our understanding of them is that they have poured vast amounts of money into areas outside of technology.
The final outcome is affected by the final 10%, you can even call it 1%, for which the semi-corrupt or "communistiquesque" countries never (seemingly) have the will or sheer talent for.
In China you don't criticise the dictatorship and don't be a Muslim and your quality of life improves every year and you get many cool products and services. In the USA they are disappearing people at random and they are banning the import of products and services from the places that are producing them (mostly China).
The US disappeared a local business owner down the street from me in a sleepy suburb because he happened to be walking to his business one morning while brown.
ICE/BP was looking for someone else, but saw another brown person while waiting, and took the opportunity to grab him, too.
He was imprisoned for more than a month and shuffled around the country before anyone bothered to look at his identification or acknowledge their validity.
Are you aware of what's going on in the US right now?
NYT: Those Deported to El Salvador Were Shackled, Beaten, and Sexually Assaulted[1]
And if you're saying to yourself, "what do I have to worry about, I'm not brown", well, do you have kids who you don't want to have abducted and zip-tied naked in the middle of the night by paramilitaries using grenades and rappelling from helicopters into your home[2][3]?
> Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.
> "They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," Watson said. "That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'fuck them kids.'"
> “It was heartbreaking to watch,” she said. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
> "They just treated us like we were nothing," Fisher said.
The level of cope... The US and the west in general is on a much more dire trajectory than China (which is facing its own demons, no doubt about that)
There is not much left of communism in China besides the name, it's more akin to a government steered economy, which arguably is very similar to what the west had when we moved at our peak speed, albeit more authoritarian. They still have what we mostly lost: a long term historical view of geopolitic.
It's most accurate to say that China is still run by folks who are committed communists. These planners, by virtue of their decades of experience, understand the social value of markets and broad based technological growth, and want to wield those even better than liberal planners.
Yeah but then again most people think "if it's not capitalism it's communism", there is a whole spectrum and China definitely does not belong in the communist part of the spectrum anymore. It's a mix of authoritarian socialism and state capitalism, you can add many other words to the mix but communism isn't at the top of it anymore
New things deserve new definitions, we have to get out of the ww2 lingo where everyone is a nazi, a fascist, a communist or a capitalist, it's overly simplistic and muddies the water. 2025 China is completely different than 2000 China which itself is completely different than 1980 China.
> since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves.
This implies copying what someone else did. Rather than inventing something new. I know it's not what you meant but if it wasn't made by God it's because it's already made by someone else. The sentence says to me more about copying than some relentless pursuit. The people who invented the thing to copy, those were more relentless presumably.
And then again the Chinese invented plenty over the years. These generalizations are bit meh.
I don't see why copying is unnatural or even bad. Maybe within a single economy or a group of economies which share a common understanding and laws, chosing to discourage copying to incentivise other citizen innovators makes sense.
But in the global context, between adversarial nations, or even countries that don't see each other as equal, it is absolutely foolish not to copy. Since everything is framed in terms of game theories, what is even the benefit of not copying and being a "good boy" country?
In fact in this situation a country's IP is almost its liability and not its asset. Because it should cost the holding country money and resources so their citizens' IP is protected. And these resources are better off preserved for more crucial knowledge.
None of this even makes the copier's actions bad or immoral. They have a moral imperative to succeed.
Some copying creates a first mover disadvantage in game theory in regards to capital resource allocation. It requires second order thinking to understand, but it’s not super complicated.
You’re not wrong to think that way. But now there’s less and less left for China to “copy,” and it’s hard to argue that many things aren’t being invented by China itself.
Perhaps the real question is this: why is it that places that used to be technologically advanced no longer produce new, original inventions? Is it fear of China copying them? Did the U.S. decide not to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet because it was afraid China would copy it? Did it stop working on battery technology because it feared China would copy that too?
The joke is, if you want a consumer good to exist, but you don't want to do it yourself and you want it for cheap, just make a flashy Kickstarter for it, buy marketing, then cancel the Kickstarter and wait for Chinese"clones" to hit the market!
Nobel prizes in physics are awarded typically with lag of 20-30 years. In early 2000s China was still a relative backwater economically (and academically). In 2000 US R&D spending was over 8 times China's. Now China has likely surpassed USA. It surpassed EU already in about 2014.
Working in academia, the rise of China academically is palpable. There's an avalance of Chinese research published, and a reasonable chunk of it very high quality, and getting better.
The peace price is different, and it's been a bit of a hit and miss at least since Kissinger got it.
And the economics prize, though it's not officially really a Nobel prize.
But the core science prizes, AFAICT, are pretty spot on. Of course there are always many worthy contenders of a prize and one can quibble should this or that person really deserve to get it instead of another person, but I haven't heard of any outright frauds or some trivial advancement getting the prize.
For example the recent nobel prize for Chemistry being awarded to David Baker, Dennis Hassabis and John Jumper.
Why the hell is David Baker on that list? He was just the head of a very big lab that was working in the traditional way using largely physics based approaches, making incremental progress.
AlphaFold blew that whole approach out of the water.
They cite the design of Top7 back in 2003 - it's not at the level of impact as Alphafold.
The impact of Alphafold is obvious to all - the importance of the 2003 Baker paper doesn't stand out to me from 1000's of other possible candidates - that's where self-promotion, visibility and politics plays a part.
The 2003 Baker paper has 2249 citations over 22 years. The 2021 AlphaFold paper has had 43876 citations in 4 years..........
Reminder that there are two different organizations that award “Nobel” prizes; one is the actual organization and the other is the Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden. Not the same people, etc.
Can you clarify what are you talking about? The US has been developing 6th-gen fighter since the mid mid-2010s - not that I'd consider it as an important new original invention.
What I would consider as the most impactful inventions of the last decade would be things like mRNA, Generative AI, and reusable rockets - all came from the US and the US is maintaining the lead in them.
> What I would consider as the most impactful inventions of the last decade would be things like mRNA, Generative AI, and reusable rockets - all came from the US and the US is maintaining the lead in them.
This so myopic. The covid mRNA vaccine that Pfizer made billions from was done by BionTech a company in Germany led by immigrant turks.
Sure some American's recently got the Nobel prize for the pseudouridine modification - and whiles that's enabling it's not sufficient - you also need LNPs and a whole bunch of other stuff to make it all work - some of which was invented in America and some of which wasn't.
The nature of international science is collaboration.
The danger the for the US right now is it's cutting itself off from one of the biggest sources of innovation right now - China.
I’m sorry, but you are completely missing the point.
Nobody disputed that mRNA, like all science, has many inventors. And that many people in the west as a whole has worked on the technology. Everything you said about the contributions to mRNA is correct, and doesn’t diminish US’s critical part in it.
The point was, and remains, that saying that the US has stopped becoming innovative, is just nonsense.
Of course the US is still innovative - I think the question is whether countries like China are simply copying or now out innovating in some areas.
Their appears to be a lack of acknowledgement in the US about the current rate of innovation coming out of China these days - the days of only cheap knock-offs ( as with Japan before them ) is largely over.
In the areas I know - I see increasingly impressive innovation coming out of China right now.
The way the US is treating China right now is counter productive in my view. The biggest risk isn't the Chinese stealing US innovation - the biggest risk is the US cutting itself off from a key source of new ideas.
In my view the next Biontech is more likely to come from China than Germany.
I don't know why the US is treating it as a zero-sum game.
> Can you clarify what are you talking about? The US has been developing 6th-gen fighter since the mid mid-2010s - not that I'd consider it as an important new original invention.
So you think that, as an advanced military project that should have been kept under the strictest secrecy, the Chinese somehow obtained it and, based on that, developed their own sixth-generation fighter—and even managed a successful test flight while the U.S. is still at the PowerPoint stage? I don’t know which scenario would be worse for the United States.
Well, if we compare what we know about China's NGAD, which is almost nothing, with what we know about US NGAD, which is also almost nothing, we can safely conclude almost nothing.
China doesn’t yet have the jet engine technology to compete with American 5th gen fighters. I certainly don’t think the US or anyone else should be complacent, but the US has a substantial lead for now.
Not sure fighters matter as much these days - Russia has air superiority in terms of jets over Ukraine - but it uses them infrequently - appears the problem is the ground based counter measures are quite effective and much cheaper.
If they want to attack by air - drones and missiles rather than planes appear to be the way to go.
Similarly aircraft carriers - they can only really be used now to bully small countries. To anybody with significant missile/drone tech they are just massive, slow, sitting ducks.
What matters is drones and missiles etc and how fast you can churn them out. Who would win that?
The US is going to have to find a way to live with countries like China and India, rather than trying to suppress them.
The current US policy of trying to dismant all the organisations that were set up post world war II in order to keep the peace is madness.
>Russia has air superiority in terms of jets over Ukraine
No, no they do not. Russia has more fighter jets than Ukraine yes but that's not what "Air superiority" is, let alone "Air supremacy" which is what the USA designs for.
If you cannot suppress air defense networks, you do not have anything close to air superiority. If you cannot fly missions in an airspace, you do not have superiority.
>What matters is drones and missiles etc and how fast you can churn them out. Who would win that?
Drones and missiles still don't replace airframes. Do not mistake "Is new and the battlefield is still teasing things out" with "Is dominant forever". China definitely doesn't seem to think they are replacing airframes, and in fact is doubling down on making platforms that are aligned with US doctrine, like modern stealth fighters, carriers, and networked battlespace management.
Torpedo boats did not kill Battleships. Battleships were only replaced when their job could be done from longer range by an Aircraft carrier.
>To anybody with significant missile/drone tech they are just massive, slow, sitting ducks.
Only China with their legit Hypersonic weapons has a strong case for nullifying the carriers. US doctrine has included "Defend from 200 incoming weapons targeting the carrier" since the 60s when the Navy first built an entirely automated and networked fleet system to ensure that those incoming get tasked appropriately, and anti-missile defense is never a guarantee, but it works well enough that the sinking of the Moskva was utterly shocking to those familiar with it, and implies terrible things about Russian naval readiness.
The previous threat model of these carriers was supersonic bombers launching high speed cruise missiles 200 at a time from 100 miles out. Shaheds are not a threat. That's why the Navy started running primary 5inch gun practice against them. They are the same threat model as a helicopter because they are slow.
>The current US policy of trying to dismant all the organisations that were set up post world war II
Agree
>in order to keep the peace is madness.
What? That's uh, not what they are doing. See Venezuela.
> If you cannot suppress air defense networks, you do not have anything close to air superiority. If you cannot fly missions in an airspace, you do not have superiority.
Isn't that my point? The balance has shifted.
BTW I did't say planes or aircraft carriers are not useful - just that they are not useful for the political reasons that are given. ie they are useful in bullying second rate countries - however that's not how defence spending is justified - it's all about existential threat of Russia/China etc.
>in order to keep the peace is madness.
Sorry that sentence was unclear - I didn't mean they are dismantling to keep the peace, I'm saying the organisation were set up to keep the peace post WWII.
My reading of why they are dismantling them is because they think these organisations and treaties constrain them - which is of course true - and by and large a good idea.
Bottom line if you build up weapons because you fear somebody, you create fear in the other and create a vicious cycle - good for the arms industry - no good for anybody else. The only way to break that is to talk, do deals, build trust.
All of the US military is a waste including 6th generation fighters. We hope china copies our disinformation campaign. In fact as the usa has been taken apart almost all of our big secrets are just disinformation
- stealth (not really)
- aliens (sure....)
- 6th gen jets (where are the jets?)
The reality is that everything that you do in peacetime is just to scare the enemy and will have very little effect in war. Since the US doesn't have as much industrial capacity the only winning war is nuke from space first or learn to get along
And it is not like making a copy for cheaper isn't something that requires skill and innovation. Or then iterate on that copy. Didn't Roomba just fail to these copies. If west was truly so much more innovative and better shouldn't they as company be infinitely ahead still?
That depends heavily on where the cost saving came from. For a long time China made cheap copies with extremely cheap labor, though that may no longer be the case as it seems they're innovating on the manufacturing process these days.
I never said that, or that there's something wrong with copying. I just said the sentence implies copying. Which it does.
And in fact this meme Chinese only copy is crap as I point out in my last paragraph. Over the centuries the Chinese were the first at quite a few things.
Which in turn was fueled by the consumers' desire for cheap stuff, and for their portfolios to earn them a lot of money to be able to retire early and live comfortably while letting a cheaper workforce far away do more and more of the dirty and dangerous jobs.
The "bean counters" are under pressure just like everybody else. They didn't come up with their targets and incentives out of nowhere.
All is copied in one way or another, progress in a vacuum is truly artificial and those who've been singularly credited for certain inventions likely have so because of the luck of the draw.
If I was in china's position and so much is at stake, how can I go towards engineering all the tech from scratch when I can reverse engineer existing tech from west?
With Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line.
It’s a good thing that Chinese companies have zero expertise in leveraging consumer demand for lower-end tech to develop know-how and catch up with the state of the art from Western-aligned companies and then economies of scale to surpass them in distribution.
>pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up
"Forgetting to look up" implies a desire or intent to do so. The United States - former leader of the collective West - made the choice decades ago to sacrifice everything on the altar of quarterly profits. All that remains are the consequences of that decision.
You can round it down to Milton Friedman as the ideology and Jack Welch at GE in the 80s as the implementation and figurehead, but the original seeds were in the SEC mandating quarterly reporting as part of regulation after the great depression.
We can all agree to blame Jack Welch as shorthand though, I think.
It's not real. Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth. But for some reason people love to use this as an explanation of everything wrong in our country.
I'd cite as a counterexample in recent memory Sears, GE, Boeing, and Intel. I think collectively they've destroyed close to a trillion dollars by focus on quarterly results over long term, and they're not alone.
I sometimes wonder what a Drucker or ishikawa would say of today's "vaunted American management". Speed roughly short term thinking is too strong of a force in our American thinking. Heck I've counted three recent HN posts this month pushing for speedy software development too.
Yes, and we all saw what happened. They've experienced serious financial consequences, some went out of business. This is exactly what is supposed to happen when you do dumb shortsighted things.
There's also risk in investing in very long-term things that may not pan out.
FAANG-like stock, in general, has paid little to zero dividends for long periods of time post IPO, their rational stock values being based on hypothetical future dividends only after the initial self-investment phase is over.
Don't most tech startups lose money for years before they maybe make a profit?
I mean, I agree that such companies are over-represented in thinking about small businesses if that's what you mean. Normal companies have to be profitable quickly for sure.
It feels like tons of companies get valued based on userbase or revenue or theoretical breakthrough rather than ever having to really think about breaking even, but I know that's just because those folks get all the press.
> Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth.
But much of that long term growth now is just the company growing to displace competitors in existing markets, often by subsidizing prices and dodging regulations - see: Uber, Lyft, Air BnB, etc.
We've all seen the playbook a dozen times now: move into a market, keep prices artificially low until the existing competitors are displaced, then the raise prices to return the initial investment and more. That kind of growth-by-displacement is genuinely necessary sometimes but in these cases it's more like a fungus than a plant, just metabolizing an existing system.
It's not the same thing as actually expanding a market or investing in concrete assets (steel mills, power plants, boats, railroads) or R&D that compounds future growth. When the actual investment is just spent artificially lowering prices there's no actual efficiency gains and the consumers ultimately pay the price and more when the company hits the peak of the existing market and shift to enshittification mode to really extract wealth.
My counterpoint is that it’s not possible to buy appliances which last for decades anymore, because the entire industry has changed. Consumers eventually don’t have a choice
They have much less choice because all of those businesses that cared about quality have gone out of business!
100 years ago clothes were expensive items. Which is why they were class signals - less because of fashion and more because if you were poor you needed to buy long lasting fabrics. Clothes for the poor were expensive as well as the rich.
You can buy those same quality items today but nobody will because we expect clothes to be cheap and not have to repair them.
Take flights... For all the complaints about lack of legroom etc the price of a flight 50 years ago was the same as first/business class today. And yet how few people will pay for it. They'll grumble about small seats and bad snacks but hardly anybody will fork out for the upgrade. Not because they can't actually afford it but because they believe it should be cheaper.
I think some people can afford those quality goods, the same percentage roughly as could afford it before things got cheaper. The people complaining are people who couldn’t afford those quality goods earlier and now are buying the cheaper versions they can afford. But that has shaped broader consumer preferences for cheaper goods across the board
When a manager at GE decided to turn into a bank and get rid of all the making stuff, how was the consumer supposed to continue buying quality things that didn't exist?
When Sears was looted by management, how were consumers supposed to continue purchasing quality stuff from a historic company?
You've got your cause and effect backwards. American companies fired everyone who was paid enough to afford good stuff, and replaced them with workers in other countries, and then those people didn't really have a choice but to buy the junk because it was the only option left on the market and they couldn't afford anything else
What happened was that American business theory abandoned the American worker.
I would just be careful to discount the capitalist West. You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing. All of that wasted capital. Authoritarian regimes with controlled media always seem successful… until it doesn’t. Up until the USSR collapsed there were many prominent people in the West saying it was the superior system. The market test - meaning floating prices and the response to them - is a superior way of allocating capital. We need to see how all of this plays out
I swear I've been reading about overbuilding in China since, like, 2012. And I've definitely used it in arguments myself. Not only China hasn't collapsed, but it has improved massively since then, as far as I can tell.
The US also had a period of time in which their government directed large construction projects, and they too were particularly prosperous in the time afterwards.
Yep, it's way better to overbuild than underbuild. Lack of houses for young people looking to start families / move in for better jobs has big negative societal impacts that we're only starting to see.
> I would just be careful to discount the capitalist West.
I would. It's showing the weaknesses and limitations of its ideology.
> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing. All of that wasted capital.
So what?
> Authoritarian regimes with controlled media always seem successful… Up until the USSR collapsed there were many prominent people in the West saying it was the superior system.
The West is literally de-industrializing and can't seem to built shit except slowly and expensively. Industry after industry gets hollowed out as China takes the lead.
Do not make the mistake of reasoning about US vs China from the experience of US vs USSR. China doesn't have a command economy, outproduces the US, and controls many key industries. The US is resting on its laurels, and its people cope by thinking of the few industries where it's still ahead, but those are dwindling.
> The market test - meaning floating prices and the response to them - is a superior way of allocating capital.
That's not truth, it's a dogmatic assumption.
China has been able to exploit a dogmatic belief in the free market to siphon the real capital out of the West and into itself (industry and know-how) in order to achieve dominance. The US elite is content to have paper. We'll see how that works out.
> We need to see how all of this plays out
If you're rooting for China. If you're rooting for the US, by then it will be too late to course correct.
> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China
Isn't the same now happening with the US with the massive overbuilding of AI capacity? Seems like a tightly centralized capitalist system is not that different from a communist one.
Or rather thinking one step forward the question arises, whether we use the right words for the right things?
Does the capitalist West has any defining economics characteristics of a liberal free-market capitalism at all?
Private ownership of means of production: On an atomic, legal level of course. But if point at an NVIDIA based compute rack at a US based random datacenter, can someone tell me actually who owns it? I am interested in the actual natural person who has an ownership share of this capital asset, not the myriads of layers of corporate and financial networks of equity delegations through investment banks, but the actual owner?
Profit oriented: Of course, it is said so. But do really companies, entrepreneurs do things to maximize the profits of the actual owners, shareholders? Are the executives and boards really that keen on putting forward the interest - of the previously referenced unknown - actual owner of the capital assets?
Free market based: This has also multiple sub-characteristics, but most importantly something about competition, or rather the lack of collusion and that economic actors (including consumers, (natural person) investors) are all fully informed. How much is this true in the West?
> West-- as usual-- is pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up.
The companies building out vast data centers for AI aren’t looking to make profits for several years (if ever), and are catching a lot of flak for it. The shareholders who seem to be focused on short-term profits and punish them every time they get cold feet. Oracle is a prime example of this.
I don’t know if the markets in Asia work differently, or if the investors there are just as fickle.
And they should be catching a lot of flak for it because it's not really long term strategic planning, it's overhyping a technology and running roughshod over society promoting misuses and AI slops.
Although I'm the first to agree with this, it is actually commendable in the sense that it breaks with the quarterly profits approach.
Like meta with the metaverse thing, I hate it with a passion, but pouring billions yearly with little return just to support your vision is at least a break with tradition...
To be very fair, Chinese companies are also pursing quarterly profits. They're just better at scaling things up and down very fast because of immense supply chain options.
so this begs the question - why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense? My unresearched answer is that the gov't policies of the west doesn't induce it, while china's gov't does (which includes targeted subsidies, tax incentives and state driven finances).
The "hidden" cost is that the workers in this supply chain isn't as well paid and isn't as powerful as the workers from the west (there's no unions in china for example).
> why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense?
They used to be. Since roughly the 80's, policymakers have decided it is better for the shareholders to outsource most of that industry overseas to China and India and etc, where the labor is cheaper.
Note that workers and especially union members actually have every incentive to keep that production domestic, but shareholders and CEOs profit when they can cut labor costs and the typical Western consumer values cheap products more than the health of domestic industry.
Western industries have been supported by subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, low interest rates, and a dozen other things from the gov't but the same policies reward outsourcing and financial engineering more than actual production capacity.
> Rather, the US wants its worker coming up with the concept of drones to begin with.
Sure, but that idea is too stupid and arrogant to event consider. China's not going to cede that kind of high-level work forever. They'll learn how to do it, and when that happens what will the US do?
And then, in the conflict, can your "concept makers" get their implementation done by the hamburger assemblers, with their hamburger assembler skills and hamburger assembly equipment?
> They'll learn how to do it, and when that happens what will the US do?
Continue coming up with even more advanced ideas. This is like the Winklevoss Twins getting mad at Zuckerberg for 'stealing their idea', and the dean of Harvard lecturing them about how they're Men of Harvard and as such they'll simply come up with another idea, because that's what Men of Harvard do. They don't just one and done with one good idea.
The US built the world's most advanced idea factory, but the people who hate smart people got into power and now they're stripping the copper out of the walls.
> And then, in the conflict
There won't be a hot conflict between nuclear powers. Or there will, and whoever can make the most drones will be irrelevant in the first 24 hours.
>Sure, but that idea is too stupid and arrogant to event consider. China's not going to cede that kind of high-level work forever.
The "stupid and arrogant" idea has worked for decades and the only real problem with it is espionage. Stealing someone else's labor is an enormous amount of China's progress, and a good thing to remember when musing about a country's future.
> The "stupid and arrogant" idea has worked for decades and the only real problem with it is espionage.
No, the stupid and arrogant idea is the one that the Chinese will be content to occupy the subordinate position forever, taking direction from Westerners and doing only the grunt work the Westerners often think is beneath them.
It's also stupid and arrogant to think the Chinese are not capable of innovation on their own. The espionage was a tactic to catch up more quickly, and now that they've done that, Chinese are innovating on their own now and have better technology in many areas. But that's not the only thing going on: Western countries are literally going over to China, teaching them what they'll need to know to out-compete them in the future.
US and China are on completely different stages of industrialization: The US had its massive boom of manufacturing almost a century ago, enriching its population massively. Those rich citizens make the same manufacturing uncompetitive today, because no one is going to work in a factory for $20k/year (median wage in urban China), when he can work for other "rich" people for more than twice as much.
Switching paths is not feasible for the US in the same way that it is not gonna be feasible for China to hold on to all its industry as wages rise: You can't compete globally at "poor people wages" while being "rich", as simple as that.
The only thing that the US is on track to is getting a taste of what real corruption feels like, enriching Trump's friends, and hollowing out its middle class.
Joke's on them. If a wave of post-trump anti-corruption retribution doesn't come when the Republicans get swept out of power, we're going to have a whole generation of Luigis.
There are lots of reasons, but also, having 1.4B people under the same government that has more-or-less aligned strategic goals help. Like supply chains within Japan, from what I've seen and experienced, are pretty strong. However, the options will always look smaller compared to a gigantic organism across the pond.
> why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense?
Because each city in China has become specialized. You want to have someone make hairdryers for your company to sell? Then go to Cixi. There are dozens of small suppliers making the parts that go into hair dryers. There are dozens of companies making small appliances (just like hairdryers) They're all "just down the street" from each other. This means that the knowledge and infrastructure and workers are all in one place. You don't have to ship a truckload of heater elements across the country to some factory that some CEO decided should be built in the lowest cost real estate. The same reason that all of the America IC manufacturers got started in Silicon Valley.
This sort of specialization/concentration used to happen in the US. That's why NYC had a "garment district" where you could get clothing made from design to ready-to-sell. Los Angeles used to be one of the major hubs for making aircraft because of the large number of small companies making stuff that the aerospace companies assemble into aircraft. Jacobs wrote about this sort of thing in Cities And The Wealth of Nations about how the Shah of Iran wanted a helicopter factory in Iran. It was a flop because none of the seats are made across town, they're made in America, like the blades or engine or windscreen or avionics. All the Shah got for his dream was an assembly plant. There was no transfer of technology so that the parts could be made in Iran.
Before shipping containers were invented, shipping goods was expensive enough that factories making things tended to be located close to their suppliers. That was why Detroit became a center of car manufacturing. Shipping containers made it cheaper to transport some item across an ocean than it costs to drive it across the city.
The West (with particular emphasis on the USA) got infected with this insane ideology that the best way to restore democracy to China would be to "corrupt" them with capitalism. Hence open them up to international trade, allow joining WTO etc. With prosperity the people would demand democracy.
You can also see this in the German approach to energy trade with Russia.
This toxic idea needs to be put to bed. All it did was feed and enrich foreigners at the expense of locals and create supply chain dependencies that made themselves hostage.
The beneficial owners of the US economy sold our industrial manufacturing base to the Communist Party of China because the price was good. China got our hard power and US capital owners got to break the back of the US labor movement. A win-win deal for the ages.
Chinese companies are simply not as beholden to shareholders - the stock market really doesn’t dominate the country’s financial landscape as it does in the US
It might be a bit nihilistic but at this point I don't think the current US administration has any strategy. In past administrations, it felt like even if there was a strategy, bureaucracy and lack of caring enough to do their job led to nothing happening. In this administration, it feels like there's no care for the rules so in theory a strategy could be pushed through... except there isn't one - literally whoever is the last person to talk to the president is the person who gets to set the direction.
> I don't think the current US administration has any strategy
I 100% believe the strategy is to enlarge the Trump family's wealth, and it's been a wildly successful strategy (in the past year he's been able to create billions in wealth for his family [0]). At least this vaguely ties Trump's success to the success of the United States in a limited capacity. Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, but it's clear all policy decisions being made are being done so based on their capacity to improve Trump's situation.
We've been headed this direction long before Trump, from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies and in particular the people who own them. Now that pool has just shrunk a bit.
> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him
How can you say? The ultra wealthy are not playing team sports. If the country burned tomorrow they would just sit on their yacht or buy citizenship somewhere else.
Sure the lion share of his investments are currently in the US, but that could easily change.
Most cynically? I sincerely believe there's more value he can extract from American workers if he can keep the ride going on just a bit longer. For example: it's better to keep the stock market a float a volatile so he can transfer a bit more wealth from the American people before it does eventually break down.
Yes, they'll all be on yachts when the shit hits the fan, but they're still fighting to figure out who get the biggest yacht, and right now it seems like Trump has more to milk from us before he entirely lets this thing fall apart.
He also has dementia so he probably can't plan that far ahead. He's operating on a very short term feedback cycle: this reporter asked me a question that makes me look bad, so I call her piggy. That's the timescale we're operating on. Not even quarterly profits but moment-to-moment.
> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him,
Exactly, just as taking out structural supports when stripping copper and goods from a three story walkup is sub optimal and potentially fatal.
But make no mistake, from way out here (Australia), having watched the US for decades, it really does look like you've a grifter inside the house taking everything that isn't nailed down with zero concern for anyone else in the US.
It's a bad time for those that cannot afford shiny gold baubles.
> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him
Nah.
He wants to be a dictator that extracts wealth from it's citizens.
He has a benefit from following the communist path to extract wealth. Make lives miserable, so they are living off the state ( eg. standing in line for bread), so they can't protest.
Putin is not Trump's friend, but Trump idolises him for extracting enormous wealth from Russia, censoring news ( propaganda) and imprisoning political opponents, ...
Just check the "firehose of falsehoods" ( a Russian propaganda method), it will explain a lot about Trump.
>Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him
People like Trump are perfectly happy to destroy a trillion dollars of GDP as long as they get a billion. Project 2025 and all the techfascist dreams of "Network states" are exactly about destroying the US and ruling over the ashes. Christian fundamentalists for example are perfectly happy to have a shell of a former good country as long as they get to institute sharia law.
> from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies
When democrats lost the election to Reagan by a landslide, it was pretty clear Americans had no idea what good policy was and would not vote for it. That's what the problem was. Bill Clinton did neoliberalism and "It's the economy stupid" and democrats pushed for the Crime Bill because those slogans were what the American voter will respond to, at least until right wing media improved it's propaganda power to turn the entire concept of "democrat" into a slur.
Voters in the 80s decided that hard work and building a better future was for suckers, and they'd rather loot the future and do cocaine now. So here we are. Now the exact same people are pitching a fit and giving everything to Trump because they are angry that the policies they supported the past 40 years did exactly what they should have expected.
People keep voting for republicans because "the debt is bad" despite 25 years of direct and objective evidence showing that to be the worst idea.
People keep voting for republicans for "anti-war" despite Bush Jr. getting re-elected for running multiple criminal wars against the middle east, not even the right fucking countries, "for doing 9/11"
People keep voting for republicans "because of the economy" even though republicans haven't shown any ability to run the damn economy for decades, and Trump specifically pushing for things that harm the economy outright.
I think it's the same problem as the past administration and most members of congress- they're just too old to care about 50yrs from now. I don't think they're actively against the 50yr+ future, it's just that the world is changing too fast, and they're falling back to what they know- competing with their peers for power, money, and status. They only have some inkling of actual empathy for the communities their grandkids are in at a personal level, and just have the "throw money at it" mentality for the bigger issues like healthcare, since that has been their MO for the last couple decades. Instead of taking leadership positions and driving change, they seem to just want to squabble and create fiefdoms and have others do the work.
I do think the current administration is still a step down from the (not particularly great) last, though. Congress has essentially given up their authority on everything so any movement must come from the top… and the top has an extremely small attention span.
Did you miss the Infrastructure act that spent $500B on roads, ports, and water projects? The CHIPS act that spent $50B on decoupling and R&D?! The Climate & Energy act ("IRA") that spent $400B on clean energy subsidies??!!
I can understand the perspective of wanting more, but the forward-looking policies of the last administration were in a different galaxy compared to those of the current administration, where the big plan is to chop USAID, boost deportations, and cut capital gains tax.
This is the difference between corn and the cob and corn in the toilet. No, it is not the same.
The problem is that China could have built the same infrastructure for $100B and in 25% of the time. Pumping subsidies into our bloated bureaucratic nightmare of a system is only going to make the lawyers and bureaucrats who are its gatekeepers fatter.
TSMC Arizona Gigafab, Intel's Chandler fabs, Micron's Boise megafab, these are all giant buildings full of equipment cranking out chips or credibly preparing to. I'd hazard a guess that more than lawyers were involved.
Oh, but trollbridge saw a lawyer once! That's it, phone it in, shut it all down, corruption proven, the gigantic buildings must be all be a mirage. Trollbridge saw a lawyer and that disproves everything!
In the google results, if you had bothered to google. It turns out $50B was enough to tip the investment calculus on half a dozen large projects and a dozen or so smaller ones.
So tell me: was it learned helplessness or partisan hackery that made you severely underestimate what turned out to be possible?
My opinion comes from my personal experience with CHiPs funded projects but admittedly thats merely anecdotal knowledge so I’m very glad to hear that Biden’s “biggest ever!”(tm) inflation reduction package met its goals and wasn’t just money printing and political cronyism. Imagine where we would be without all those new chip fabs and infrastructure fixes you mentioned finding in your Google search. You’re right, that was 50 billion, give or take, well spent!
Current US strategy is to get South America+Canada resources and call it a day. They looked at global geopolitics and it looked too complicated for them.
Without getting overly political, it is nihilistic because one of the major US parties got so high on its own supply of lies that the people currently running it FORGOT they were lying. You're looking at a similar situation to many authoritarian or fascist political systems in which they way to get ahead in no way involves doing your job, but making sure Stalin or Mussolini is happy with you. This started in the US in the mid 1990s when GOP leadership bought in on power being its own end and is now on full display.
People have all sorts of mythologized reasons for why the USSR failed, because while it often produced immense amounts of goods and services and well educated people in certain areas (sometimes beating "the west" by a good margin for one or two years at a go), it also made long term advancement contingent on the party and not the real world and became incapable of handling major changes.
We're witnessing that now in the US with perhaps one of the most incompetent governments in history that is also burning down the non-political institutions of expertise that for all their faults and mistakes, at least had educated and motivated people that cared about their purpose.
It's more accurate to say everyone who wants to do the right thing is a Democrat, than to say all Democrats want to do the right thing. Most of them are just the lite version of Republicans.
Oh, they know. The industry has been lobbying quite badly for exactly this to happen. Why spend a fortune on innovation when a few bucks of lobbying can get the government to ban your competition because "China bad"?
As the comment you responded to said: it's all about the next quarterly profits. The fact that we are getting leapfrogged by China doesn't matter to those CEOs: that's a long-term thing, and it doesn't impact their next bonus.
this is one of those 'elections matter' cases. There's no strategy. Americans made it clear they want a country run by real estate crooks, crypto bros, gambling advocates and bizarre entertainment personalities. A country sized Las Vegas maybe and the beauty is the people get always what they deserve.
Or, to play Devil's advocate, people called in the rabid dog because they felt they had been sold down the river starting in the 1970s. The hollowed out industrial towns weren't good places to grow up, and when they did manage to go to college and play by the rules the ladders were already in a fast retreat up the walls..
I took the previous comment as satire, considering that - for example - Chinese electric vehicles are now far more affordable than anything produced domestically in the US.
You are 100% correct on that, I fully expect that importing cheap GPUs and NPUs will be banned in the US, or tariff'd so heavily that it doesn't matter should they become available. But that will just allow Nvidia to fall behind until they get surpassed like AMD passed Intel.
A move like that will seriously hurt our ability to train and raise new software developers and the domestic game market.
Importing might be banned until the US loses access to its main source of GPU manufacturing. And what are the US going to do about it? Defend Taiwan? With missiles made with components and materials processed where, pray tell?
The US does need to start protecting its manufacturing again, but it’d be lucky to start at a level as high as high end semiconductors. That’d be like a stroke victim trying to run before they re-learn to walk.
As others have pointed out, this means less services, more manufacturing, less consumption, a probably a lower standard of living. But with the business as usual alternative looking a lot like business as usual in the western Roman Empire circa 450 CE, taking a hit to your standard of living while investing in a future which you still have the slightest control over, maybe feels like a decent trade.
The fact that we banned the better products out of spite doesn't mean they're not better products.
Imagine if in 2010 the USA had banned itself from using computer hardware more powerful than they had at the time. Where would they be in the AI race? That's the situation the USA is heading for.
When it comes to China and its ability to quickly mass produce items while incrementally improving on them, I absolutely will view the past as an indicator of the future.
One function of R&D involves how to manufacture things cheaply, quickly + en masse.
Those efficiencies that started with consumer drones now serve drones used in war. DJI being used at the start of the war is the evidence of that.
Continuation of that investment in R&D will also lead to new technologies: such as quieter drones, drones that can carry more, go further, and be controlled through difficult to counter means.
It's blithely short sighted to think that the technology is already at its maximum, or that these concepts are disconnected from each other. It's a type of naive thinking that people on the internet do to rationalise a false sense of security.
Also: to address another set of comments in this thread - China aren't looking at EUV so they can break into the graphics cards market or lower the price of RAM. Absolute utter numpties.
Yeah PRC probably going to dump 1T into indigenize semi efforts by end of decade, but IMO good chance they're going to treat strategic semi as commodity utility business than make NASDAQ lines go up model. When western semi has 1st tier suppliers taking 30% margin, asml taking 50%, tsmc taking 50%, nvidia taking lol 70%, there's alot of fat on the pyramid to trim. PRC doing cost plus 10-20% will basically be able to brrrt chips stupid cheap if they have mature domestic tool scaling, enough to wipe litho+yield inefficiencies.
Western semi still "safe" since west+co aren't going to source from PRC leading edge due to national security, but pretty soon they're either going to need to compress margins to compete which means cutting costs, which means cutting R&D because shareholder going to get theirs or western semi business model going to run on permenant subsidies. Which is what will probably happen considering their performance is why stonk lines go up right now. That 1T PRC spend and choose to simply discount for utility chips is going to wipe multipel trillion of western semi market cap and all the economic implications that entails so it might not even be bad idea.
The NASDAQ line go up model is why the AI boom is happening and a major factor in why it is Western companies leading the charge. The more bigger issue is that the west refused to sell chips to China so they had to figure out how to make their own. And margin compression is what free markets do. That is one of the big motivators to putting free markets everywhere, the freer the market the more compressed the margins become. All the people working hard at crappy jobs start working hard at high paying jobs instead until the competition drives the money out of the sector.
There is a theme in the industries China does well in - western regulators ban cut-throat competition, China competes very hard and wins. The situation at scale is pretty straightforward. Usually it is environmental or labour policy, so this case of the root cause being sanctions is a bit unusual. But, once again, how Nvidia is meant to compete in China when their best products can't be sold there?
Free markets suppose to compress margins, perfect market theoretically drive profits down to zero (aka involution). But you compress margin and you lose current western semi business model that is functionally monopoly suppliers/producers who can sustain 50%+ margins to keep their monopoly. Shed those margins down to 20% because competitor enters market, harder to fund R&D to keep lead, it's still "enough" to be profitable, but then western commercial companies have to think harder how to split that compressed margin between investors and R&D. Right now we know what this leads to. Investors get paid, companies beg for subsidies. Not that PRC companies aren't concerned, look at PRC stock capitlization, not nearly to the same degree.
I poorly paraphrased profits converge to zero under perfect competitive market. Yes real world not perfect competitive markets. Oligor/duo/monopolies form, sometimes subsidies other shenanigans pick winner(s), winners extract huge margins/rents to build moats lock out new competition. Sometimes they collude / settle on business model with higher margins, i.e. 10-20% being normal/commodity, 50% for software and semi is top end of luxury goods. New state backed competitor enters and decides they can live on 10% margin, and then incumbants business model falls apart unless state also steps in to match.
E: And state can, but I don't know if state generally willing/able to backstop companies to 50% margin long term. I can't think of any, maybe some major state oil. Nvidia/TSMC with $$$ margins getting some CHIPs injection really meant for bailing out broke ass Intel was already anomalous, and it was basically to bribe them to onshore production.
Note "converging to zero" doesn't really mean zero because economics includes opportunity costs. It just means that outsized gains don't exist over the longer term without some kind of market power. In the long run, most industries end up making the same returns.
I've found that this does not match reality. People have strong beliefs in value of specific things, even when that value is not economically there. The value of software is indeed zero, which seems to make people value hiring software engineers greatly over paying for software, and, tbh, that makes approximately zero sense in a lot of cases. The value of medical care is high, even when it's not (meaning there is plenty of medical and "medical" products that don't have real value). The value of houses is high and absolutely certain. Thinks like certain brands (even when the company behind them has disappeared), most obviously of watches.
This tends towards the economic reality but it certainly does not match it.
Except the market pretty much can't do this with Nvidia. Nobody is showing any sign of catching up: it is entirely possible we are seeing a runaway train and without the intervention of a massive state like China to create a viable competitor, there will never be one.
This situation has been going on for 5 years now. It's ridiculous to assume there will never be competition. You. could have said the same about Intel a couple of decades ago.
> There is a theme in the industries China does well in - western regulators ban cut-throat competition,
The problem is not regulation, it is the lack of it: anti-monopolist practices and deregulation of the finance industry has led us to insane bubbles, dead markets and extreme wealth concentration. Any competition gets bought, crushed, or undercut via bankrolling. This is what you get when the 0.0001% gets to pull the strings again. Must watch (3 parts): https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...
They flood an industry with funds and let them all compete with each other. Then they back the biggest winner. A command economy usually mandates X units of Y good. This isn’t quite that.
Its a pretty big detriment to American thinking that they take cold-war era characterizations of the Russian economy and then apply them to 2025 China.
The current Chinese worries are about having too much competition rather than too little, Google "involution" to read about it.
I am talking about the economy in the Western model, it works well if there is competition. And it usually needs the state to do moonshots, like the literal moon shot or Silicon Valley. But the American economy was the most impressive during the Roosevelt years. The war production was insane, with 75% state planned, state built and state owned factories. The private sector was dominated by oligarchy owned monopolies, which means it wasn't impressive¹. The government had no time for conservative fairy tales and needed to take initiative.
What helped was the public outrage over the insane profits the American oligarchs reaped during WOI. This enabled Roosevelt during WOII to set a maximum profit margin for the oligarchy owned factories and fined those who evaded the law. It was a shock for the conservatives to see how the bureaucracy turned America's mediocre output around with a fast, efficient and lean production monster. The monopolists had to resort to propaganda, claiming the government's success as theirs, injecting the falsehoods we now all take for granted.
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1. As an exercise, think what would be possible if all the cash piles didn't sit at big tech, but instead enabled competition. Meta isn't still more than a useless addiction factory.
Your analysis is out of date I think. This has already happened. Poor NXP just got their asses handed to them by the PRC. The fab they have in Italy looks nice but PRC has many of those.
Also Texas Instruments, STMicro, Onsemi, Microchip Tech, i.e. what PRC is doing after going big in mature nodes last few years they likely will also do in leading edge. IMO there's argument that since leading edge will definitely be strategically bifurcated PRC and western semi can pseudo collude to maintain higher margins, especially if PRC wants to claw back investment. But if western semi continues to drive economy/growth there's also incentive to weaponize margins.
You don't need CUDA for gaming but software is still just as big of a moat. Gaming GPU drivers are complex and have tons of game-specific patches.
With their new Radeon/RDNA architecture it took AMD years to overcome their reputation for having shitty drivers on their consumer GPUs (and that reputation was indeed deserved early on). And I bet if you go read GPU discussion online today you'll still find people who avoid AMD because of drivers.
That won't stop them, but it's a big barrier to entry.
Oh and that's just to get the drivers to work. Not including company-specific features that need to be integrated by the game devs into their game codebase, like DLSS / FrameGen and FSR. And in the past there was other Nvidia/AMD-specific stuff like PhysX, hair rendering, etc.
Cuda is 20 years old and it shows. Time for a new language that fixes the 20 years of rough edges. The Guy (Lattner) who made LLVM is working on this: https://www.modular.com/mojo
What I gather from this comment is that you haven't written CUDA code in a while, maybe ever.
Mojo looked promising initially. The more details we got though, the more it became apparent that they weren't interested in actually competing with Nvidia. Mojo doesn't replace the majority of what CUDA does, it doesn't have any translation or interoperability with CUDA programs. It uses a proprietary compiler with a single implementation. They're not working in conjunction with any serious standardization orgs, they're reliant on C/C++ FFI for huge amounts of code and as far as I'm aware there's no SemVer of compute capability like CUDA offers. The more popular Mojo gets, the more entrenched Nvidia (and likely CUDA) will become. We need something more like OpenGL with mutual commitment from OEMs.
Lattner is an awesome dude, but Mojo is such a trend-chasing clusterfuck that I don't know what anyone sees in it. I'm worried that Apple's "fuck the dev experience" attitude rubbed off on Chris in the long run, and made him callous towards appeals to openness and industry-wide consortiums.
Many of those posts are opinionated and even provably wrong. The very first one about Deepseek's "recent breakthrough" was never proven or replicated in practice. He's drawing premature conclusions, ones that especially look silly now that we know Deepseek evaded US sanctions to import Nvidia Blackwell chips.
I can't claim to know more about GPU compilers than Lattner - but in this specific instance, I think Mojo fucked itself and is at the mercy of hardware vendors that don't care about it. CUDA, by comparison, is having zero expense spared in it's development at every layer of the stack. There is no comparison with Mojo, the project is doomed if they intend any real comparison with CUDA.
Yea, but less than in the past. Modern graphics APIs are much thinner layers.
This was even proven in practice with Intel’s Arc. While they had (and to some extent still have) their share of driver problems, at a low enough price that isn’t a barrier.
> Gaming GPU drivers are complex and have tons of game-specific patches.
I don't think the Chinese government will be too upset if cheap Chinese GPUs work best with China-made games. It will be quite the cultural coup if, in 20 years time, the most popular shooter is a Chinese version of Call of Duty or Battlefield.
They made the most popular RPG last year already - why do you think it'll take 20 years for them to make the most popular shooter? For that matter, the Singapore-HQed SEA makes Free Fire, which topped Google Play in 2019.
Im aware of Genshin Impact, and that NetEase is behind Marvel Rivals. FPS tend to have sticker fanbases, but I chose 20 years because that's what I guess is how long it may take not only for the domestic EUV to launch and get yields good enough for a cheap but competitive GPU out the door.
Gacha mobages are rarely considered the same kind of entertainment as actual RPGs, and even then the Japanese and the Koreans give them stiff competition. When it's not a skinner box FOMO with titillating skins the Chinese barely register on the radar.
On the other hand, all it would take would be one successful Steam Deck/Steam Machine-style console to get all the developers of the world making sure that their games work on that hypothetical GPU.
I don't think that it will happen in the next 5 years, but who knows?
I believe the software will follow the hardware. Not immediately, of course, but if I want to learn to do ML and have to pick between a $2500 Nvidia GPU and a $500 Chinese GPU that's 80% as fast, I would absolutely take the cheap one and keep an eye out for patches.
When it comes to drivers, IMO all they really need is reasonable functionality on linux. That alone would probably be enough to get used in a budget steam machine or budget pc builds, with Windows 11 being a disaster and both RAM and GPU prices shooting through the roof. The choice may soon be Bazzite Linux with a janky GPU or gaming on your phone.
Its not really just that AMD drivers are not that great (they are not) but they have been stable for a long time.
Its that nvidia relentlessly works with game developers to make sure their graphics tricks work with nvidia drivers. Its so obvious you miss it. Look in the nvidia driver updates they always list games that have fixes, performance ect. AMD never (used?) to do this they just gave you the drivers and expected developers to make their game work with it. The same strategy that MS used for their OS back in the 90's.
AMD provides this. Example:
"Fixed Issues and Improvements
Intermittent driver timeout or crash may be observed while playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 on some AMD Graphics Products, such as the AMD Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370.)
Lower than expected performance may be observed in Delta Force on Radeon™ RX 7000 series graphics products.
Intermittent stutter may be observed while playing Marvel Rivals when AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 3 frame generation is enabled. "
Glad to see. Ive been 100% certian that nvidia will ultimately abandon the gfx market since 2022. If AMD doesnt pick up the torch computer gfx will stagnate for at least a decade. Its already regressing.
They definitely do it some, like Starfield came out with FSR out of the box but they didn’t add DLSS for several months. I got Starfield for free when I bought my 7800X3D which was a nice bonus. Definitely to a lesser degree than Nvidia though.
Frankly, this always seemed like dirty hacks - either the game or the drivers don't actually comply woth the graphics API and then the drivers need to hack around that. :P
I don't work in the industry but as I've understood from reading stuff from people that are. Basically the entire industry is dirty hacks from the top down and bottom up.
That is not to say this is good or bad. Just that it appears common.
The general trend of the industry is to move computational resources from the hands of users into data centers, so that they can control what can be done and how much they'll charge for computational services. In the medium term, a lot of what we take for granted nowadays will only be accessible from cloud providers and companies will pay more and more in subscriptions for these services.
Isn’t that mostly economics? I definitely prefer using Claude to GPT-OSS120B for a code assistant.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $500,000 laying around to buy myself a DGX B200 with a TB of HBM and 2TB of system ram, nor the 14.3kW of power to run the thing.
I'm pretty sure all of these LLMs operate in the black on inference costs.
If I were to set up a DGX200 in my garage, say the 5 year TCO is a million dollars. Split that among 500 people and we can get it done for maybe $30/mo per user in total operating cost. I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server.
> I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server.
Seems like on hn a lot of people pay for the subscriptions.
I don't personally know a single person who pays for any type of llm subscription. I am a staff sw engineer, been doing this a long time.
I acknowledge this is an anecdote. I just happen to know a lot of people at a lot of different companies from my network. Nobody pays for any of this. My company has banned llms, even if I wanted to use one, I can't.
I actually even gave one a shot tonight. I asked for a list of repos I needed to clone to build a yocto image for an nxp board. This was the result:
I then pointed out that three of those lines were useless and asked it to fix those lines. The result I got was even more hilarious, and just as useless.
Disclaimer: this was the "dive deeper" button on a google search. No idea what fucking model it tried to use.
How much of the current usage is paying at least 1 cent per inference? AI providers are giving away AI for anyone to use. Only professionals and big companies, that are at most 1% of the market, are paying anything at this point.
Who knows? LLM providers losing money on every user and making it up on volume is a problem for them to deal with. I’m simply saying that the products are here to stay, even if (hopefully) the companies need to right-size their growth strategies. If Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 is the pinnacle of models and we never see a new one again, I think they’ll be useful and cash flow positive. OpenAI and Anthropic will, of course, go bankrupt. But the models themselves are absolutely valuable.
Cloud providers will use cheap investment capital to buy chips at increasing prices, while the public will be economically forced to get computational services from these cloud providers. After a few years, most software will work only when connected to cloud infrastructure, either for performance or for "safety" reasons. We're already seeing this with AI.
Cloud was there for many years and it's not that cheap, compared to ordinary servers you can buy. It's not clear how anything will change in the future.
Because of this I hope the current AI fad is a bubble and it bursts soon. So instead of cheap investment drying up the market for individual consumers, we'll have lots of used corporate hardware selling at scrap prices to end users.
It makes me feel so gross that these companies are leaving gamers behind. The whole idea of a GPU was from gaming and games. And the whole AI evolution was subsequently born over the fact that gamers/software engineers could toy around with incredibly powerful CUDA without having to shoehorn a weird graphics Api in the middle to do mathematics.
They did the same thing with the COVID crypto era boom. There really is no honor for these companies and I will be buying the first Chinese made silicone out of absolute spite and anger
At this point I’d straight up buy their PC components, because fuck Nvidia for doing that. Same goes for other manufacturers throwing the consumer segment into the dirt because of their greed.
I already got an Intel Arc to support more market competition (A580 was rough, B580 is a decent daily driver) and if the prices weren’t absolutely insane would have gotten the 245K (better than my 5800X, but not for the price).
scale down or not, we will see consumer GPU from China in the future. might be a copy or rip of existing GPUs, but it will happen. 3 of my GPU rigs are chinese MB built for the chinese market, ripoff of dual x99. They work, they are cheap, I got them for under $100 a piece. So maybe 5 years from now, we get cheap GPUs, and maybe they will be equivalent to 5090s, but who cares if the price is right?
> I don't think Nvidia wants to give up on consumer... This is a pragmatic choice.
You mean, NV is after the money with a heavy heart and a sad tear or two over the abandoned consumers, like "We love you so much but sorry, we must go pragmatic on you"?
> And most of the money is in commercial.
This is a serious systemic failure and it's even wilder that it's accepted without question.
That's not the right light to view this chess move.
If Nvidia had infinite supply and infinite resources, they would absolutely continue doing consumer. There are constraints that prevent them from doing so at the typical volumes.
Giving up on consumer also means giving up on a gateway to more CUDA ecosystem users.
At this point, the only reason to be in the consumer GPU market is because that's the first rung on the ladder that leads to the AI data center market.
Would be interesting if the US decides to ban or heavily tariff these chips and if the consequence will be significanly cheaper data center access through chinese-owned sites/platforms
> If that happens, hardware trust becomes non-verifiable.
Unfortunately I already have to run a binary blob just to play fps games from 10 years ago. I can't even load a new OS onto my phone anymore.
Ultimately I'm not sure hardware sourced from China changes the trust equation very much, at least for me individually. I have much more concern about the FBI, which has recently decided to ramp up investigations into queer people [0][1][2], than I do about foreign powers - at least as long as it's not actively destructive malware or something.
> We will also see talent pipeline erosion.
We absolutely will, and to some degree I wonder if we aren't already with how popular tablets and phones are. I've noticed many young people these days don't really know how to interact with anything on a computer that isn't an app. GPUs and RAM becoming more significantly more expensive will take a huge chunk out of the hobby market and in doing so they will intensify the pipeline erosion.
Modern GPU's often have on device firmware, secure boot chains, microcontrollers, etc. If you don't control silicon design, firmware signing and update pipelines you can't meaningfully attest to what the advice is doing.
For the average paranoid person who is wasting their life on it, sure
But large organizations like defense are all about distributed trust anyway - even if you could verify the hardware, the guy you order to do it is going to be a whole command chain removed and likely a contractor with a clearance in the civilian world.
Whereas your high level political and military leadership having direct contact with managers and designers in production facilities is extremely valuable.
You're screwed. An individual is completely powerless against the combined might of the entire country they live in. Nothing you touch and nobody you talk to can be trusted.
But realistically, they'll just bring out the wrench[0].
If I were running this show, I would have a second concurrent project as a hedge and as a chance of leapfrogging the West: trying to make free electron laser lithography work.
Free electron lasers have lots of (theoretical) advantages: no tin debris, better wavelength control, the ability to get even shorter wavelengths, higher power, higher efficiency, and it’s less Rube Goldberg-ish. Also the barrier to entry for basic research is pretty low: I visited a little FEL in a small lab that looked like it had been built for an entirely reasonable price and did not require any clean rooms.
So far it seems like Japan is working on this, but I have the impression that no one is trying all that hard.
Yeah I think it's likely they get an EUV machine working but with less efficiency than ASML just because of how long it takes to tune these beasts and work out all the kinks.
The big brain move is to try leap-frog the whole thing with XFEL. Smaller wavelength, way brighter source, no vaporized tin particulate, etc.
It's a much bigger lift, new optics, new resists, etc. So a completely brand new supply-chain from scatch but with no competitors on that tech yet and low will for Western companies to try compete on it because they need to get money out of existing EUV tech first.
This is very similar IMO to Chinese auto manufacturing. Their ICE cars never really did meet the same standards as European or Japanese manufacturers despite JVs etc.
However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.
> However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.
I'm not convinced Chinese EVs are technologically better. They've just command economied demand and reduced costs via mass production. The technology seems pretty inline with anything available in the West but demand isn't there to take advantage of scale. China is ahead in EVs by metric of quantity for sure but I don't think they're got next gen battery tech they are keeping secret.
Making batteries for $80/kWh IS the next gen tech. I’m pretty sure China invented lipo (EDIT: I meant lfp) (at least they’re the only ones making it) and they’re currently pushing ahead on sodium ion. They are also the ones who have pushed lithium ion to the point it is today. My first EV was a Nissan Leaf that cost 40 grand and could drive 80 miles. Now you can buy 300-mile cars for about that. That was all China’s doing and nearly every EV on the road today uses their batteries.
They have done to the battery market exactly what Taiwan did to the chip market. You can buy an EV made anywhere the same way you can buy a laptop made anywhere. But guess where the chips and batteries were made.
They didn't invent LiPo (and you probably don't want those in a car), nor did they invent LFP (LiFePO4) but they did license it when no one else wanted to and turned it into probably the best EV battery tech you can buy today. They didn't innovate a ton on the chemistry but they did on the packaging side, BYD and CATLs structural pack designs exploit the low thermal runaway characteristics in a way that wouldn't be safe for NMC etc to reach near parity on density but with better longevity and cost.
They will be the first to sodium ion and solid state though.
One could tune an FEL to precisely the same wavelength as ASML’s setup if one were so inclined. (Subject to all kinds of complications, as the high energy electron sources needed are complex and EUV light is hard to work with. But there isn’t much of a fundamental constraint on the ability to adjust the wavelength of a FEL.)
A free electron laser (FEL) uses free electrons (electrons not attached to a nucleus) as a lasing medium to produce light. The light would shine through a mask and expose photoresist more or less just like the light from ASML’s tin plasma contraption, minus the tin plasma. FELs, in principle, can produce light over a very wide range of wavelengths, including EUV and even shorter.
That DARPA thing is a maskless electron beam lithography system: the photoresist is exposed by hitting it directly with electrons.
Electrons have lots of advantages: they have mass, so much less kinetic energy is needed to achieve short wavelengths. They have charge, so they can be accelerated electrically and they can be steered electrically or magnetically. And there are quite a few maskless designs, which saves the enormous expense of producing a mask. (And maskless lithography would let a factory make chips that are different in different wafers, which no one currently does. And you need a maskless technique to make masks in the first place.) There were direct-write electron-beam research fabs, making actual chips, with resolution comparable to or better than the current generation of ASML gear, 20-30 years ago, built at costs that were accessible to research universities.
But electrons have a huge, enormous disadvantage: because they are charged, they repel each other. So a bright electron beam naturally spreads out, and multiple parallel beams will deflect each other. And electrons will get stuck in electrically nonconductive photoresists, causing the photoresist to (hopefully temporarily) build up a surface charge, interfering with future electron beams.
All of that causes e-beam lithography to be slow. Which is why those research fabs from the nineties weren’t mass-producing supercomputers.
What bandwidth limitations are you referencing? My understanding is that deep euv lithography is limited by chromatic aberration, so the narrow bandwidth of a single beam FEL would be an advantage. If you need more bandwidth, you can chirp it. Is the bandwidth too high?
They mean bandwidth as in rate at which one can expose a mask using an electron beam, because they’ve confused two different technologies. See my other reply.
P.S. Can you usefully chirp an FEL? I don’t know whether the electron sources that would be used for EUV FELs can be re-tuned quickly enough, nor whether the magnet arrangements are conducive to perturbing the wavelength. But relativistic electron beams are weird and maybe it works fine. Of course, I also have no idea why you would want to chirp your lithography light source.
I don't think it's strictly chirping, but there are methods to achieve that sort of time/ bandwidth trade-off with FELs. I've seen references to it pop up in high speed imaging, though the details of anything that fast and small are quite outside my expertise. Wasn't sure why you would want high bandwidth either, hence my confusion.
If they actually produce machines that can do ~14 nm stuff on "desktop" sized equipment, perhaps we'll see a lot of it eventually. As far as I can remember a lot of decent processing and storage chips were made with ~14 nm processes over the last decade or so.
Oh, that’s neat. It uses high-harmonic generation.
My sole personal experience with any sort of harmonic generation was being in the room while some grad students debugged a 266nm laser that consisted of a boring 1064nm Nd:YAG laser followed by two frequency doublers. Quite a lot of power was lost in each stage, and the results of accidentally letting the full 1064nm source power loose were mildly spectacular.
I wish Lumiverse luck getting any appreciable amount of power out of their system. (FELs, in contrast, seem to be cable of monstrous power output — that’s never been the problem AFAIK.)
P.S. never buy a 532nm laser from a non-reputable source. While it’s impressive that frequency doubled Nd:YAG lasers are small and cheap enough to be sold as laser pointers these days, it’s far too easy for highly dangerous amounts of invisible 1064nm radiation to leak out, whether by carelessness or malice. I have a little disreputable ~510nm laser pointer, which I chose because, while I don’t trust the specs at all, 510nm is likely produced directly using a somewhat unusual solid state source, and it can’t be produced at all using a doubled Nd:YAH laser. The color is different enough that I’m confident they’re not lying about the wavelength.
It's wild to me that so many skeptical westerners who want to nitpick certain unproven technicalities, when the entire world only gets bits and pieces of the on the ground reality of China's progress, like the original Reuters article which was clearly fed information by insiders.
You should be living in the world of "China has successfully developed EUV and equivalent litho supply chain" and basing your decision making off of that.
I also cant understand people being in denial about, or claiming other imagined moats or whatever. They're whipping the pants of us right now industrially, if the west has any advantages left its that we speak the truth about stuff even when it hurts, why live in denial.
Also this stuff was figured out and built once before, other than the effort and resources involved (which China has lots of), why wouldn't someone else be able to figure it out again?
The west is still underestimating China. There is a great anecdote, I think it's from the book 'Apple in China', about their engineers visiting a Chinese production plant. Some changes needed to be made to the place. The Apple people estimated that that would take two weeks.
They came back the next day. It was finished, the Chinese had done it overnight.
Because in Western Europe, nobody serious is underestimating China, quite the contrary.
We know that there's no going back, and quality is no longer a criteria to choose local over imported.
Only bigotted people are still viewing China as a country mass-producing cheap crap.
I think that's the EVs that definitely sealed the deal in lots of people's minds.
I often wonder what is it that's driving the Chinese to work themselves to death to get this stuff done? Surely there must be some limit. I guess we can see it in the low birth rates, the youth unemployment, and I guess the desire to just survive because there's just so many people there. But still, I just don't get how Chinese just keep going and going. What is their end goal on a person to person level? Are they just going to keep killing themselves for the rest of their lives? What happened to the lie flat movement?
Their parent's generation toiled really hard and lifted the entire country out of poverty and everyone was pretty well rewarded for it.
They feel working hard brings benefits.
In America, working hard brings your manager benefits. We are multiple generations into this. Most people have learned to not work hard because it is just free benefit to your employer.
Sure, we could pressure Americans to work harder by making the entire country even more afraid of losing their jobs and terrified of not overworking themselves, but even then, all that hard work will just be captured by a spoiled managerial class playing bonus games and extracting all that wealth for themselves, not for American advancement.
Even in the shithole that is American managerial culture, you can still find young Americans working hard, often in spite of themselves, because they get into some project. In the past, projects were small and your team had substantial agency, so this sort of "The team really gets into the project" outcomes paid huge dividends, and resulted in a lot of success. Things like the IBM PC, lots of stuff at Bell Labs.
I don't know. You are correct that the Japanese/Korea has this mentality to spend time at work just to spend time but there is a noticeable delta in effective results between those countries and modern China.
It's more like the genocide in Gaza is the uncommon case where western propaganda was openly rejected by the population, at least by younger people, despite a concerted top-down effort to try to convince people that genocide is actually concordant with western values. Though it did take some time.
It's the propaganda that nobody questions that is most insidious.
We can't dismiss the role TikTok played in breaking the standard media narrative in the west. I grew up following this issue since I am in a group that is on the receiving end of this conflict.
I occasionally think about software that has truly transformed the trajectory of humanity. So much software is just disposable or is only useful for a small group of people. But the folks at TikTok should be commended in some ways for the drastic changes their algorithm made to the views of worldwide youth. Was it altruistic or nefarious? I suspect we won't know for sure until its written in the history books but man did it have an impact. Even though TikTok is probably gone now that its been taken over by the same people who used to shape the narrative its impact wont be easily forgotten.
How many of us developers get a chance to write software that really changes the direction the world takes?
A better question here is, would china be doing this, if "the west" wasn't threathening (and implementing) all kinds of sanctions on them, giving them no choice but to go "the bender way", by making their own chips (with blackjack, and hookers!).
Yes? The replication of the foreign capability domestically has been a driving force of China's economy for the last 20 - 30 years. No major R&D program in which china is catching up or even exceeding the western capability was started there, even the quite recent AI boom is mostly based on the work of American companies and labs.
If anything the constant underestimation of Chinese capabilities caused "the west" to react way to late.
It's wild that every comment section about China these days must paint the picture of these rabid anti-Chinese Westerners who are saying that China is an eternal backwater, yet one never sees actual comments like this, and how all of Western media is pushing anti-China propaganda, when the submitted article is just a neutral bit.
It's an overcorrection for years of western arrogance being expressed in the past decade+. I think most people have woken up by now to the reality of Chinese manufacturing dominance and what that implies, at least those in power and journalists.
It is always like that. Most people just don't have the attitude of getting things done, and they can barely believe it is possible when they watch what the people who do accomplish.
A lot of things require sacrifice beyond reasonable means. I see these books on how Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla developed their innovations, its groups of people that are extremely talented and became that talented due to sacrifices from their families/communities that go and sacrifice everything themselves to achieve amazing goals. Some of that resultant wealth goes to them but most goes to the shareholders/tech bros.
Eventually less and less people want to go down this route so we get "people just not having the attitude of getting things done".
The real question is will Chinese people go down that same road or will the fact that there is so much cutthroat competition there keep people in line?
> A "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist.
You’re missing forest for the trees. ASML at the moment has the monopoly on these machines. This is not only a great tool for the West to keep China at bay, but also a way to maintain economic dominance. Even if they can’t get the machine up and running until 2030, and the machine is a generation behind, China has effectively gained leverage in world theater.
From geopolitical perspective, it’s huge. Right now Taiwan produces the world’s chips, so China plays nice. The minute they can produce their own chips, even an older generation, they can invade Taiwan anytime they want. And then the rest of the world won’t even have older chips.
> And then the rest of the world won’t even have older chips.
This basically just means Europe wont have older chips.
TSMC is already producing a significant percentage of their chips in Arizona. And they've even slated ~30% of their total production of 2nm chips and better will be produced in USA by 2028-2029.
The article mentions the language and cultural barriers, and the rigid hierarchy with old bosses who demand blind obedience, even when the rules are counterproductive.
I have been living in Japan for years now and I have had the same experience, so I am inclined to believe the article. Mixing Western workers with East Asian management is extremely difficult, to put it mildly.
They have high security, and obfuscating the premises is part of it, but is it really secret in any way ? I mean, we're knowing exactly what they're aiming for and could compare notes at the end of it.
Is it war ? in a "everything is a war" political sense, perhaps, but not in any other sense.
We're left with "massive project" for the analogy, that's kinda weak really.
people love to be reductionist... i wonder what aspects of a culture make everyone so black/white us/them ingroup/outgroup. Is it particular to the US, or like, is France the same way? Or Ghana? Or is it just human that everything is a war? Naqoyqattsi.
If someone likes you, trade secrets flow like wine. That's basic humanity. It's not unique to China, though the relationships involved are a little bit different. It's not a bad thing either, we all live in the same society.
There's a whole regiment of immigrants who worked on the Manhattan project, as we all know. We also know that the USSR obtained much of their knowledge on how to build the bomb through espionage.
Espionage? Gasp. The US would never do that to get ahead. I'm so suspicious of claims without external sources of provenance about American exceptionalism during the cold war that I take all if it with a large grain of salt. Back then, everything Russia said was propaganda, and everything the US said was truth from the mouth of god.
I have no sympathy towards China, but it is dumb and arrogant to think that such a big and powerful country with enough time and determination won't be able to achieve this goal. They have the industry, the manpower, the education system, this is only a question of time now.
Good for them, I don't see this as a big deal other than my fear of west china invading china (taiwan! :) ).
Don't get me wrong, I want the west to succeed, but a competition from China is exactly what is needed. They're building datacenters in arizona and india for TSMC because of this competition.
I really hope we get past historical political rivalry and get along with China better. Competition is good, hostility sucks.
Give you some more historical context: China (ROC) planned to invade west China until the plan was given up in 60's. Both sides wanted reunification by force. When China's navy and air force was superior in early 1950's, it tried to "establish blockade of trade with west China (PRC) along the Chinese coast" (1)
China eventually gave up the plan in 1960's not because it didn't want to but because the balance of the power weighting over to west China. In 80's and 90's both agree to make peace given the premise that both sides belong to China.
TSMC was a product of industry policy from None-democratic China government. The founder Morris Chang ， an American born in the west China ，never visited China before 50 years old.
Both China (before 90') and west China used to want reunification , by force or not. China changed a bit later. The motivation of west China to invade China has little to do with chips although US thought that's the critical incentive. West China will still let TSMC provide the chips to the world in case it would have successfully invaded China in my view.
Thanks. In my view, the PRC is making a huge strategic mistake. As is Taiwan. The PRC is too focused on full control, normally they're more long-term-minded, but in this case they're rushing it too much. Establishing a trade-bloc and peaceful relations first and then aiming for full reunification would be the smart play, since there isn't anything huge to gain outside of TSMC (that I know of) by way of an invasion.
Taiwan is too dependent on the west, it too should know it can't actually resist an invasion, and that the west won't do much when it comes down to it. Its interests would have been served best if it sought good trade relations with the PRC, so that the PRC will continue to rely on TSMC. it should be providing west-china with all the nice chips the west is forbidding it from having. It should have been more like india and less like south korea.
> there isn't anything huge to gain outside of TSMC (that I know of) by way of an invasion.
The reunification of Taiwan is a fundamental national policy, enshrined in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. The primary intention behind the desire for national reunification stems from the realization of reunification itself, rather than from other interests. This reflects a complex national sentiment and shared aspiration.
We consider the people of Taiwan to be our compatriots. Therefore, even though our military strength far surpasses that of Taiwan, the mainland is unwilling to resort to force and has always hoped for peaceful reunification. This is because we do not wish to harm or even kill any of our compatriots in the process of achieving it.
Essentially, it has been the United States that has been obstructing this unification process and using propaganda tools to influence public perception in Taiwan. As a result, many Taiwanese people are shocked by the stark difference between the mainland and the propaganda portrays them when they visit. It is truly baffling that, despite living so close to the mainland, their understanding of it is almost in sync with that of Americans.
> I don't see this as a big deal other than my fear of west china invading china (taiwan! :) ).
Isn't that "other than" clause a big deal, though? I've read a survey and a number of articles from defense and foreign policy types, and the general feeling is there's a ~25% chance that China will invade Taiwan this decade. That's really damn big. If there's rollback in Taiwan then the first island chain could plausibly fall, or if not you will surely see Japan and maybe South Korea nuclearize. Why must we keep assuming the best with these security calculations instead of believing someone when they keep saying what they're going to do?
This will probably never happen. All countries are rivals, and the semblance of cooperation is really just the manifestation of a power imbalance.
China grew into their big boy pants and can hold their own on the international stage. They have no need to be cooperative because they are in the International Superpower Club. Their strategic ambitions do not align with those of their rivals, and they are strong enough to not need to play nice anymore.
Now that the US has also dropped their visage of being the benevolent world leader, there's even less reason for China to pretend to be cooperative. At this point, it's a matter of who is more apt to invade your country, US or China? And you buy weapons from the other one.
Maybe we see more "cooperation" between China and the EU or South America. But that will be entirely because those regions are under duress.
Tibet. Their ongoing border disputes with India. Island disputes along side their bullying of nearly every maritime neighbor in the region. Stationing destroyers outside of Australian cities as a show of force.
Plus, their current antagonistic relationship with Japan, where they make direct public threats to Japanese leaders who respond by seeking nuclear weapons.
They are currently probing for weakness in their neighbors because of territorial ambitions. Just because they don't invade countries on the other side of the world like the USA does, doesn't make them pacifists. They just have different goals.
yeah they really shouldn't be blockading their neighbors while claiming every country around them is their sphere of influence and openly interfering in their allies domestic politics while leveraging their size to force other countries to accept asymmetric economic deals...
Please spare us. China invaded Vietnam to protect Pol Pot while he was mass killing millions of innocent civilians. They have territorial disputes with over 10 countries, which they've been unable to decisively act on because those neighbors either have nukes (India) or are protected by a more powerful country (US). Not because their government is some benevolent entity. They're basically an authoritarian dictatorship that's kind of cornered at the moment (like Saddam after the Gulf War) but would kill a bunch of people and expand if the US wasn't around.
China has resolved a lot of its border disputes already. The border disputes with Kazakhstan, Krgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Tajikstan have all been resolved
The more China advances domestically, especially in this area, the less it has to gain from invading Taiwan. China is getting to the point where the conquest is finally doable (rapidly advancing and massive military, plus a weak US president), but the potential gains are diminishing year to year.
I'd speculate that if they don't invade during Trump's term, they never will, and will pursue a different course down the road. China is nothing if not patient.
The motivation to invade Taiwan is rooted in the PRC's political and historical narrative about it's legitimacy and purpose, a narrative internalized by most Chinese, including especially the military. It's in a sense existential, not economic or realpolitik, and I don't see that motivation diminishing anytime soon. If anything it's growing stronger, as evidenced by the suppression in Hong Kong, which made zero sense without reference to how Chinese political institutions sustain themselves. The risk of an invasion sparking a conflict with the US is primarily what held them back, and at best economic and foreign strategic pain only secondarily, but all those risks diminish by the day, leaving China's raw existential motivation unchecked.
The biggest victory for CCP will be Taiwan willingly joining PRC. Nothing else will be a better testament to the CCP model
Reunification with the mainland isn’t a completely unpopular idea in Taiwan. The economic ties are already extremely deep (largest trading partner by far).
Reunification in Taiwan has nothing to do with chips, and militarily PRC was able to do so a long time ago. The political will in PRC to "kill other Chinese" is zero.
> The political will in PRC to "kill other Chinese" is zero.
Counts for nothing, these narratives are built on sand. Russians also saw Ukrainians as "brothers", as did South/North Koreans before the war, among countless other examples.
Their is always a political will in China to kill other Chinese since thousands of years ago. This works vastly different from the western humanitarian philosophy.
Invading Taiwan isn't about chips at all, and in fact chips are actively disincentivizing invasion. Semiconductor fabs and the oodles of atomically precise ultra clean and ultra expensive equipment inside absolutely do not mix well with bombs.
A better title would be "New EUV light source built in Shenzhen". Light source said to be working, not fabbing chips yet. Few technical details in the Reuters article.
The light source is the “easy” bit. The mirrors, masks, and the rest of the machine are all individually as difficult if not more so.
The wafers have to be positioned to nanometer accuracy repeatedly and at high speed! It’s hard to believe that’s even possible, let alone commercially viable.
Managing the light source, specifically the 13.5nm length on the wave spectrum, that gets generated from overheated tin plasma, is in fact the most challenging part of the machine. Here "managing" includes the process of hitting a rightly sized tin droplet with lasers at the right angles, and all the rest of the complicated fluid math necessary to get the most of that precious lighting moment, as well as the proper handling of that spark event's after-effects, of course. As opposed to the rest of the machine parts (like directing the EUV light to the reticle through those mirrors you mention), the light generation part is dynamic, very easily to get wrong, and very costly to iterate on.
There's a lot of machinery for moving the wafers around precisely in vacuum. But that's ordinary engineering, although the speeds at which ASML moves wafers are impressive.
I'd argue ASML's moat isn't the machine itself but the ecosystem: Carl Zeiss optics, decades of supplier relationships, institutional knowledge.
This is clearly a significant achievement, but does anyone with semiconductor experience have a sense of how far "generates EUV light" is from "production-ready tool"?
This isn't a moat ASML can keep for long though. There can be alternatove technologies to achieve the same goal. So far only China has that incentive. The real problem is process scaling is slowing down. How many more generations of lithography machines will ASML design? Probably not many. This means there will be no edge left in 5 or 10 years, as eventually brute force will work and China will achieve the same lithography resolution.
Till that point, they are just going all in with cheap coal + solar, so even if they use older machines and run longer exposure times, even if they achieve lower yields and toss away a lot of the dies, they are still economically competitive. At the end cheap enery solves a lot of the issues.
Nowhere close, but pace now seems faster than estimated, i.e. original western estimate is they won't even get EUV prototype up until 2030s.
Right now their chips are already "economically" competitive, as in SMIC is starving on 20% margins vs ASML/TSMC/NVIDIA getting gluttonous on 50-70%, at least for enterprise AI. Current scarcity pricing = litho costs borderline rounding error, 1500 Nvidia chip flips for 30000, 6000 huawei chip flips for 20000. The problem is really # of tools access and throughput. They can only bring in so many expensive ASML machines, including smuggling, which caps how much wafers they can afford to toss at low yield. They figure out domestic DUV to 2000 series and throughput is solved.
Hence IMO people sleeping on Huawei 9030 on 5nm DUV SAQP, still using ASML DUV for high overlay requirement processes, domestic DUV to fill rest. But once they figure out SAQP overlay, which will come before EUV, they're "set". For cost a 300m-400m ASML EUV, PRC can brrrt tools at BOM / cost plus margin. Think 40 domestic DUVs and associated infra for price of one ASML EUV to run 8x lines with 30% yield and still build 2x more chips normalized for compute that they can run on cheap local energy to match operating costs. Then they have export shenanigans like bundle 5nm chips with renewable energy projects and all of sudden PRC data center + energy combo deals might be globally competitive with 3/2nm. Deal with our shitter chips for now, once they deprecate we give you something better when our processes narrows gap, and you have bonus power to boot because some jurisdictions, building grid is harder than building fabs.
How does one even smuggle an ASML machine? I'd assume the machine stops working if the GPS position doesn't compute, at end of life I wouldn't expect ASML to allow these devices nor their components to end up on the second hand market, I'd expect the future transfers to require continued permission of ASML, much like weapons distribution.
The machines live indoors, far from being able to see GPS signals. Sure, you could require that there be an antenna run to the roof, but you can spoof that stuff.
The thing that helps prevent smuggling of ASML machines is that a) there are few of them (i.e., people would notice), b) it requires tremendous effort to move them at all, let alone without anyone noticing.
Considering that these tools are installed in seismically active areas [0], the last thing a customer would want is for the tool to zeroise itself because of an earthquake.
These machines are not like John Deere tractors. If you own the hardware, you own it. They won't be connected to internet. Security first!
Smuggling part is happening on the old machines before EUV. There's a lot of them available on the second hand market thanks to Europe and US keep shutting down their old fabs. I don't think any DUV machine is smuggled. Even if they physically smuggled one, you need a team of ASML engineers to set it up and calibrate. You can guess what ASML will do in this case.
By the way, let's don't forget: ASML doesn't have any problems with China. They are incredibly annoyed with US and Dutch governments. This is potentially the biggest market they are missing out. Even then, they won't tolerate a summugling operation.
The US is close to having that incentive, if the rift between the US and Europe keeps widening. The Netherlands has one lever, but damn it's a long one.
ASML develops and ships their machines at the pleasure of Uncle Sam because the USA licensed them the tech and remains a crucial part of the supply chain intentionally. It's not a lever. It's a partnership that is mutually beneficial and neither side can really ruin the other without damaging themselves.
ASML will instantly stall at that point. The EUV light sources are built in the US under US export control regulation. No EUV light source means no ASML EUV machine. I get that some European chest-beating sounds good because there's not very much tech in Europe, but this is an intentional transnational supply chain. It's no accident that the US chose ASML to develop this tech rather than Canon or Nikon. Close ally deep within the US military shield from nearby air bases.
The biggest losers from any such actual attempt by Europe will be Western Europe and the US.
I really like that Europeans are starting to be more patriotic. It's good to see. It's also fortunate that European leaders are aware of Europe's position and role in geopolitics.
An alternative manufacturer, but not a supplier, no.
The US exerts sufficient control over ASML that this will not happen without NATO ending. And the end of NATO (which would be a geopolitical shift more profound than the Fall of the Berlin Wall) and a replacement with some Chinese EUV light source risks the scuttling of all ASML facilities and devices. This is vapor above a coffee cup.
The scenario I'm imagining is in fact the US further destabilizing NATO, in which case Europe wouldn't feel bound by any of the agreements we've made with Americans. Failing that, I don't think any of what was said above is relevant.
ASML owns the company that builds the light source. They acquired it, it's a US company, which is why US export controls apply, that's all. If needed, they could replicate the subsidiary in the EU.
This is too far from correct for any correction to be anything but a full restatement of the facts. Moving the tech over requires US approval. Listen, the Dutch are not going to risk it. Even if they were, ASML would not risk it because all of their customers wouldn't buy anything from a company that's on the EAR Entity List (which is where they'd end up if they tried this without the US allowing it) without US approval. I don't get why people are saying this stuff. It's like saying "Oh yeah, so you divide by zero and then multiply both sides and ta-da". Like, the whole statement is nonsensical.
To enable the whole thing to work you'd need the US to have shrunk to the equivalent of Canada in influence. I'm not saying that's impossible, but in that scenario, the Dutch might well be trying to keep Russians out of Amsterdam and the Turks out of Germany rather than trying to pull an IP heist on the Americans.
You can buy an e-book on Kindle and Amazon still controls what you do with it, right? ASML's ownership of Cymer is like that, except it's the US instead of Amazon.
Specifically control is related to the Foreign Direct Product Rule, where in which the US claims jurisdiction over any foreign product containing 25% or more of US-origins (Cymer, etc)
I think Europe is bluffing that they can go their own way. They can't. They won't try. Europe has been whining that they're going to catch up since the 80s, but they've yet to do it.
If you didn't care about exposure time, you could build 2nm chips with brute-force electron beam lithography. But the limited throughput confines EBL to research and very low-volume applications. ASML's EUV-based processes are what permit industrial-level scaling, ultimately because parallel beams of electrons repel each other while parallel beams of photons don't.
I don't personally understand why suitable EUV light sources are so hard to build, but evidently, they are. It sounds like a big deal if China is catching up in that area.
They can do 7nm and 5nm. Multiple patterning basically. I don't know when it doesn't scale anymore. Moat likely 4x patterning is the max you want to do.
They are "extracting" optical devices from other machines, imagine how desperate they are for this "machine".
As I ironically said in another comment, all you need is a retired Chinese ex employee at Zeiss.
Nothing can stay private or secret forever, and they have the money and people to achieve that. Even if it takes them another 5 years to reach what we have today.
> I bet the ex employee doesn't even have to be Chinese.
That bit struck me as naive, given the instances of Americans who aren't Chinese nationals, or even ethnically Chinese at all, caught committing actual espionage on behalf of China.
Given the current high prices for chips and memory due to "AI" artificial resource scarcity, the world will welcome the additional chip production from China.
I've read both articles and they say basically the exact same information. Only the tone of this article is a little more skeptical. It also just includes less context/information in general than the featured article
The "problem" with China is that they move from "the amazing thing about a dog playing the piano is not that it plays it badly, but that it plays it all" to Franz Liszt very fast.
This is undoubtedly a good news story, and the most wonderful part is that the article mentions that 14 organizations declined to comment on the matter.
The "Manhattan Project" part is that the research lab was confidential...which doesn't seem that unusual for a high profile research lab, but that aside.
Comparing China's public efforts to build a computer chips industry to the US effort to nuke Japan is kinda wild. Outside of the bait part, the piece coming from Japan Times makes it that much spicier.
> It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (EUVs)
This seems like the obvious conclusion of an ethnic bloc against a mercenary creedel nation?
Any westerner reading this right now wouldn’t die for their country, it’s almost absurd. It’s like asking them to die for Walmart.
Also interesting huge project: China is building a $116 billion dam which, according to Bloomberg, is expected to generate 70 GW, just to compare: UK whole capacity (de-rated) is around 70 GW.
The current largest hydroelectric dam in the world is the Three Gorges Dam in China. It can generate 22.5GW (40% more power than the dam in 2nd place, which is also Chinese).
Since Jan 2024, China has on average constructed 23GW of new solar power every month. So China has effectively been adding a "world's largest dam" worth of solar power, every single month for the last 24 months.
Love how people (americans) are always framing it "China vs the west" or "Russia vs the West" when in reality it's just China vs the US. It's convenient and makes people think that the whole western world is allied and agrees with the US. While it's true in theory, the reality is much more nuanced than this.
China, Russia, Iran, have shared interests and are known to help each other out, in some cases finding ways to go around sanctions. It's wrong to look at it as one country "vs the west". It's two sets of countries. Even if you don't fully agree with the US, a western country will have much more disagreement with countries from the other group.
Even that is true, it still doesn't make the west one block, and such title makes it believe so. There are no chip makers in Europe, so why even include it on the title ?
China has interests at direct odds to Europe like assisting the Russians to victory in Ukraine. It also has interest to dump exports onto European markets. Regardless of whether you agree with the US, China is going to be looking out only for itself from now on.
Why is it that whenever China is concerned, their most non-violent aspirations are always framed as evil? Manhattan project for anything outside a literal nuke is pretty wild for a headline.
It’s really not. It just is short hand for a government deciding that something really important is worth throwing a lot of resources at. I’ve heard it used to describe plenty of things western governments do too.
“Manhattan Project” is an ubiquitous metaphor that has nothing to do with nukes or weapons. The media describes everything from climate research to AI this way. Companies often refer to their own strategic internal projects as a “Manhattan Project”.
In 1945 as World War 2 wrapped up and the Cold War started, many in the US believed that it would take the Soviet Union 20+ years to build the atomic bomb. It took 4 years. There were several reasons for this. It became a national security interest, there were leaks to the USSR by people who thought the US shouldn't have a monopoly on the bomb and Americans in general viewed the Soviets as backward farmers.
I see the same thing with China. It's not so much espionage now (although there might be that) but China instead will just hire people with the right knowledge, so former employees of ASML, Nvidia, TSMC, etc.
I've been saying for awhile that China won't tolerate the export ban on ASML's best lithography machines and NVidia's best chips. It's a national security issue. And China is the one country on Earth I have faith can dedicate itself to a long term goal.
And yet I got the same reaction. "The Chinese will never catch up", etc. Reports have been comiung out that Huawei has started developing and using their own 7nm chips.
Weirdly, the US created this problem. By restricting exports of chips to China, Chinese manufacturers had no choice but to develop their own chips. Had China been flooded with NVidia chips, there would be far less market opportunity.
The American economy is essentially a bet on an AI future now. Were it not for like 7 tech companies, we'd be in a technical recession. I also believe that bubble is going to burst. But the economy as a whole pretty much now requires US dominance of an AI future and I think a lot of people are in for a rude shock as China completely disrupts that.
China hasn't caught up yet. There are still many steps in the supply chain and chip design as a whole but making their own chips at sub-7nm is a massive step in that direction.
The knowledge came from former ASML employees. I wonder if countries will sanction these individuals given the geopolitical implications of their assistance.
> The team includes recently retired, Chinese-born former ASML engineers and scientists — prime recruitment targets because they possess sensitive technical knowledge but face fewer professional constraints after leaving the company, the people said.
> Their recruitment was part of an aggressive drive China launched in 2019 for semiconductor experts working abroad, offering signing bonuses that started at 3 million yuan to 5 million yuan ($420,000 to $700,000) and home-purchase subsidies, according to a review of government policy documents.
I guess they won't leave China anyways. So what's to sanction...
Sanctioning won’t do anything. These former ASML employees know that their professional careers in the western world are finished. I bet they know when they are signing that they are going to stay in China or countries friendly with China for the rest of their lives.
Who is "the west" in your eyes? I personally know plenty of people in the USA who are openly cheering for Russia in the conflict. So I don't think we could say that "the west" is mad at Russia. Certain people in western countries are, but plenty are quite happy with Russia and wish them well in their endeavors.
The team includes recently retired, Chinese-born former ASML engineers and scientists — prime recruitment targets because they possess sensitive technical knowledge but face fewer professional constraints after leaving the company, the people said.
and
Once inside, he recognized other former ASML colleagues who were also working under aliases and was instructed to use their fake names at work to maintain secrecy, the person said.
One interesting and ironic part of the article is that one of the mentioned optics research groups has been submitting a lot of patents on EUV sources. Are we meant to be mad about it?
Why would Holland sanction people who switch jobs? Don't get me wrong, I can absolutely see how it might have happened if ASML had been an US company. I'm just not sure how you figure that it would happen in Europe.
Controversial and possibly politically incorrect take, but the People's Republic of China sends many, many, of its citizens to study at top universities and work at top companies all over the world. I'm sure even at sensitive defense related orgs too.
While I am sure that the vast majority of them are just regular people, I'm also pretty sure there are True Believers amongst them whose mission is to go out into the world and enrich themselves with the skills and knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals. Some of them might even attain citizenship in the country they go to while inwardly retaining full allegiance to the PRC.
Heck, I know people from other, friendly/allied countries who obtain US citizenship who, if you pose the hypothetical question "If your former country and the US got into a shooting war, who would you fight for?", they would pick their former country without hestitation.
And despite public policy and rhetoric sometimes stating how the PRC is becoming a rival or even existential threat to the Liberal Democratic World Order (TM), the Western democracies don't do anything to secure things. And quite frankly, I don't know if there is anything that could be done, short of getting into... highly controversial territory. Which if the situation were reversed, the CCP would probably not bat an eye to do.
Controversial take: Democracy and the US are awful at keeping secrets, and are incapable of winning by an information delta, if we followed your strategy we would surely be doomed. Our greatest advantages come when we work in the open, and share knowledge and empower ordinary people and the world with technology. As things stand, we are funneling our brightest minds into creating proprietary (secret) technologies... And it turns out the only people for whom the technology is uncopyable or secret are... American citizens. The "proprietary" technology is trivial to steal, and legal protections don't matter outside of our borders, the legal protections and subsidies afforded to those building proprietary (secret) technologies only deprives Americans of the ability to innovate, while in peer nations like China, individuals and startups are totally free to use and enjoy American technology without any restrictions.
But that only works if China reciprocates, which they show no sign of doing.
I’d imagine a Chinese citizen living, studying, or working in the US has access to a lot more advanced knowledge than a US citizen trying to do so in China.
Up to this point, the US has been the one with the advanced knowledge. We now face a world where the opposite might become true.
But using the previous example, I’d imagine a future hypothetical American going to China to study or work would face a lot more roadblocks to obtaining and extracting any advanced knowledge, especially anything with strategic importance.
It doesn't require reciprocation because it is a generalized version of the rebasing problem in software.
Over a big round table with cigar smoke in the air it's natural to come to the conclusion that the closed party can always outpace any set of open parties since it can take the public work and extend it with an advance that it keeps a secret.
In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party. In the rebasing metaphor, the reason for this is the free coordination an open party gets with other open parties. The closed party never gets to insert its advance into the shared state-of-the-art, so it loses all of the free maintenance of coordination, and it has to choose between paying the maintenance cost of integrating its secret advance with the public SOTA, dropping the secret advance and going back to parity with the public SOTA, or disconnecting from the public SOTA and going all hands in on its own ideas. The maintenance burden of integrating your ideas with the constantly moving SOTA may sound trivial but in practice it is usually prohibitively expensive if there are a lot of parties collaborating on the public SOTA and doesn't leave you with much time/budget to find new secret advances.
Right now in the US, we have all of the disadvantages of the open model: the closed parties of the world can cheaply take ideas they like from Meta, Google, OpenAI and mix them with private advances, and all of the disadvantages of the closed model: our domestic tech industry keeps all of its technology a secret from other domestic competitors, and gets none of the coordination benefits of open research / technology, independents and startups are not only unable to access information about the SOTA, but they are actively attacked by the existing monopoly players with any means available when they approach it independently, including using their access to massive capital to drain the talent pool, or being bought outright. And, as we are all too familiar with, the entrenched players don't even care that much about whether or not they can even use the talent efficiently, denying it to competitors is worth more.
> In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party
An obvious counter-example to this is the NSA/GCHQ and cryptography. They've repeatedly shown that they're a good 5-15 years ahead of everyone else.
Is this still true? I feel like I haven't heard of any crazy cryptography revelations for a while now. My assumption was that cryptography was a bit of a special case because it was only government/defense entities putting significant work into it, up until the Internet/digital telecommunications became prominent enough that there was great individual and private-sector demand for crypto. (Plus the whole mess with it being export-controlled, obviously)
Aside from doubts about whether or not this is actually the case the pertinent question that comes from my point is:
If cryptography researchers were keeping their results secret to within their institution / research circle, instead of sharing with academic community / public, would that advantage or disadvantage the NSA relative to the researchers? I think the answer is obvious, and it's a pretty excellent analogy for the US-China situation.
We haven't always been awful at keeping secrets, see the actual Manhattan Project. I like the optimism of your proposal, but how would those US companies continue the same level of R&D investment without those extra profits? If the government just directly invests, then you've just become the enemy.
In late 2022 our telco soft eng team got purged and everyone who was even friends with people who might be Chinese were removed from the project. That included the original architect and product owner, both Americans but with Chinese roots. So there that!
I wonder if there would be more outrage if this was done to those with Israeli connections? Yes, Israel is an ally but they have been known to spy on us and share our secrets with other nations, like China.
I don't like this. Feels like easily become racist. E.g. people from Southeast Asia, Japan, or Korea who might not even speak Chinese but getting fired because they "look Chinese"
I don’t like this either. It falls under what I referred to as “highly controversial” choices.
But I also don’t doubt that if the coin was flipped, China would not hesitate at all to fire any non-Chinese person from such sensitive projects, and all without any outcry you would see in the West.
> knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals
You're forgetting to mention that they're also getting paid a lot of money. Quite a lot of people will sell out, given the right conditions, for that amount of money especially in lower CoL areas. To be honest, I'm sure Western governments and companies could do the same if they wanted to bring in the expertise from China.
Is there any other way to see it than just we are too divided and 50% of our own people just think we are the bad guys? What you describe is so obvious but one political side in the US at least pretends this isn't happening and actively does anything they can to hamper any response to it. I would love to be convinced otherwise because I am also part of the division, I truly don't understand the other side at all.
I think there was a time when the other side truly believed globalization and economic progress would turn the CCP into a democratic ally. Maybe both sides believed that for a while. What you see now is just the fragmented and incoherent remains of a failed philosophy that hasn’t yet come up with a coherent replacement, so we’re left adrift with no rational foreign policy from either side (in my opinion).
Why is China not an ally to the US other than the fact that it is a growing economy may be too big for US? What happens if US does not want to contain China any more? Are there fundamental issues which will put China and US as enemies?
China is communist and systemically atheist. That's basically it. Americans have always (or at least always since WW2) viewed communism as an existential evil and themselves as chosen by God to eradicate it from the world by any means necessary.
Well, they first saw the opportunity of cheap manufacturing. Then they saw the democratic ally. But let's say...at the very bottom of the top 1000 reasons to do what they did.
For me many Western politicians don't see past 5-10 years. Short-term China was Heaven (for big corp), so they used all the resources they had to justify what they did. Many called BS on that, but were treated like right wing, populists, old conservatives, naive, fear-mongering, etc. Almost a dejavu.
It seems most of those ASML employees were already Chinese engineers. I doubt they would care if they got caught and had their careers restricted to China
Well real question is how much would that limit PRC talent from working abroad. PRC will be producing plurality of STEM / high skilled talent for decades. They're going to be the only country with project intergrated circuit talent glut in next 10 years, every other semi power projected to have 100,000s shortage. No PRC talent, and you cap western semi talent pool.
Ultimately a lot western innovation run on brain drained PRC talent. There is bamboo ceiling in western tech for east asians, specifically to restrict reverse knowledge transfer. Side effect is once PRC talent hits this ceiling they know big title and fat paychecks and upward mobility is back home, where frankly QoL is off the charts. Ultimately PRC wealthy enough to reverse brain drain aka brain recirculation and PRC talent aren't retarded enough to limit their career aspirations because west decides to cap their career trajectory and try to lock their future behind noncompetes, especially in cold war vs their birth country. Worse, PRC wealthy enough even if there's no bamboo ceiling they can afford to reverse brain drain top 1%, hence current equilibirum. West needs PRC talent, west cannot afford PRC talent to climb too high, PRC can afford to take them off west's hands.
Until west figures out another source of talent, they're stuck in this talent trap. And IMO India ain't it, they don't have the integrated industrial chains and academic structure to produce same kind industrial ready workers yet.
Your point is right on. And additionally, why would an average Indian refuse the pay package to work in China? The top r&d guy at SMIC is from Taiwan after all. Liang got both Samsung and SMIC into the advanced nodes.
Yeah it reminds me of the Smyth report, published in August 1945 about atomic bombs, commissioned by the director of the real Manhattan Project. It’s fine to reveal knowledge in detail, if it doesn’t reveal anything related to constructing the apparatuses (the chemistry and the metallurgy) needed.
The press release following the bombing of Hiroshima specifically stated which method of refining Uranium was used. The U.S. spent a great deal of time, effort, and money on researching and testing four different enrichment systems. Just that one detail saved the Soviets 3/4s of a sizeable chunk of the A-bomb effort. Sometimes you don't need to leak much detail to give away a great deal.
I am kind of skeptical about the report, as there are almost no details revealed. Everyone knows that China wants to build its own semeconductor manufacturing devices. The question is how close it is to be used in real production. The report just throws out a very vague number, maybe ~2030, which I can give the same guess, too.
Of course China will probably catch up, and surpass, in this and most things that it sets its mind to.
Instead of the US recently veering into batpoop-insane policy, the US should be focused on promoting a peaceful and equitable world that it would like to live in when it's not top dog.
If - hear me out - this whole LLM AI thing turns out be be overhyped, won't this capability be useful for a lot of other things , from consumer electronics to combat drones.
e.g. Useful in the growing Chinese EV sector. And lessening dependence on chips made in Taiwan seems strategic.
It seems broader than a bet on "AI" specifically. A more strategic move.
From the article, first paragraph:
> cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance.
It's kind of nasty that a fresh society of capable people has the drive to achieve technological excellence and the incumbents do whatever they can to delay this, even though it's inevitable and there's a lot to gain by empowering them. All in the name of "they are not us".
World has gained so much from modern Chinese industrial revolution. Why suddenly everyone got cold feet? Nobody was stopping Germany or Japan on their way up even though they were literal former enemies with history of brutal warfare. China never done anything even comparable to others.
Pretty sure the US pressured Japan to up their exchange rate which was one of the factors in their stagflation. Germany never threatened the power of the US
Give China 50 years and I'm sure they are gonna be properly sad about what happened to Uyghurs, western style.
Or not. Measures applied to Uyghurs were done under the banner of fight with terror, which the West waved fervently as well. Although US decided to direct their zeal outside, bombing several countries and killing countless "enemies" which were defined as everybody within the blast radius. Were attempts of China at controlling their islamist minority so uncomparably worse?
Especially when we compare them to how they approached the problem of pandemics. They obviously have no qualms about attempting sweeping solutions regardless of religion and ethnicity of those affected.
I mean, if we’re going to make that comparison, China today looks much more like pre-war Germany and Japan— set on expansion. That’s pretty clearly what the anti-China crowd is worried about. Tibet, Taiwan, Philippine islands, ever expanding naval bases, aggressive displays of power around Australia, prison camps and sterilization programs, and so forth.
How does it compare to the last 50-70 years of US actions? Even if all narratives are true and significant, China could still massively benefit the world same way US did despite its vast shortcomings.
China has never had expansionist ambitions. On the contrary, modern Chinese foreign policy is explicitly grounded in non-interventionism and respect for sovereignty (the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence). Xinjiang, Tibet and, per Beijing, Taiwan, are internal matters. The "Philippine islands" have been claimed by multiple states long before the PRC existed.
Western strength is not tech that we have today, but the velocity we're moving forward. Any tech can be and will be stolen, copied and improved, the only way to remain ahead is to run faster.
A country with technical ability and ambition like China was never going to go "Oh only one company in netherlands can do it? Damn I guess we're snookered then".
I feel the American media and general public has gotten psyched by the recent announcements coming from China. This might be new weapons or Deepseek or conveniences in the cities. I wish the Chinese people all the best and sincerely hope they prosper. At the same time, I really wish Americans would get out of this panic mode. You answered several challenges over the last 250 years. Some were existential threats. America generally lays out its problems for everyone to see. Americans tend to be extremely self-critical. This is often misconstrued by some to be signs of weakness. Anyone who believes this is, in my opinion, delusional.
As an aside, there are some comments about the "Chinese way of thinking" and the "American way of thinking". I generally think these discussions veer off into notions of cultural superiority. That, also in my opinion, is the mark of weak minds. The fact is once something is shown to be possible, it is exponentially easier to duplicate and improve it. America did this with German technology, China did it with American technology and I am sure countries like India are going to quickly get there too (I am not suggesting the Germans didn't learn from others themselves). This sets a firm base for iterative improvements.
To riff off another comment, China's progress wasn't done by God. America will learn and adopt what's valuable and discard what's not. If I have learned anything about Americans (of all backgrounds), they don't shy away from a challenge. For all its faults, I still personally will root for a society based on something like the American constitution.
If China actually catches up and surpasses the West/TSMC in fab technology and production, I think they'd have a better option, which is simply flooding the world market with high-end chips and obliterating the Taiwanese economy. Eventually, joining an economically dominant China might become more palatable, or a necessity.
The leadership will have a price in mind and they won’t be the ones under the boot. Everyone has a price to look the other way even if they think they are principled now.
This would be more in-line with their strategy in other areas. Quietly massively improve technical capability and then utterly out-compete international competitors. They did this with solar, multicopters, are in progress with doing this with TVs, nuclear power, etc. War is expensive and destructive, it's easier and nicer to just negate the economic relevance of your opponents if you have the time and resources to do it (which they do).
China is also doing this with weapons. It's just a little more difficult normal people to see the results because people can't get a Dongfeng 2x series rocket from Ali Express.
Realistically, the general public doesn't have access to an honest appraise of their capabilities. So we are left to infer from their accomplishments in other high-tech areas what their military industry is capable of producing.
I know mass media keeps pounding this "eventual scenario" (manufacturing consent and all). Maybe it will happen, but the Chinese think on longer timelines than the ADHD West and are probably banking on A). Out-attriting, B). Out-innovating. If both happen, we might find ourselves with a situation where Taiwan voluntarily wants to align closer with China as the West flails.
Reversing demographic momentum isn’t so easy. You have a cascade effect which happens, and high costs of a massive elderly population can’t be borne by a sudden baby boom. Also, through the medical system, etc, you can force people to abort their children, but it’s harder to force them to make children.
And that's more of the "propaganda narrative" (google that term) getting pounded at us from all channels over the past several years. It's so 1984 - remember when we were told they were growing too much and getting overpopulated and the planet was going extent any moment? So which one is it? Anyways, their population decrease will be offset by AI and automation all while they still pump out more honor students than the entire West combined. They'll be fine is what I'm saying.
I think it's more like smearing/projection, like Republican conspiracy theories about Democrats being pedophiles. Guess where the real pedophiles were hanging out the whole time.
Read as "anyone connected flees to the US, anyone deemed political gets a free relocation to a Xinjiang re-education camp, and lots of new mainland 'mothers' live with those allowed to remain".
Why would anyone voluntarily sign up to have Winnie the Pooh's boot on their face?
Sure, by the time China clones this generation of tin droplet ASML EUV machines at production scale, the market will have shifted to free-electron lasers.
They really need to pay us all compensation money. And I mean
literally EVERY single company that has been responsible for
driving the RAM prices up. Free market my ... ...
It seems extremely dishonest to frame the project of improving computer chip manufacturing to the development of weapons of mass destruction— weapons that went on to be used against civilians. Sensationalist and propagandistic framing for what is otherwise an interesting article.
The term 'Manhattan Project' is a common and widely used metaphor for R&D programs with effectively unlimited resources applied to them. The actual Manhattan Project is simply a very famous exemplar of such a program.
Use of that term is not propaganda, it's normal English.
It's not just about the use of the term "Manhattan Project". It's about the framing and wording of the article. There is literally an image of a PRC soldier in front of a rocket in the article.
When referring to the efforts nation-states, I'd be very interested to hear how often such metaphorical usage is used to describe the work of adversarial vs. friendly countries. I would be shocked if it's as often (in the Anglophone press) used to describe the work of US-aligned countries as it is that of US-adversarial countries.
Most of that entire network is easy to replicate, as in it's not technically hard, the hard part is validation, no one in PRC wants to use unproven PRC inputs if risk is 100m wafer run goes to trash. Hence PRC now basically insuring domestic fabs on risk runs using domestic inputs, which are being validated on full scale production, instead of taking 5 years to verify, it'll take 2. Export controls help this, i.e. domestic resist basically required now after JP export controls.
The hard part, i.e. optics, light source. Zeiss had like 3k engineerings, Cymer 1k, ASML 13k during EUV commercialization process. PRC can (and is) just throwing bodies at problem, lots of parallel execution with clear second mover road map. That and as this article suggest, they're literally poaching people with the tacit knowledge which will help speed run. I'd wadger they get there sooner than later.
China seems to be doing well on supply chain integration (with the exception of the trust part).
Being how strategic this is, I imagine that the investment won't be entirely laissez faire and there will be lower tolerance for cheating in this endeavor. I think that ultimately they'll do quite well with their efforts.
> China’s prototype lags behind ASML’s machines largely because researchers have struggled to obtain optical systems such as those from Germany’s Carl Zeiss, one of ASML’s key suppliers, the two people said.
So, now they just need an old retired Chinese that worked for Zeiss and build a prototype for the optical devices they need.
They use armies of graduates just to literally copy, when they could build something new or different.
Is "Manhattan Project" supposed to be sounding threatening or something? Is anyone in on Japanese newspapers and whether they often us such rhetoric, when reporting things about China? It reads really kind of idiotic. As if chips are to be equal to atomic bombs and could be dropped on Tokyo any moment now. Maximum alarmist. That on the background of recent clumsiness of the Japanese PM ... It starts to paint a certain picture.
When I hear Manhattan Project, I don't think about the outcome. I think about the massive amount of effort for a singular goal that might not even be possible.
We learn that before 2023 EUV lithography was worthless. "AI" is the only reason why China would want this technology!
EDIT: Given the dramatic downvotes, I repent: China will use these EUV machines to build AI sharks with lasers that will swim towards Taiwan! Is this better?
Complex systems evolve by learning. They grow more complex. Same for the brain as for organizations and societies.
China is a redistribute centralist State. It has to be: a narrow coastal region is hyper wealthy and to maintain territorial integrity it requires a strong government to tax there and spend elsewhere. Hence the infrastructure and construction boom. The high debt is a feature of the system, these are State backed enterprises that live on subsidy.
The upshot is this limits complexity. ASML is in NL for a reason. NL is a feature of Western Europe decentralization. Arguably, Europe conquered the world because its internal fragmentation fostered a rapid gain in complexity.
The US has cemented this into its own constitution and political culture. All talks about "Europe innovation" and "China catching up" are moot. Europe became a colony of the US post WWII and the integration needed to foster internal peace capped its capacity to grow complex. The US is now the most complex society on Earth and no other region can cope with that much complexity on that scale. Both Russia and China are held together by trading complexity off centrality.
Domestically, we often put it this way: since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves. It’s only a matter of time — if not this year, then next year; if we can’t do it next year, we’ll just keep going. This is how we approach everything.
There is a small caveat, though. China was not actually that far behind in the semiconductor field in the past. The problem was that corruption and fraudulent projects were quite serious, which undermined the Chinese government’s confidence in these efforts. A few years ago, there was even a so-called “transparent computing” scam project that was awarded a national-level prize.
Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome. This is because it is not only a government policy, but also a Chinese way of thinking. Nothing can interrupt this process.
In fact, aside from high-end chips, China already dominates the mid- and low-end chip segments.
I don't disagree with you on the conclusion, but man I just wish people stopped believing in fairy tales about countries like this. America does it too. Why are people so allergic to materialism? I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.
Material conditions shape history
To speak to this importance, it wasn't long ago that the sentiment I heard about the country was that it isn't, or wouldn't be, ascendant due to their "culture".
It's the Schrodinger's cat of cultures. Or maybe generalities about culture aren't to explain for economic and political velocity.
But it's undeniable that culture and how that's reflected in governance have a huge impact: South vs North Korea.
> But it's undeniable that culture and how that's reflected in governance have a huge impact: South vs North Korea.
Considering that north and south korea share the same "culture", wouldn't they be an example against your assertion?
Isn't the bigger impact that one is sanctioned by the world's sole superpower and the other is not?
Yeah, also it shows the comment is ignorant of history.
In the immediate aftermath of the Korean war, the North was actually more prosperous than the South. That changed with time, dramatically so, but initially it'd be reasonable to see the north as having better economic prospects.
> I'm not saying culture is irrelevant but saying china's success is due to "Chinese way of thinking" or america was dominant because of the "american dream" is an adult believing santa-tier take.
I don't know that it's a fairy tale. Certainly, it helps nations project more influence than they really have. But it's not nothing, commonly-shared philosophy is useful. It matters, because it differs, and that impacts things.
(as an American) America definitely does not share this philosophy. The idea that "Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome." is not something most Americans would ever say about America as we struggle with mostly-unchecked corruption and fraud, and have zero enforcement over the consequences of such. It is absolutely effecting the final outcomes of the US, and in a massively negative way.
> Material conditions shape history
Sure, but not just material conditions. "Hope for the future" plays a bigger role than many people give it credit for.
>Why are people so allergic to materialism?
At the risk of starting a fight... I would point at America's religious history, and the continuing threads of that today that increasingly see scientific/materialist thought as a direct threat to their ideas of how a society ought to be organized.
I mean yeah avoiding materialism in political debates is great for people dominating the material realm. I don't think that's an accident
Because a shared cultural identity is vital to maintain a cohesive society that can muster the collective resources to get shit done?
The world is shaped by psychology and the actions of a very very few individuals at the peak of their respective societies. Material conditions merely enable success brought by cultural motivation.
Your argument really only holds water if you consider all humans to be fungible worker drones and that culture doesn't exist. The human factor is the critical factor in all of history. Material wealth does not magically produce innovation. The Romans could have started the industrial revolution a thousand years earlier, they had effectively unlimited resources. They simply lacked the cultural spark to pursue that line of research and industry. They even literally invented a steam engine a thousand years before modern times.
This is a country with its own written language, writing system, calendar, the internet, and so on; a country with the world’s largest single ethnic population; a country whose cultural traditions were established two thousand years ago; a country with an independent ideology. Are you saying that Western societies would rather believe this is a country of large-scale surveillance, that its people live under a social credit system with no individuality or freedom, than believe that its people possess a distinct and stronger sense of collective consciousness?
I think you are writing your comments conditioned on not just what you are responding to but also a lot of internal assumptions about their intentions. The person you are responding to said or implied nothing about surveillance or Western assumptions about China. They are making the claim (apologies to them if I am misrepresenting) that societies or governments achieve extraordinary goals (i.e. goals that they were not expected to achieve within a certain time-frame) because of the physical, economic and social conditions and not because of cultural elements. Cultural explanations are post-hoc i.e. they are used after the fact to boost morale or give a sense of unity. More concretely, if China, the US, the EU, Japan, India, Russia can launch spacecrafts to the moon, so can Nigeria and Kenya given enough time, resources and the right incentive structure even if they are culturally very different from the countries above.
> Why are people so allergic to materialism?
They are made so in the Angloamerican West. The establishment wants them to focus on 'values' instead. Because if the people started thinking about material conditions, they would topple the system that concentrates 99% of the wealth in the hands of the 0.1%.
Does this include the material conditions of human bio diversity? You deny "way of thinking" is itself a material differentiation but could that not be an expression of material conditions over time reshaping separate groups of people to act and think differently, who were through differing selective pressures, environments, adaptations and historical contingencies themselves "shaped" differently?
Or do you yourself have a religious belief in strict human blank slate equality?
I'm not saying relevance of culture, human bio-diversity, etc. are zeroes in terms of impact. I just get frustrated because they seem to be the only things talked about at the expense of any discussion about actual material conditions or control and distribution of resources
ideologies are part of the material conditions
Well if you have pay attention this user you would realize he is a very classic example of an educated and proud Chinese. No offense but an unusual amount of Chinese uniformly think and talk like that thanks to the education.
Why would you assume culture is immaterial? And to make this less emotional let’s take the micro scale; don’t you think the culture of doing engineering doesn’t affect outcomes team to team within the same company, or company to company within the same country or even country to country within the same company?
a perfect example in this context would be when a company is successful and it's attributed to culture not product market fit, funding or luck
I understand your point about misattribution but it cuts both ways. How about when a company is better than competitors because they executed better because they had a superior organizational culture. Or not successful and this is due to poor culture.
YC sets the prime examples. It is never product at the expense of who the team is and in what proven way they have worked together and plan to execute at scale.
> Domestically, we often put it this way: since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves. It’s only a matter of time — if not this year, then next year; if we can’t do it next year, we’ll just keep going. This is how we approach everything.
That's how everyone who industrialized/advanced approaches everything. China isn't the only country with the "can do" or "if you can do it, we can do it" attitude. The US is a prime example of the "can do" attitude. Do you think when britain industrialized, the US decided only britain is capable of industrializing and gave up? Of course not. Heck, china isn't even the first asian country with the "can do" attitude. The japanese, during the 1800s, decided that if europeans can industrialize, so can they. So on and so forth.
> Corruption and fraud can slow China’s progress, but they will not affect the final outcome. This is because it is not only a government policy, but also a Chinese way of thinking. Nothing can interrupt this process.
It isn't a "chinese way of thinking". It is assumed everywhere that some level "corruption and fraud" is baked into any large scale investment or endeavor. It's simply a matter of managing it so as not to consume the whole project.
The PRC motto is not about "can do", it's about "able to do". Can Palau build a commercial airliner when Boeing and Airbus workforce is 10x their population? No that's simply out of their reach.
That's really the crux behind the original statement, there are not many (really currently any) country in the world other than PRC who has the complete industrial chains and workforce numbers to build anything that already exist if they pour enough resources into it. They're the only country whose manufacturing sector has every industrial category classified by UN. That's the context behind the quote (directed at domestic doubters), every other country in the world has to pick and choose what to specialize in, PRC doesn't, so as long as item is not made by god, PRC can figure out how to build it.
The geopolitical reality today (i.e. the amount aggregate S&T complexity that has accumulated from past 100 years) is there may not be anything others can build that PRC eventually can't due to size of PRC talent and industrial base, the reverse is not necessarily true. There's a shit load of advanced industries that are simply out of most small/medium even large countries reach because their size precludes them from coordinating enough people or industrial resources for undertaking.
> The PRC motto is not about "can do", it's about "able to do".
Who cares? "Can do" assumes "able to do".
> Can Palau build a commercial airliner when Boeing and Airbus workforce is 10x their population? No that's simply out of their reach.
That's why I limited it to : "That's how everyone who industrialized/advanced approaches everything.".
> That's really the crux behind the original statement, there are not many (really currently any) country in the world other than PRC who has the complete industrial chains and workforce numbers to build anything that already exist if they pour enough resources into it.
China is a subset of the american world order. The PRC's industrialization is a creation of the US/Japan/EU.
> PRC can figure out how to build it.
So can the US. Are you saying china can create something we can't figure out?
> The geopolitical reality today (i.e. the amount aggregate S&T complexity that has accumulated from past 100 years) is there may not be anything others can build that PRC eventually can't due to size of PRC talent and industrial base, the reverse is not necessarily true
I'd say there is nothing that china cannot build.
> There's a shit load of advanced industries that are simply out of most small/medium even large countries reach because their size precludes them from coordinating enough people or industrial resources for undertaking.
That just means small/medium countries will collaborate.
FYI: China is smaller than the west. China is much smaller than the west and its allies combined. There is no denying china has some advantages. But china also has disadvantages. Linguistically, politically, culturally, geographically, historically, etc. China's industrialization, just like japan's industrialization, was predicated entirely on western knowledge/tech and access to western trade routes.
>"Can do" assumes "able to do"
> industrialized/advanced approaches everything
Can do, does not in fact translate to able to do, for advanced/industrialized economies. It takes about 150k workforce to build long body civil aviation industry. US as country can muster that critical mass. EU has to muster that as a bloc (as you recognized). Developed economy <200m pop without bloc can't. That precludes most of the world. 50 years ago, there was less complexity, and many more smaller players "can do" their way to long body civil aviation, now they can't, they are not "able to do", the scale has grown and those smaller economies don't even approach/"can do" in the first place.
>So can the US. Are you saying china can create something we can't figure out?
>small/medium countries will collaborate
US has projected technical talent shortage in semi in 100,000s. Hence US only try to reshore fabs vs PRC semi brrrting talent to execute industrial policy to indigenize entire semi supply chain i.e. it's something US maybe can figure out, but can't execute, again not able to do on it's own, so it doesn't even try. That's really the crux behind original quote, EUV is made by people... but the broader context is EUV (and supply chains) is made by consortium of countries, i.e. common rhetoric is EUV is made by the world, how can PRC replicate global effort? The answer is EUV is made by a small handful of countries with fraction of PRC population, PRC talent pool and industry large enough to single hand speed run global coordination. Hence PRC is able to do everything, even things that require others to do as bloc.
>China is a subset
>predicated entirely on western knowledge/tech >I'd say there is nothing that china cannot build.
Was a subsect. Now much of their dependencies are gone. That dependency made clear by export controls is why many PRC industry doubters existed 5-10 years ago who definitely thought there were things China could not replicate, EUV supply chain is one of these. The other is a competent national football team. But domestic industrial chain and talent generation has expanded so much so fast that much of doubt gone. The motto, was specifically made in this context. PRC techno-optimist look at all the other concurrent major indigenization projects and the underlying meaning morphed to PRC can build not just what another country can build, what another bloc can build, but everything... simultaneously, i.e. post war US hyper hegemony type of sole player. It is not your generic can do attitude, it's can do anything, and everything at the same time. Continental scale, industrial sovereignty/autarky tier of ambition.
>smaller than the west and its allies
It's roughly the same size by pop, unless you through in 3rd party India then when might as well as through in global south for PRC. But if we're talking about useful indicators, PRC produce more talent i.e. about same as OECD which is more than US+co. Industrially, PRC produce as much as core US+co block, US+co produce more by value add. Both are flow measures. But if we look in raw output / actual material production / output, PRC can be substantially larger than west combined. Many raw inputs (ree steel aluminum etc) small intermediate goods PRC make more than RoW combined. The exception is of course the pinnacle that PRC hasn't figured out, thrown industrial printing press at. But things like auto, spacelaunch, semi, civil aviation can go the way of PRC shipbuilding, one of the mature strategic industries where PRC now produces more than RoW combined.
I understood OP's saying more as "appetite for doing".
Ignoring the practical reality that you need resources, capacity, good planning, and so on to actually do something. I understood OP as saying the mindset in China is that they want to do it all. They are willing to invest even in things that would have poor ROI, if they can come into an industry and undercut by taking a smaller margin they will.
If so, that is a difference in attitude. In the west, we are only interested in returns that beat our alternatives. Capital is divested based on maximizing return on investment. This is why we even allowed many industries in the first place to move to China and we exited those segments domestically.
> That's how everyone who industrialized/advanced approaches everything. China isn't the only country with the "can do" or "if you can do it, we can do it" attitude. The US is a prime example of the "can do" attitude. Do you think when britain industrialized, the US decided only britain is capable of industrializing and gave up? Of course not. Heck, china isn't even the first asian country with the "can do" attitude. The japanese, during the 1800s, decided that if europeans can industrialize, so can they. So on and so forth.
A reminder: the difference is that Japan has already failed in areas such as mobile internet, robotics, Fifth-generation computers, and space technology....LLM and so on. Japan is still clinging to the substantial profits of its internal combustion vehicle industry, and in battery technology it has fallen far behind.
States may disappear, nations may vanish, and once-advanced countries can become backward. Most of them will never return to their former national glory. “If others can do it, we can do it” only becomes a true national characteristic if it is persistently pursued, strictly implemented, and internalized into the national mindset. Japan clearly does not fall into this category.
In fact, only China and the United States possess this mindset. Germany and Japan have small national territories, making it easy for them to fall into early industrial leadership and then rest on high-profit laurels without further ambition. Essentially, it is not a national character. Look at Japan’s reliance on fax machines and Yahoo, or the chaos in Germany’s train system—it shows that this is an advantage created by a particular population with a special disposition, useful only for a limited time. The pace of deindustrialization in these two countries is also very fast: Japan now heavily depends on tourism, and Germany has become something of a joke.
If you browse YouTube or other video platforms, you can see that the people of China and the United States have, and continue to have, the national confidence and “hands-on” culture of the world’s largest industrial powers. In the U.S., there are many farm owners and ordinary laborers who are skilled at making and producing things—they are the foundation of the country. Capitalism merely led the U.S. down a different path.
> A reminder: the difference is that Japan has already failed in areas such as mobile internet, robotics, Fifth-generation computers, and space technology....LLM and so on. Japan is still clinging to the substantial profits of its internal combustion vehicle industry, and in battery technology it has fallen far behind.
So what?
> Japan clearly does not fall into this category.
A country that rose to become a major power in the 1800s. Got destroyed during ww2. Then rose again to be a mjor power.
> In fact, only China and the United States possess this mindset.
If that was the case, post ww2 germany and japan would not exist.
> Germany and Japan have small national territories, making it easy for them to fall into early industrial leadership and then rest on high-profit laurels without further ambition.
Have you no understanding of history prior to the last 10 years?
> This is how we approach everything.
> This is because it is not only a government policy, but also a Chinese way of thinking. Nothing can interrupt this process.
Is there any evidence that this kind of homogeneous "national character" is objectively real? Or is it just another story that people tell themselves?
was the American dream real at any point? Sounds like the same to me. Just a less individualistic dream.
I'm also skeptical of narratives of a pre-ordained future for America based on the American Dream or any other teleological belief system.
It's always felt pretty intuitive to me that shared goals in a culture should have some real effect on outcomes.
It doesn't mean absolutely everyone takes part, of course, but it does mean it's a 'thing' that people may take part in with support from many of those around them if they choose.
Looking at the inverse: If you're going against the cultural wind, you're just going to have a much harder time doing whatever it is.
It just seems like this must show up in outcomes, it would be strange if it didn't.
I don't agree. I think this comes out of necessity. What else a developing country can do in order to develop itself? Everyone believes they are unique and different, I don't agree.
Does it need to be homogenous? In the end, only a few people are needed to create companies and drive the vision.
That's what I was asking. I was replying to a commenter who used "how we approach everything" and "Chinese way of thinking" when explaining China's economic dominance, which at least implies it. I was questioning that, is all.
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> Your comment seems rooted in fear and anger.
It's rooted in neither. Care to explain why you came to that conclusion? Fyi I'm neither American nor Chinese.
I was replying to a commenter who used "how we approach everything" and "Chinese way of thinking" when explaining China's economic dominance. I was questioning whether there is any such "national thinking" in any society, still less in a society of ~1.4bn people.
Fwiw I think that China's achievement, since the mid 20th century, of lifting so many people out of extreme poverty in such a short time is extremely creditable. As is its recent action on deploying clean energy technology. I'm much less impressed with its authoritarian political system. And of course I worry about military conflict.
It's the story the new generations tell themselves that's taken hold last few years. IIRC context is SMEE chairman (maker of PRC litho machine) said EUV is made by man, not god. Became rally for PRC industry and national confidence. X is made by man, not god for anything PRC needs to catchup on. Which circles back to Qian Xuesen, foreign people can build rockets, why can't we. Or more recently, foreign people are good at XYZ events, why can't we. AKA anything they can do we can do.
The bigger undercurrent is divide between faction of people who think EUV impossible or possible. Between boomer/doomers (older, never do better than west types) and young techno-optimists, faction generation/education divided. TLDR PRC technical talent skews young, and techwar as spurned wave of scifi optimists, techno nationalists and industrialist party way of thinking. It's not homogeneous but it's dominant, especially in S&T after quick ascendancy.
As a non-American, I think that Americans are special in that they have the right combination of hard work and personal initiative and efficiency. To oversimplify, Europeans are efficient workers, but unlike Americans, they use their efficiency not to produce more but to work less and enjoy life. East Asians are hard workers but they tend to favor group cohesion over maximizing individual potential, which is not as efficient.
I am not saying that one culture is better than another, but I think the American way is particularly productive, particularly stressful too.
I feel this is true of Americans and Europeans. And as an American, I've been migrating myself more and more into the European mindset. I put in my 8 hours, and I'm done, then I do non-work related activities for the next 8 hours, then I sleep for the next.
As a non-American, but one who worked in US companies for decades, I feel Americans are influenced by economic gigantism.
The American experience is of triumphing with audacious, go big or go home schemes that others wouldn't or couldn't attempt.
To cherry pick one example, during WWII the US created airstrips on tiny pacific islands to fight the Japanese. Few people imagined it was possible to freight in the bulldozers, machines and materials to accomplish this, and it was game changing.
And of course we have the Manhattan project. Railroads. Gigantic IT companies like Oracle, IBM, Apple and more lately Google.
These successes fed into American exceptionalism.
This has its pros and cons.
In a world on the cusp of incredible discoveries, it let audacious American megacorps capture the high ground.
But explosive capitalist success has costs and masks underlying issues. Many people have had the experience of starting work at US Megacorp and being astonished at the waste, ineptitude and back stabbing that happens - yet somehow the corporate continues to thrive and throw off mountains of money.
The experience of that easy money breeds an unhealthy version of American exceptionalism where people start to believe they will and should succeed - just because American.
Things are different elsewhere in the world.
Up and comers make do with what they have and struggle upwards while the USA cruises.
Just one example are the thriving Chinese fabbing companies like JLCPCB. Every tech product contains a PCB. It's pretty obvious now that PCB manufacture is an absolute core competency in tech going forward.
Any two man upstart tech company can use JLCPCB's free online tools to design a PCB, then click to have the factory fabricate the board, solder on all the components and connectors, and have it in the customer's hands a few days later. True on demand manufacturing.
What would have cost thousands of dollars, taken months and required a team of experts a few years ago now takes days and costs a few bucks.
The US is nowhere in this relatively new but critical industry. The only US competitors are stuck in a local minimum where they get assured business at generous prices from security-sensitive govt agencies who can't outsource to China, but they can't remotely compete on price with their Chinese competitors on price or even quality and timeliness.
I often think of the USA as a melting pot in the truest sense. You have a little bit of different cultures percolating and bubbling in the fondue pot. Interesting things can come out of it...
But when the fondue "decides" to melt in a certain way, you get the unified ideas which seem impossible (like your airstrip example). Perspectives from all cultures aligned under one roof, while also aligned in direction.
As an American every self made millionaire I've known outside of software is the opposite of this. American success was about the small business made big. It's leaders were people who often built the company themselves. Who started with an idea themselves, who who grew in the kind of environment you outlined in the last part of your post. But those people are all old now, and the environment barely exists anymore. And they normally made their success in a non-glamorous industry making non-glamorous things.
You outline Jack Welch style American business, but that was a reinventing of American business to 'save it' (stock market 'keep the line going up' saving it, not actual saving it as long term GE was left worse off). This isn't the successful American business style that built the country originally.
Your airstrip to me sounds like basically what any American agriculture guy would have done, and in fact probably did do, all the time. My 2002 white Chevy pickup driving 70s millionaire neighbor does this sort of thing all the time in the forest he manages. He does more road work than the local government in crazy remote forrest
I like your takes. As an American, I agree.
The grass is greener though. Europe's work to live, not live to work aligns more with my sensibilities.
Everybody wants (western) Europe's QoL and American's money. What lies in the middle is tiny and every such place is top notch - Switzerland, maybe Singapore, maybe some more.
Small to tiny, highly cohesive, dont shy hard work and dont have unsustainable social utopias
Everybody wants (western) Europe's QoL and American's money. What lies in the middle is tiny and every such place is top notch - Switzerland, maybe Singapore.
You’re not addressing the parent’s question about how any of this is about the “Chinese way of thinking”. In fact, in offering a purely material explanation for China’s success, that it simply has more people and resources, you’re actively arguing against the idea.
I think the places where American inefficiency is most visible is in construction, urban planning, and healthcare.
America blows a significant amount of its money by having its citizens drive everywhere with no option to take a train, bus, bicycle, or low-speed e-scooter. Americans take a crazy percentage of their income and just dump it into the stagnant automotive industry. Americans blow between $5,000-10,000 a year on transportation. It’s so crazy that there is a pretty long list of American cities where moving from the suburbs to the most walkable part of the metro area of that city will net you more square footage in your dwelling after removing the $750/month expense of owning a personal vehicle.
Then you can’t even really fix this problem in America because construction costs are wildly inflated. China can build a high speed rail network for the entire country for the price of a handful of miles of subway in manhattan. Projects take an insanely long time, e.g., California high speed rail. Multiple US cities have a housing cost crisis because houses aren’t being built fast enough, and that’s more money in the economy being blown on rent and financial products rather than productive endeavors.
Hangzhou metro has 12 subway lines. In 2014 they only had one.
Finally, healthcare. America just blows double the amount of money on healthcare of the next most expensive country, with worse outcomes in part because they sit in their cars all day.
I don’t even think some of the problems you’ve brought up with America like the school system are as big of problems. America has really good public schools and universities, so good that Chinese people still come to the US to get educated en masse, even at pretty standard and average state schools.
The current government doing stupid shit like discouraging research and immigration is certainly not helping though.
Regarding your last point, back when my political views were "evolving", I had thought about if, instead of handing foreigners diplomas and kicking them out of the country as fast as possible, we should do the opposite: have student visas require that the recipient stay in the US at least five years after graduation, and then fast-track them through the permanent residency -> citizenship pipeline. It made no sense to me why we'd educate someone to get a degree in chemical engineering, possibly from a rival nation, and then send them back to where they came from. We should "brain drain" other countries, not the other way around.
Those foreign students usually pay for the education they receive, they might not be willing to do so (or as much) if there are strings attached. Besides, I don't think any country should aim on brain draining any other country, that kind of selfishness will be counterproductive long-term. Who knows, might be what we're seeing right now (the US self-sabotaging). Karma's a bitch.
I like the idea of incentivizing people to stay, but I don’t know how we could “require” it. I don’t want the U.S. to implement exit visas or egress control.
Maybe this could be done with a different mechanism like an incentive to stay or an escrow deposit that you get back once you’ve met the requirements.
I think a streamlined path to real citizenship would be an incredible incentive for a lot of people.
I think the world would be better on the whole if such people returned home and improved their countries. The US cannot brain drain the entire world for its own benefit.
That seems like a pretty good idea that’s worth trying.
I think the current logic is that foreign students pay the full unsubsidized sticker price, so it’s basically a profitable transaction.
Show me these magical cities where an extra $750/mo in rent lets you both move from the suburbs to downtown, and increase your sq footage!
Certainly! Here’s my source: https://youtu.be/kYLPUsn0X
The top 5 or 10 of these you’re basically getting close to equivalent square footage or better once you replace your vehicle spending with housing spend.
Well, the video isn't available. And it's a big ask to make way out there claims and then expect people to watch whatever that video was to fully understand whether the claims are true or not. This is basically asymmetric warfare in trolling.
"Here's my wild claim, to verify it go spend your time watching a video!"
I saw the video a few days ago. It uses some napkin math but the author does at least use a spreadsheet / toy model to arrive at their conclusions.
Ohhh okay ty "throwaway920102" will take your word for this.
Ray is a reasonably well-known current/former professional city planner who does look at data to make his content.
The videos he makes do sometimes use napkin math but in the way a city planner does napkin math - with data.
They also don’t claim to be a comprehensive study and each video is accompanied by a pretty thorough disclaimer on what methods are being used.
Odd and unfortunate that this one was taken down.
Was trying to be at least a little helpful "irl_zebra", not to suggest the video was sufficient evidence.
Interesting, I have never seen CityNerd take a video down. I’ll summarize it below my next couple of paragraphs.
Criticizing a source for being in video format and therefore taking time to digest is an invalid criticism. If I linked you a scientific study you’d still have to take time to read it to properly evaluate it. Just because a source in video form doesn’t make it not a source, and it’s not asymmetric trolling warfare. I’m literally just providing a source that aligns with my perspective and opinion, and trying to have a good faith discussion.
I will also point out that every YouTube video provides a full automated transcript on the desktop version of YouTube.
The gist of the video was that some selected American cities presented in a “worst to best” list have an interesting effect going on where people who live in suburban car-dependent areas can potentially live in their metro area’s most walkable neighborhoods with rich urban fabric without sacrificing a lot of square feet or potentially even gaining more space in their home by removing the cost of owning a car and putting that into their rent instead. Ray Delahanty, a (former?) professional city planner, ran through some data on this based on median rent in various neighborhoods and an assumed TCO of personal vehicle ownership of around $750 a month. Metro areas like New York City fared poorly but others presented an interesting trade-off potential.
Obviously, it was something of a simplified discussion that doesn’t take into account every life factor that determines whether car ownership is a requirement, but he is a guy who lived without a car in Las Vegas of all places, so I think the general point was to present a thought experiment on what kind of lifestyle you can get if you change your perspective to consider the idea of ditching your car entirely and no longer pay the very high average costs that Americans incur to own, operate, store, and maintain their vehicles.
Seriously, delusional take. I live in Manhattan and I’m considering a move to Westchester (large suburban county just north of NYC). Average cost per sq foot to buy in Manhattan is about $1500, and it’s about $400 in Westchester. That’s before you touch the other differences in cost of living (taxes, childcare, groceries, etc).
Manhattan is not one of those areas, and is actually one of the worst on the list. Mostly this applies to a lot of smaller cities, here’s my source:
https://youtu.be/kYLPUsn0X3E
So some or even many people explain America’s success as a result of diversity. If that’s true then either China will need to import a diverse population (axis of diversity is uncertain), or else diversity is irrelevant and they will succeed as a more or less undiverse population (whether people are actually Han doesn’t matter so long as they believe and the government classifies them as Han). It’ll be interesting to see.
Diversity is just short hand for US needs to brain drain from around the world, the success is system that disproportionaly increase size of US skilled workforce vs rest, so people better play nice with each other (worked well until not). When PRC went from making 1% of of global technical talent to 50%, and able to retain them or in this case redrain them, they win talent game for generations (at least until 2070s). They will output more stem in next 20 years than US will increase population, births + immigration, i.e. their technical workforce will be 2-3x US. "Diversity" can't brain drain enough to make a dent on those ratios.
"diversity" is an overbroad concept that covers many disparate social practices, a lot of which have nothing to do with technological progress.
I guess that the more focused question is whether China needs to import some amount of tech talent to succeed, at least temporarily. The reporting on this EUV prototype does suggest that that is what they did, giving foreign researchers special visas and whatnot.
China is in a bad place long-term with an inevitable population decline.
Long term is after you and I die, before that they'll reap the greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history that can put everyone else in a bad place long term first.
Which developed country doesn’t have a demographics problem?
Google the top 25 cities in China Skylines.
Your going to feel humbled.
Very impressive. Here are some other interesting google searches:
- "world-wide coal consumption by country"
- "countries with the most executions in 2024"
- "freedom in the world report"
- "world press freedom index"
- "climate change performance by country"
Enjoy.
Now divide "coal consumption", "executions" and " CO2 emission" by capita, it is also interesting.
Hopefully, this century, we can shed some of the 'dominating' mindset that has led to technological exclusionism in the first place. Not that catching up to the state-of-the-art isn't warranted, but that progress will become pocketed once more if we keep falling for the same economic traps.
It's interesting how this comes up when the west is the one that is trying to catch up :)
Fair enough, but the point still stands: innovation of equal benefit compared to isolationism once more with a hefty share of underhanded copying, which will ultimately result in similar technical capabilities anyways.
While historically this has been difficult to achieve, when innovation cycles shift there is an opportunity to shift ingrained practices too.
It’s only a matter of time, but time matters, as they say.
You should know that what China is doing was tried in the past. It is an old story. When the microchip was brand new (invented in the USA) the Soviets realized they needed the tech for military purposes. So they built a closed city devoted to silicon research called Zelenograd. It was staffed with very bright physicists and engineers.
But Zelenograd didn't make the Soviets a computing superpower. In fact they were always behind and fell further and further as time went on. The reason is that the Zelenograd scientists were given copies of US chips and told to clone them. By the time they finished cloning one chip the US had already invented several that were much more advanced. Unable or unwilling to forge their own path, even though they were smart enough to do so, they could not truly develop the in-house expertise needed to match the ever accelerating pace of innovation.
The Soviets never did catch up. Americans tightened security and they just fell ever further behind. By the 1980s they did not even have any attempt to develop an internal internet.
That China is running secret projects to try and clone ASML's machines isn't surprising because for all it has changed, it's still a communist state and its leaders still think in communist ways. They don't understand or appreciate distributed wisdom, so are mentally unable to truly understand how innovation works. Government projects like that are destined to fail - they will clone yesterday's machines tomorrow, and just like the Soviets, will fall further and further behind.
The thing that saves China is that its private sector actually does exist and is much more developed, so the Chinese government projects aren't the only way it can make progress.
The history of Soviet electronics manufacturing is fascinating, but there are some huge differences and I actually don't think the private sector is the largest. One is the pace and type of innovation. In the 70s and 80s the landscape was incredibly dynamic and technology went through several huge changes. If you wanted to run a clone of the US tech industry then, you would need a distributed, dynamic effort across many fields and not a top-down directed Manhattan Project. In 2025 we do have rapid technological change, but things are much more consolidated. In terms of strategically important recent innovations I can only think of EUV and AI. That's much more Manhattan-Project-able.
The other difference - which is even more significant - is that China is already far ahead in advanced manufacturing. The US was lightyears ahead of the Soviets in advanced manufacturing, which is what allowed us to win in the 70s and 80s. Now, we're so far behind it's not even funny. Sure, the West still makes some ultra-precise machines for EUV, but look where most of the components in those machines are made...
At the start of the microchip age, the US wasn't that far ahead. The techniques for manufacturing microchips weren't anything special and the Soviets could do so easily. The problem was the top-down mandate to clone, not lack of internal capability.
I don't know when you want to define as the start of the microchip age (50s? 60s?) but the Soviets were always behind the Americans in advanced manufacturing. In 1931 Stalin said "We are 50–100 years behind the advanced countries" [1.] In WW2 the Soviets relied on the US for advanced machine tools and in 1943 Stalin said: "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war." Khrushchev echoed this in his 1964 memoirs and there is a 1963 recording of Zhukov concurring. Now onto the 50s; the US invents NC machines, transistor manufacturing, chemical processing, miniaturization. The Soviets really only have the lead here in a few metal-related subjects: titanium production and rocket engine metallurgy. This is probably the closest the Soviets came; at this point they did indeed mass produce more tonnage of simple heavy machinery, but cannot mass-produce almost _anything_ cutting edge; look at their cars or consumer electronics of this time period. Onto the sixties; now the gap widens once more, the US pulls far ahead with ICs, microelectronics, CNC manufacturing, advanced alloys and composites, extreme precision manufacturing and precision manufacturing on a large scale. Look at the Saturn V vs the N1 or anything else in the aerospace/space industry at the time; the US was lightyears ahead. They could do things the Soviets could not even dream about. By the 70s the game was lost entirely; the US had advanced electronics manufacturing on a massive scale, laser cutting, even wider deployment of CAD/CAM, and was building the Space Shuttle. The Soviets essentially stagnated and were relegated to making cheap copies years later that looked similar but didn't work well in practice; see the Buran, TU-144, etc.
The reality is that the Soviets never really managed cutting-edge mass manufacturing. There are only a few countries that have: first Britain from the screw-cutting lathe in 1800, then the US, then later Japan, Germany, China, Taiwan and South Korea. In 225 years it's a fairly short list of countries, and most only made the list for a few decades!
The closest the Soviets ever came, of course, was aerospace, but to use that as an example of advanced manufacturing leadership would be a stretch. Sputnik was impressive, but advanced manufacturing it was certainly not; it was a simple sphere with a simple radio transmitter. Look at the tolerances, finishes, materials, manufacturing methods, etc of N1 vs Saturn V, Buran vs the Space Shuttle, TU-144 vs the Concorde.
[1] https://www.hrono.info/libris/stalin/13-18.php - fascinating speech by Stalin on industrialization in 1931
The analogy with Russia is too obtuse to be useful. Russia never was an economic exporting powerhouse with tons of manufacturing know-how and willing engagement in the larger international capitalist economies. I am no fan of the PRC, but there is plenty of intellectual, innovation, and economic competition within China to make your analogy unlikely to be helpful.
That said, the U.S., if it wants to stay ahead, also needs to fight trends toward reducing competition via de facto monopolistic behaviors by mega corporations with co-opted governmental protections.
Soviet Russia at that time was a global superpower that had developed nuclear weapons and was winning the space race. It only exported heavily to other communist states, but it definitely could do advanced tech and manufacturing.
Modern PRC and USSR aren't exact analogues, but the approach of their governments is clearly similar in this case.
Soviets winning space race during microchip era? I think you have mildly mixed up decades. Soviets were leaders till US put people on the moon, that was so far beyond what soviets were capable of this race stopped, and they just focused on ICBMs.
Soviet tech was sturdy and more primitive (thus more sturdy), much cheaper and they were willing to deliver it to anybody.
I wasn't attempting to be extremely precise with dates. My point was only that the Soviets and the US were technologically comparable in that era. Yes, the US put in huge efforts and were able to overtake them in the space race, largely due to a stronger economy rather than some unique technological skill.
I agree a lot.
China is very good at industrialising stuff because they are very obedient and efficient on matters that are already known. Once the west has identified a worthwhile endeavor, they are quite quick at reproducing and churning out copies efficiently. Sometimes they improve on it slightly but their game is mostly about making it cheaper.
This can readily be seen in the smartphone market. They have all the industrial base, large supply of engineers and large amount of cash. Yet they are unable to make a truly defining product once you remove the price out of the equation. The first reason to buy a Chinese smartphone is lower price otherwise people still prefer to go with Apple, Google or Samsung. There are small details that make those devices generally just better; even when the Chinese manage to do better in a particular dimension, overall the western designed devices are just better. They have tried increasing price (at least MSRP, to make their devices look more expensive) but there is no way one would pay Apple/Samsung prices for their smartphone. I actually think this is why smartphone haven't trended down on price much lately, the Chinese are trying to capture the design/engineering part of the pie but with limited success. Meanwhile, since competiton has reduced, the major western player can feel content selling the same stuff without reducing price.
And yes the private sector is quite developed but to me it seems like it is largely devoted to fulfill western needs because that's were the real money is. When they manage to do something special, there is always an enormous western influence, either through education (chinese who studied abroad) or via direct involvement of western people inside their business.
For the big projects, they are relying a lot on technology transfer from the west, buying the IP with consulting from western companies and then copying what they learned at scale.
I think a lot of people still don't understand what a profond influence having a communist mindset has. It looks successfull to them because they manage to afford a good lifestyle thanks to their massive industries but that is downstream of all their copying/mimicking the western inventions.
Western societies should think about what they are doing when they transfer their knowledge to this country on the cheap, because it strenghten them and China isn't a nice player in general.
The argument that never fails to appear: China’s failures are blamed on communism, while China’s successes are attributed to capitalism.
What do you think would have happened if 1989 had went a different way, China today is already united with Taiwan and basically a billion+ person version of Taiwan.
They would be less successful?
It never fails to appear because it's correct and obviously so. Look at when China started to become rich and what they changed around that time.
IMO, the difference between East and West is money allocation. In west, especially in the US, there are a lot money in the private sector, they will take the risk and fund moonshot projects; in China, the state will (have to) play that role. Yes, 90% of the projects will fail in the portfolio, that's part of the game.
There’s a NYT’s interview several months back where the journalist phrased it as in America, you have to prove success first to get funded. But in China, funding comes first and the successful companies emerge.
Which isn't at all accurate. Venture capital specifically exists to fund first, in the pursuit of success later - and the US has been by a dramatic margin the leader in doing that for the past ~60-70 years.
China has this process at the city state level. They can leverage their pegged currency to keep their citizen’s purchasing power lower than it should be to fund anything.
A downside is that their consumption economy is low, all their geo neighbors view them as a threat (reducing exports long term), and this contributes to high unemployment as productivity increases.
VC still requires startups to find themselves and prove something first. China basically has a program to do X and anyone can sign up to be a part of that program. All are funded and the winners emerge. I’m broadly generalizing that process but that’s not how VC approaches it.
So instead of "Come pitch us your varied and unique ideas and convince us how our investment will 1000x the returns" it's more like "we need this capability in this industry. Here is a pool of money for you to start figuring it out. We'll focus on the more successful companies over time until they can stand on their own and compete internationally."
I can't imagine why China is so dominant in so many areas when they explicitly plan and invest in capabilities they want to have instead of just relying on the market to "naturally" provide these capabilities or constantly relying on the same handful of inept and corrupt companies to deliver on national needs.
I think thats misunderstanding. China studied the US and learned from the US, the funding is almost the same way except the state funding has objectives other than returns. US has the best financial system, (well most effective and powerful). There is no way China can do better than the US, what we are seeing is that the objectives are very different.
That sounds more like Europe than America.
Europe is like the US, money is owned by private but they are old money, not new tech billionaires, and does not take the risks as the US. In China, money is owned by the state, and they are willing to take the risks as the US. In this way, I think China is more similar to US than Europe.
I wonder how much scam there is on US side...
To be honest, maybe only Americans themselves really understand it. Our understanding of them is that they have poured vast amounts of money into areas outside of technology.
“transparent computing” -> this shit: https://www.science.org/content/article/critics-pounce-china...
The final outcome is affected by the final 10%, you can even call it 1%, for which the semi-corrupt or "communistiquesque" countries never (seemingly) have the will or sheer talent for.
> "communistiquesque" countries never (seemingly) have the will or sheer talent for.
I don't have the data to back it up, but I think that there is actually the same amount of will and talent in China as in the West
Based on the population size and school system, I'd conjecture there's more... though there is brain drain and emigration to consider.
I'd rather be in China than the USA right now.
Are you being facetious or are you ignorant of what it's actually like over there?
https://reclaimthenet.org/china-man-chair-interrogation-soci...
Or even worse, do you actually support their views on human rights?
In China you don't criticise the dictatorship and don't be a Muslim and your quality of life improves every year and you get many cool products and services. In the USA they are disappearing people at random and they are banning the import of products and services from the places that are producing them (mostly China).
The US disappeared a local business owner down the street from me in a sleepy suburb because he happened to be walking to his business one morning while brown.
ICE/BP was looking for someone else, but saw another brown person while waiting, and took the opportunity to grab him, too.
He was imprisoned for more than a month and shuffled around the country before anyone bothered to look at his identification or acknowledge their validity.
Are you aware of what's going on in the US right now?
NYT: Those Deported to El Salvador Were Shackled, Beaten, and Sexually Assaulted[1]
And if you're saying to yourself, "what do I have to worry about, I'm not brown", well, do you have kids who you don't want to have abducted and zip-tied naked in the middle of the night by paramilitaries using grenades and rappelling from helicopters into your home[2][3]?
> Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.
> "They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other," Watson said. "That's all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where's the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'fuck them kids.'"
> “It was heartbreaking to watch,” she said. “Even if you’re not a mother, seeing kids coming out buck naked and taken from their mothers, it was horrible.”
> "They just treated us like we were nothing," Fisher said.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/world/americas/el-salvado...
[2] https://www.rawstory.com/it-was-heartbreaking-naked-zip-tied...
[3] https://abc7chicago.com/post/ice-chicago-federal-agents-surr...
around 13 millons graduates each year and > 50% of them are STEM
The level of cope... The US and the west in general is on a much more dire trajectory than China (which is facing its own demons, no doubt about that)
There is not much left of communism in China besides the name, it's more akin to a government steered economy, which arguably is very similar to what the west had when we moved at our peak speed, albeit more authoritarian. They still have what we mostly lost: a long term historical view of geopolitic.
>There is not much left of communism in China besides the name,
After living 2 years in China and visiting the country every year for the last 12 years, I disagree with you.
Many not minor things in China are still very aligned with communism.
How the university system works, land property, production in unpopulated areas and small towns, participation of the government in industry, etc…
It's most accurate to say that China is still run by folks who are committed communists. These planners, by virtue of their decades of experience, understand the social value of markets and broad based technological growth, and want to wield those even better than liberal planners.
Yeah but then again most people think "if it's not capitalism it's communism", there is a whole spectrum and China definitely does not belong in the communist part of the spectrum anymore. It's a mix of authoritarian socialism and state capitalism, you can add many other words to the mix but communism isn't at the top of it anymore
New things deserve new definitions, we have to get out of the ww2 lingo where everyone is a nazi, a fascist, a communist or a capitalist, it's overly simplistic and muddies the water. 2025 China is completely different than 2000 China which itself is completely different than 1980 China.
> since it wasn’t made by God, we can definitely make it ourselves.
This implies copying what someone else did. Rather than inventing something new. I know it's not what you meant but if it wasn't made by God it's because it's already made by someone else. The sentence says to me more about copying than some relentless pursuit. The people who invented the thing to copy, those were more relentless presumably.
And then again the Chinese invented plenty over the years. These generalizations are bit meh.
I don't see why copying is unnatural or even bad. Maybe within a single economy or a group of economies which share a common understanding and laws, chosing to discourage copying to incentivise other citizen innovators makes sense.
But in the global context, between adversarial nations, or even countries that don't see each other as equal, it is absolutely foolish not to copy. Since everything is framed in terms of game theories, what is even the benefit of not copying and being a "good boy" country?
In fact in this situation a country's IP is almost its liability and not its asset. Because it should cost the holding country money and resources so their citizens' IP is protected. And these resources are better off preserved for more crucial knowledge.
None of this even makes the copier's actions bad or immoral. They have a moral imperative to succeed.
Some copying creates a first mover disadvantage in game theory in regards to capital resource allocation. It requires second order thinking to understand, but it’s not super complicated.
Yes but thats not the copyers problem is it? Risk is inherent in all things the second order requires that you keep advancing by attracting resources.
It depends on the sophistication of your analysis.
What are possible problems you can imagine a copyer having?
You’re not wrong to think that way. But now there’s less and less left for China to “copy,” and it’s hard to argue that many things aren’t being invented by China itself.
Perhaps the real question is this: why is it that places that used to be technologically advanced no longer produce new, original inventions? Is it fear of China copying them? Did the U.S. decide not to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet because it was afraid China would copy it? Did it stop working on battery technology because it feared China would copy that too?
The joke is, if you want a consumer good to exist, but you don't want to do it yourself and you want it for cheap, just make a flashy Kickstarter for it, buy marketing, then cancel the Kickstarter and wait for Chinese"clones" to hit the market!
Can't wait to see the first Nobel prize in physics being awarded to a scientist who is actually a product of Chinese academy. Any moment now.
Nobel prizes in physics are awarded typically with lag of 20-30 years. In early 2000s China was still a relative backwater economically (and academically). In 2000 US R&D spending was over 8 times China's. Now China has likely surpassed USA. It surpassed EU already in about 2014.
Working in academia, the rise of China academically is palpable. There's an avalance of Chinese research published, and a reasonable chunk of it very high quality, and getting better.
https://www.statista.com/chart/20553/gross-domestic-expendit...
https://itif.org/publications/2025/06/30/china-outpacing-us-...
Nobel prizes are almost as sus as Oscars now. Corina Machado tells you all you need to know.
The peace price is different, and it's been a bit of a hit and miss at least since Kissinger got it.
And the economics prize, though it's not officially really a Nobel prize.
But the core science prizes, AFAICT, are pretty spot on. Of course there are always many worthy contenders of a prize and one can quibble should this or that person really deserve to get it instead of another person, but I haven't heard of any outright frauds or some trivial advancement getting the prize.
It's still very political - with a small p.
For example the recent nobel prize for Chemistry being awarded to David Baker, Dennis Hassabis and John Jumper.
Why the hell is David Baker on that list? He was just the head of a very big lab that was working in the traditional way using largely physics based approaches, making incremental progress.
AlphaFold blew that whole approach out of the water.
They cite the design of Top7 back in 2003 - it's not at the level of impact as Alphafold.
The impact of Alphafold is obvious to all - the importance of the 2003 Baker paper doesn't stand out to me from 1000's of other possible candidates - that's where self-promotion, visibility and politics plays a part.
The 2003 Baker paper has 2249 citations over 22 years. The 2021 AlphaFold paper has had 43876 citations in 4 years..........
Reminder that there are two different organizations that award “Nobel” prizes; one is the actual organization and the other is the Riksbank, the central bank of Sweden. Not the same people, etc.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but it will happen sooner or later.
Can you clarify what are you talking about? The US has been developing 6th-gen fighter since the mid mid-2010s - not that I'd consider it as an important new original invention.
What I would consider as the most impactful inventions of the last decade would be things like mRNA, Generative AI, and reusable rockets - all came from the US and the US is maintaining the lead in them.
> What I would consider as the most impactful inventions of the last decade would be things like mRNA, Generative AI, and reusable rockets - all came from the US and the US is maintaining the lead in them.
This so myopic. The covid mRNA vaccine that Pfizer made billions from was done by BionTech a company in Germany led by immigrant turks.
Sure some American's recently got the Nobel prize for the pseudouridine modification - and whiles that's enabling it's not sufficient - you also need LNPs and a whole bunch of other stuff to make it all work - some of which was invented in America and some of which wasn't.
The nature of international science is collaboration.
The danger the for the US right now is it's cutting itself off from one of the biggest sources of innovation right now - China.
I’m sorry, but you are completely missing the point.
Nobody disputed that mRNA, like all science, has many inventors. And that many people in the west as a whole has worked on the technology. Everything you said about the contributions to mRNA is correct, and doesn’t diminish US’s critical part in it.
The point was, and remains, that saying that the US has stopped becoming innovative, is just nonsense.
Aren't we are talking about relative innovation?
Of course the US is still innovative - I think the question is whether countries like China are simply copying or now out innovating in some areas.
Their appears to be a lack of acknowledgement in the US about the current rate of innovation coming out of China these days - the days of only cheap knock-offs ( as with Japan before them ) is largely over.
In the areas I know - I see increasingly impressive innovation coming out of China right now.
The way the US is treating China right now is counter productive in my view. The biggest risk isn't the Chinese stealing US innovation - the biggest risk is the US cutting itself off from a key source of new ideas.
In my view the next Biontech is more likely to come from China than Germany.
I don't know why the US is treating it as a zero-sum game.
> Can you clarify what are you talking about? The US has been developing 6th-gen fighter since the mid mid-2010s - not that I'd consider it as an important new original invention.
So you think that, as an advanced military project that should have been kept under the strictest secrecy, the Chinese somehow obtained it and, based on that, developed their own sixth-generation fighter—and even managed a successful test flight while the U.S. is still at the PowerPoint stage? I don’t know which scenario would be worse for the United States.
Well, if we compare what we know about China's NGAD, which is almost nothing, with what we know about US NGAD, which is also almost nothing, we can safely conclude almost nothing.
China doesn’t yet have the jet engine technology to compete with American 5th gen fighters. I certainly don’t think the US or anyone else should be complacent, but the US has a substantial lead for now.
Some relevant info here: https://www.flyajetfighter.com/the-ws-15-engine-enters-servi...
Not sure fighters matter as much these days - Russia has air superiority in terms of jets over Ukraine - but it uses them infrequently - appears the problem is the ground based counter measures are quite effective and much cheaper.
If they want to attack by air - drones and missiles rather than planes appear to be the way to go.
Similarly aircraft carriers - they can only really be used now to bully small countries. To anybody with significant missile/drone tech they are just massive, slow, sitting ducks.
What matters is drones and missiles etc and how fast you can churn them out. Who would win that?
The US is going to have to find a way to live with countries like China and India, rather than trying to suppress them.
The current US policy of trying to dismant all the organisations that were set up post world war II in order to keep the peace is madness.
>Russia has air superiority in terms of jets over Ukraine
No, no they do not. Russia has more fighter jets than Ukraine yes but that's not what "Air superiority" is, let alone "Air supremacy" which is what the USA designs for.
If you cannot suppress air defense networks, you do not have anything close to air superiority. If you cannot fly missions in an airspace, you do not have superiority.
>What matters is drones and missiles etc and how fast you can churn them out. Who would win that?
Drones and missiles still don't replace airframes. Do not mistake "Is new and the battlefield is still teasing things out" with "Is dominant forever". China definitely doesn't seem to think they are replacing airframes, and in fact is doubling down on making platforms that are aligned with US doctrine, like modern stealth fighters, carriers, and networked battlespace management.
Torpedo boats did not kill Battleships. Battleships were only replaced when their job could be done from longer range by an Aircraft carrier.
>To anybody with significant missile/drone tech they are just massive, slow, sitting ducks.
Only China with their legit Hypersonic weapons has a strong case for nullifying the carriers. US doctrine has included "Defend from 200 incoming weapons targeting the carrier" since the 60s when the Navy first built an entirely automated and networked fleet system to ensure that those incoming get tasked appropriately, and anti-missile defense is never a guarantee, but it works well enough that the sinking of the Moskva was utterly shocking to those familiar with it, and implies terrible things about Russian naval readiness.
The previous threat model of these carriers was supersonic bombers launching high speed cruise missiles 200 at a time from 100 miles out. Shaheds are not a threat. That's why the Navy started running primary 5inch gun practice against them. They are the same threat model as a helicopter because they are slow.
>The current US policy of trying to dismant all the organisations that were set up post world war II
Agree
>in order to keep the peace is madness.
What? That's uh, not what they are doing. See Venezuela.
> If you cannot suppress air defense networks, you do not have anything close to air superiority. If you cannot fly missions in an airspace, you do not have superiority.
Isn't that my point? The balance has shifted.
BTW I did't say planes or aircraft carriers are not useful - just that they are not useful for the political reasons that are given. ie they are useful in bullying second rate countries - however that's not how defence spending is justified - it's all about existential threat of Russia/China etc.
>in order to keep the peace is madness.
Sorry that sentence was unclear - I didn't mean they are dismantling to keep the peace, I'm saying the organisation were set up to keep the peace post WWII.
My reading of why they are dismantling them is because they think these organisations and treaties constrain them - which is of course true - and by and large a good idea.
Bottom line if you build up weapons because you fear somebody, you create fear in the other and create a vicious cycle - good for the arms industry - no good for anybody else. The only way to break that is to talk, do deals, build trust.
All of the US military is a waste including 6th generation fighters. We hope china copies our disinformation campaign. In fact as the usa has been taken apart almost all of our big secrets are just disinformation
- stealth (not really) - aliens (sure....) - 6th gen jets (where are the jets?)
The reality is that everything that you do in peacetime is just to scare the enemy and will have very little effect in war. Since the US doesn't have as much industrial capacity the only winning war is nuke from space first or learn to get along
The Chinese are ahead at too many things at this point to think they're only good at copying
And it is not like making a copy for cheaper isn't something that requires skill and innovation. Or then iterate on that copy. Didn't Roomba just fail to these copies. If west was truly so much more innovative and better shouldn't they as company be infinitely ahead still?
That depends heavily on where the cost saving came from. For a long time China made cheap copies with extremely cheap labor, though that may no longer be the case as it seems they're innovating on the manufacturing process these days.
I never said that, or that there's something wrong with copying. I just said the sentence implies copying. Which it does.
And in fact this meme Chinese only copy is crap as I point out in my last paragraph. Over the centuries the Chinese were the first at quite a few things.
But the sentence says what it says.
And that copying was largely enabled by our greedy western bean counters that outsourced so many things in the first place.
Which in turn was fueled by the consumers' desire for cheap stuff, and for their portfolios to earn them a lot of money to be able to retire early and live comfortably while letting a cheaper workforce far away do more and more of the dirty and dangerous jobs.
The "bean counters" are under pressure just like everybody else. They didn't come up with their targets and incentives out of nowhere.
That's what happens when wages are relatively stagnant compared to increases in productivity.
That's a fair point! I am myself wondering how much of this is policy and how much is the "natural way".
To be fair, they were uncoordinated actors in a prisoner’s dilemma competition.
This was the role of government to manage but there weren’t enough non-lawyers at positions of power to understand fixes.
Now with the massive fraud seen in local states, civilians will rightfully trust institutions less and the downward trend will continue.
All is copied in one way or another, progress in a vacuum is truly artificial and those who've been singularly credited for certain inventions likely have so because of the luck of the draw.
If I was in china's position and so much is at stake, how can I go towards engineering all the tech from scratch when I can reverse engineer existing tech from west?
You wouldn't and you shouldn't. You should copy. It's what I would've done also. It's just what it is.
It's also the foundation of the US economy. Look up the cotton gin patent some time. And the early days of Hollywood.
And textile production and the industrialization of New England.
With Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...
It’s a good thing that Chinese companies have zero expertise in leveraging consumer demand for lower-end tech to develop know-how and catch up with the state of the art from Western-aligned companies and then economies of scale to surpass them in distribution.
Exactly. That's where this is heading, and the West-- as usual-- is pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up.
>pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up
"Forgetting to look up" implies a desire or intent to do so. The United States - former leader of the collective West - made the choice decades ago to sacrifice everything on the altar of quarterly profits. All that remains are the consequences of that decision.
When did this whole quarterly profits thing start and what lead to it?
You can round it down to Milton Friedman as the ideology and Jack Welch at GE in the 80s as the implementation and figurehead, but the original seeds were in the SEC mandating quarterly reporting as part of regulation after the great depression.
We can all agree to blame Jack Welch as shorthand though, I think.
I think it changed before that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
It's not real. Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth. But for some reason people love to use this as an explanation of everything wrong in our country.
I'd cite as a counterexample in recent memory Sears, GE, Boeing, and Intel. I think collectively they've destroyed close to a trillion dollars by focus on quarterly results over long term, and they're not alone.
I sometimes wonder what a Drucker or ishikawa would say of today's "vaunted American management". Speed roughly short term thinking is too strong of a force in our American thinking. Heck I've counted three recent HN posts this month pushing for speedy software development too.
Yes, and we all saw what happened. They've experienced serious financial consequences, some went out of business. This is exactly what is supposed to happen when you do dumb shortsighted things.
There's also risk in investing in very long-term things that may not pan out.
WAI, in other words
The exception proves the norm.
The only major example I can think of is Amazon dot com which famously reinvested all its profits into itself for well over a decade.
The fact that investors didn't punish Amazon dot com was seen as befuddling in the press.
> Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth.
No, I don't think this is true at all because you used the word "routinely". I would claim it is very rare.
FAANG-like stock, in general, has paid little to zero dividends for long periods of time post IPO, their rational stock values being based on hypothetical future dividends only after the initial self-investment phase is over.
There's not much that doesn't befuddle the press
Don't most tech startups lose money for years before they maybe make a profit?
I mean, I agree that such companies are over-represented in thinking about small businesses if that's what you mean. Normal companies have to be profitable quickly for sure.
It feels like tons of companies get valued based on userbase or revenue or theoretical breakthrough rather than ever having to really think about breaking even, but I know that's just because those folks get all the press.
Growth in this case can also be growth of valuation. Or maybe that is in general the goal. Get the market cap or nominal valuation to go up.
Some money is lost to push up this valuation or valuation based on some future sales, or market share or anything...
> Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth.
But much of that long term growth now is just the company growing to displace competitors in existing markets, often by subsidizing prices and dodging regulations - see: Uber, Lyft, Air BnB, etc.
We've all seen the playbook a dozen times now: move into a market, keep prices artificially low until the existing competitors are displaced, then the raise prices to return the initial investment and more. That kind of growth-by-displacement is genuinely necessary sometimes but in these cases it's more like a fungus than a plant, just metabolizing an existing system.
It's not the same thing as actually expanding a market or investing in concrete assets (steel mills, power plants, boats, railroads) or R&D that compounds future growth. When the actual investment is just spent artificially lowering prices there's no actual efficiency gains and the consumers ultimately pay the price and more when the company hits the peak of the existing market and shift to enshittification mode to really extract wealth.
Minority shareholder rights, you can be sued for not maximizing profits see Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919).
1910s Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.
This is slightly reductionist. If consumers _actually_ cared about quality or US-made over price this wouldn't have been possible.
My counterpoint is that it’s not possible to buy appliances which last for decades anymore, because the entire industry has changed. Consumers eventually don’t have a choice
They have much less choice because all of those businesses that cared about quality have gone out of business!
100 years ago clothes were expensive items. Which is why they were class signals - less because of fashion and more because if you were poor you needed to buy long lasting fabrics. Clothes for the poor were expensive as well as the rich.
You can buy those same quality items today but nobody will because we expect clothes to be cheap and not have to repair them.
Take flights... For all the complaints about lack of legroom etc the price of a flight 50 years ago was the same as first/business class today. And yet how few people will pay for it. They'll grumble about small seats and bad snacks but hardly anybody will fork out for the upgrade. Not because they can't actually afford it but because they believe it should be cheaper.
I think some people can afford those quality goods, the same percentage roughly as could afford it before things got cheaper. The people complaining are people who couldn’t afford those quality goods earlier and now are buying the cheaper versions they can afford. But that has shaped broader consumer preferences for cheaper goods across the board
When a manager at GE decided to turn into a bank and get rid of all the making stuff, how was the consumer supposed to continue buying quality things that didn't exist?
When Sears was looted by management, how were consumers supposed to continue purchasing quality stuff from a historic company?
You've got your cause and effect backwards. American companies fired everyone who was paid enough to afford good stuff, and replaced them with workers in other countries, and then those people didn't really have a choice but to buy the junk because it was the only option left on the market and they couldn't afford anything else
What happened was that American business theory abandoned the American worker.
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I would just be careful to discount the capitalist West. You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing. All of that wasted capital. Authoritarian regimes with controlled media always seem successful… until it doesn’t. Up until the USSR collapsed there were many prominent people in the West saying it was the superior system. The market test - meaning floating prices and the response to them - is a superior way of allocating capital. We need to see how all of this plays out
I swear I've been reading about overbuilding in China since, like, 2012. And I've definitely used it in arguments myself. Not only China hasn't collapsed, but it has improved massively since then, as far as I can tell.
The US also had a period of time in which their government directed large construction projects, and they too were particularly prosperous in the time afterwards.
> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing.
Is it all being demolished, or is 95% of it being moved into?
Because all those ghost cities that China was building that the news kept bitching about... Are now all full.
Meanwhile, in the West, we have a housing shortage. Who looks the fool now...
Yep, it's way better to overbuild than underbuild. Lack of houses for young people looking to start families / move in for better jobs has big negative societal impacts that we're only starting to see.
In the 60s and 70s European countries were giant construction yards. It gave many people jobs and we still enjoy the infrastructure today!
> I would just be careful to discount the capitalist West.
I would. It's showing the weaknesses and limitations of its ideology.
> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China, which they are now demolishing. All of that wasted capital.
So what?
> Authoritarian regimes with controlled media always seem successful… Up until the USSR collapsed there were many prominent people in the West saying it was the superior system.
The West is literally de-industrializing and can't seem to built shit except slowly and expensively. Industry after industry gets hollowed out as China takes the lead.
Do not make the mistake of reasoning about US vs China from the experience of US vs USSR. China doesn't have a command economy, outproduces the US, and controls many key industries. The US is resting on its laurels, and its people cope by thinking of the few industries where it's still ahead, but those are dwindling.
> The market test - meaning floating prices and the response to them - is a superior way of allocating capital.
That's not truth, it's a dogmatic assumption.
China has been able to exploit a dogmatic belief in the free market to siphon the real capital out of the West and into itself (industry and know-how) in order to achieve dominance. The US elite is content to have paper. We'll see how that works out.
> We need to see how all of this plays out
If you're rooting for China. If you're rooting for the US, by then it will be too late to course correct.
> You’d have to be blind to ignore the massive overbuilding of property in China
Isn't the same now happening with the US with the massive overbuilding of AI capacity? Seems like a tightly centralized capitalist system is not that different from a communist one.
Or rather thinking one step forward the question arises, whether we use the right words for the right things? Does the capitalist West has any defining economics characteristics of a liberal free-market capitalism at all?
Private ownership of means of production: On an atomic, legal level of course. But if point at an NVIDIA based compute rack at a US based random datacenter, can someone tell me actually who owns it? I am interested in the actual natural person who has an ownership share of this capital asset, not the myriads of layers of corporate and financial networks of equity delegations through investment banks, but the actual owner?
Profit oriented: Of course, it is said so. But do really companies, entrepreneurs do things to maximize the profits of the actual owners, shareholders? Are the executives and boards really that keen on putting forward the interest - of the previously referenced unknown - actual owner of the capital assets?
Free market based: This has also multiple sub-characteristics, but most importantly something about competition, or rather the lack of collusion and that economic actors (including consumers, (natural person) investors) are all fully informed. How much is this true in the West?
I think we are very much lost in labels.
> West-- as usual-- is pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up.
The companies building out vast data centers for AI aren’t looking to make profits for several years (if ever), and are catching a lot of flak for it. The shareholders who seem to be focused on short-term profits and punish them every time they get cold feet. Oracle is a prime example of this.
I don’t know if the markets in Asia work differently, or if the investors there are just as fickle.
And they should be catching a lot of flak for it because it's not really long term strategic planning, it's overhyping a technology and running roughshod over society promoting misuses and AI slops.
Although I'm the first to agree with this, it is actually commendable in the sense that it breaks with the quarterly profits approach.
Like meta with the metaverse thing, I hate it with a passion, but pouring billions yearly with little return just to support your vision is at least a break with tradition...
To be very fair, Chinese companies are also pursing quarterly profits. They're just better at scaling things up and down very fast because of immense supply chain options.
> immense supply chain options.
so this begs the question - why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense? My unresearched answer is that the gov't policies of the west doesn't induce it, while china's gov't does (which includes targeted subsidies, tax incentives and state driven finances).
The "hidden" cost is that the workers in this supply chain isn't as well paid and isn't as powerful as the workers from the west (there's no unions in china for example).
> why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense?
They used to be. Since roughly the 80's, policymakers have decided it is better for the shareholders to outsource most of that industry overseas to China and India and etc, where the labor is cheaper.
Note that workers and especially union members actually have every incentive to keep that production domestic, but shareholders and CEOs profit when they can cut labor costs and the typical Western consumer values cheap products more than the health of domestic industry.
Western industries have been supported by subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, low interest rates, and a dozen other things from the gov't but the same policies reward outsourcing and financial engineering more than actual production capacity.
> why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense?
The US explicitly chose to be a service economy. China explicitly chose to be a mercantile economy.
The US can absolutely switch paths, it will just take a long time and will require pushing millions into poverty. But we're on track to do it.
> The US explicitly chose to be a service economy. China explicitly chose to be a mercantile economy.
In other words: the US wants its workers assembling hamburgers, China wants its workers assembling drones.
And when there's a conflict, the US will lose because you can't win a war with hamburgers.
Rather, the US wants its worker coming up with the concept of drones to begin with.
Which is how China gets to make drones to begin with. You don't seem to have any understanding of what a service economy is.
> Rather, the US wants its worker coming up with the concept of drones to begin with.
Sure, but that idea is too stupid and arrogant to event consider. China's not going to cede that kind of high-level work forever. They'll learn how to do it, and when that happens what will the US do?
And then, in the conflict, can your "concept makers" get their implementation done by the hamburger assemblers, with their hamburger assembler skills and hamburger assembly equipment?
> They'll learn how to do it, and when that happens what will the US do?
Continue coming up with even more advanced ideas. This is like the Winklevoss Twins getting mad at Zuckerberg for 'stealing their idea', and the dean of Harvard lecturing them about how they're Men of Harvard and as such they'll simply come up with another idea, because that's what Men of Harvard do. They don't just one and done with one good idea.
The US built the world's most advanced idea factory, but the people who hate smart people got into power and now they're stripping the copper out of the walls.
> And then, in the conflict
There won't be a hot conflict between nuclear powers. Or there will, and whoever can make the most drones will be irrelevant in the first 24 hours.
>Sure, but that idea is too stupid and arrogant to event consider. China's not going to cede that kind of high-level work forever.
The "stupid and arrogant" idea has worked for decades and the only real problem with it is espionage. Stealing someone else's labor is an enormous amount of China's progress, and a good thing to remember when musing about a country's future.
> The "stupid and arrogant" idea has worked for decades and the only real problem with it is espionage.
No, the stupid and arrogant idea is the one that the Chinese will be content to occupy the subordinate position forever, taking direction from Westerners and doing only the grunt work the Westerners often think is beneath them.
It's also stupid and arrogant to think the Chinese are not capable of innovation on their own. The espionage was a tactic to catch up more quickly, and now that they've done that, Chinese are innovating on their own now and have better technology in many areas. But that's not the only thing going on: Western countries are literally going over to China, teaching them what they'll need to know to out-compete them in the future.
"Explicitly chose" is a strong word.
US and China are on completely different stages of industrialization: The US had its massive boom of manufacturing almost a century ago, enriching its population massively. Those rich citizens make the same manufacturing uncompetitive today, because no one is going to work in a factory for $20k/year (median wage in urban China), when he can work for other "rich" people for more than twice as much.
Switching paths is not feasible for the US in the same way that it is not gonna be feasible for China to hold on to all its industry as wages rise: You can't compete globally at "poor people wages" while being "rich", as simple as that.
> But we're on track to do it.
The only thing that the US is on track to is getting a taste of what real corruption feels like, enriching Trump's friends, and hollowing out its middle class.
Joke's on them. If a wave of post-trump anti-corruption retribution doesn't come when the Republicans get swept out of power, we're going to have a whole generation of Luigis.
There are lots of reasons, but also, having 1.4B people under the same government that has more-or-less aligned strategic goals help. Like supply chains within Japan, from what I've seen and experienced, are pretty strong. However, the options will always look smaller compared to a gigantic organism across the pond.
40+ years of deliberate policy choices to prioritise growth through finacialisation rather than domestic industrial production
> why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense?
Because each city in China has become specialized. You want to have someone make hairdryers for your company to sell? Then go to Cixi. There are dozens of small suppliers making the parts that go into hair dryers. There are dozens of companies making small appliances (just like hairdryers) They're all "just down the street" from each other. This means that the knowledge and infrastructure and workers are all in one place. You don't have to ship a truckload of heater elements across the country to some factory that some CEO decided should be built in the lowest cost real estate. The same reason that all of the America IC manufacturers got started in Silicon Valley.
This sort of specialization/concentration used to happen in the US. That's why NYC had a "garment district" where you could get clothing made from design to ready-to-sell. Los Angeles used to be one of the major hubs for making aircraft because of the large number of small companies making stuff that the aerospace companies assemble into aircraft. Jacobs wrote about this sort of thing in Cities And The Wealth of Nations about how the Shah of Iran wanted a helicopter factory in Iran. It was a flop because none of the seats are made across town, they're made in America, like the blades or engine or windscreen or avionics. All the Shah got for his dream was an assembly plant. There was no transfer of technology so that the parts could be made in Iran.
Before shipping containers were invented, shipping goods was expensive enough that factories making things tended to be located close to their suppliers. That was why Detroit became a center of car manufacturing. Shipping containers made it cheaper to transport some item across an ocean than it costs to drive it across the city.
The West (with particular emphasis on the USA) got infected with this insane ideology that the best way to restore democracy to China would be to "corrupt" them with capitalism. Hence open them up to international trade, allow joining WTO etc. With prosperity the people would demand democracy.
You can also see this in the German approach to energy trade with Russia.
This toxic idea needs to be put to bed. All it did was feed and enrich foreigners at the expense of locals and create supply chain dependencies that made themselves hostage.
The beneficial owners of the US economy sold our industrial manufacturing base to the Communist Party of China because the price was good. China got our hard power and US capital owners got to break the back of the US labor movement. A win-win deal for the ages.
The West only represents a minority on this planet. China alone has 1 billion people.
The last 200 years has been an aberration and it is currently in the process of being corrected.
The West is easily over a billion people
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Chinese companies are simply not as beholden to shareholders - the stock market really doesn’t dominate the country’s financial landscape as it does in the US
Is anyone here calling legislators about it to inform them of this?
Does anyone here have leverage to affect strategy?
It might be a bit nihilistic but at this point I don't think the current US administration has any strategy. In past administrations, it felt like even if there was a strategy, bureaucracy and lack of caring enough to do their job led to nothing happening. In this administration, it feels like there's no care for the rules so in theory a strategy could be pushed through... except there isn't one - literally whoever is the last person to talk to the president is the person who gets to set the direction.
> I don't think the current US administration has any strategy
I 100% believe the strategy is to enlarge the Trump family's wealth, and it's been a wildly successful strategy (in the past year he's been able to create billions in wealth for his family [0]). At least this vaguely ties Trump's success to the success of the United States in a limited capacity. Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, but it's clear all policy decisions being made are being done so based on their capacity to improve Trump's situation.
We've been headed this direction long before Trump, from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies and in particular the people who own them. Now that pool has just shrunk a bit.
0. https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-family-business-visualize...
> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him
How can you say? The ultra wealthy are not playing team sports. If the country burned tomorrow they would just sit on their yacht or buy citizenship somewhere else.
Sure the lion share of his investments are currently in the US, but that could easily change.
Most cynically? I sincerely believe there's more value he can extract from American workers if he can keep the ride going on just a bit longer. For example: it's better to keep the stock market a float a volatile so he can transfer a bit more wealth from the American people before it does eventually break down.
Yes, they'll all be on yachts when the shit hits the fan, but they're still fighting to figure out who get the biggest yacht, and right now it seems like Trump has more to milk from us before he entirely lets this thing fall apart.
He also has dementia so he probably can't plan that far ahead. He's operating on a very short term feedback cycle: this reporter asked me a question that makes me look bad, so I call her piggy. That's the timescale we're operating on. Not even quarterly profits but moment-to-moment.
> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him,
Exactly, just as taking out structural supports when stripping copper and goods from a three story walkup is sub optimal and potentially fatal.
But make no mistake, from way out here (Australia), having watched the US for decades, it really does look like you've a grifter inside the house taking everything that isn't nailed down with zero concern for anyone else in the US.
It's a bad time for those that cannot afford shiny gold baubles.
> Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him
Nah.
He wants to be a dictator that extracts wealth from it's citizens.
He has a benefit from following the communist path to extract wealth. Make lives miserable, so they are living off the state ( eg. standing in line for bread), so they can't protest.
Putin is not Trump's friend, but Trump idolises him for extracting enormous wealth from Russia, censoring news ( propaganda) and imprisoning political opponents, ...
Just check the "firehose of falsehoods" ( a Russian propaganda method), it will explain a lot about Trump.
>Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him
People like Trump are perfectly happy to destroy a trillion dollars of GDP as long as they get a billion. Project 2025 and all the techfascist dreams of "Network states" are exactly about destroying the US and ruling over the ashes. Christian fundamentalists for example are perfectly happy to have a shell of a former good country as long as they get to institute sharia law.
> from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies
When democrats lost the election to Reagan by a landslide, it was pretty clear Americans had no idea what good policy was and would not vote for it. That's what the problem was. Bill Clinton did neoliberalism and "It's the economy stupid" and democrats pushed for the Crime Bill because those slogans were what the American voter will respond to, at least until right wing media improved it's propaganda power to turn the entire concept of "democrat" into a slur.
Voters in the 80s decided that hard work and building a better future was for suckers, and they'd rather loot the future and do cocaine now. So here we are. Now the exact same people are pitching a fit and giving everything to Trump because they are angry that the policies they supported the past 40 years did exactly what they should have expected.
People keep voting for republicans because "the debt is bad" despite 25 years of direct and objective evidence showing that to be the worst idea.
People keep voting for republicans for "anti-war" despite Bush Jr. getting re-elected for running multiple criminal wars against the middle east, not even the right fucking countries, "for doing 9/11"
People keep voting for republicans "because of the economy" even though republicans haven't shown any ability to run the damn economy for decades, and Trump specifically pushing for things that harm the economy outright.
The voters are bad at voting.
I think it's the same problem as the past administration and most members of congress- they're just too old to care about 50yrs from now. I don't think they're actively against the 50yr+ future, it's just that the world is changing too fast, and they're falling back to what they know- competing with their peers for power, money, and status. They only have some inkling of actual empathy for the communities their grandkids are in at a personal level, and just have the "throw money at it" mentality for the bigger issues like healthcare, since that has been their MO for the last couple decades. Instead of taking leadership positions and driving change, they seem to just want to squabble and create fiefdoms and have others do the work.
I do think the current administration is still a step down from the (not particularly great) last, though. Congress has essentially given up their authority on everything so any movement must come from the top… and the top has an extremely small attention span.
> same problem as the past administration
Did you miss the Infrastructure act that spent $500B on roads, ports, and water projects? The CHIPS act that spent $50B on decoupling and R&D?! The Climate & Energy act ("IRA") that spent $400B on clean energy subsidies??!!
I can understand the perspective of wanting more, but the forward-looking policies of the last administration were in a different galaxy compared to those of the current administration, where the big plan is to chop USAID, boost deportations, and cut capital gains tax.
This is the difference between corn and the cob and corn in the toilet. No, it is not the same.
The problem is that China could have built the same infrastructure for $100B and in 25% of the time. Pumping subsidies into our bloated bureaucratic nightmare of a system is only going to make the lawyers and bureaucrats who are its gatekeepers fatter.
I’ve met one person whose job was funded via the CHIPS act - she was a lawyer.
I bet China’s first priority when building semiconductors isn’t hiring lawyers.
TSMC Arizona Gigafab, Intel's Chandler fabs, Micron's Boise megafab, these are all giant buildings full of equipment cranking out chips or credibly preparing to. I'd hazard a guess that more than lawyers were involved.
Oh, but trollbridge saw a lawyer once! That's it, phone it in, shut it all down, corruption proven, the gigantic buildings must be all be a mirage. Trollbridge saw a lawyer and that disproves everything!
Troll harder lol.
I've never met a corn farmer, but somehow the corn ends up on my plate.
Where are the CHIPs then? Oh but at least our infrastructure was rebuilt. Right?
In the google results, if you had bothered to google. It turns out $50B was enough to tip the investment calculus on half a dozen large projects and a dozen or so smaller ones.
So tell me: was it learned helplessness or partisan hackery that made you severely underestimate what turned out to be possible?
My opinion comes from my personal experience with CHiPs funded projects but admittedly thats merely anecdotal knowledge so I’m very glad to hear that Biden’s “biggest ever!”(tm) inflation reduction package met its goals and wasn’t just money printing and political cronyism. Imagine where we would be without all those new chip fabs and infrastructure fixes you mentioned finding in your Google search. You’re right, that was 50 billion, give or take, well spent!
Current US strategy is to get South America+Canada resources and call it a day. They looked at global geopolitics and it looked too complicated for them.
Without getting overly political, it is nihilistic because one of the major US parties got so high on its own supply of lies that the people currently running it FORGOT they were lying. You're looking at a similar situation to many authoritarian or fascist political systems in which they way to get ahead in no way involves doing your job, but making sure Stalin or Mussolini is happy with you. This started in the US in the mid 1990s when GOP leadership bought in on power being its own end and is now on full display.
People have all sorts of mythologized reasons for why the USSR failed, because while it often produced immense amounts of goods and services and well educated people in certain areas (sometimes beating "the west" by a good margin for one or two years at a go), it also made long term advancement contingent on the party and not the real world and became incapable of handling major changes.
We're witnessing that now in the US with perhaps one of the most incompetent governments in history that is also burning down the non-political institutions of expertise that for all their faults and mistakes, at least had educated and motivated people that cared about their purpose.
Exactly right. Democrats have the desire to do big things, but not the capability. Republicans have the capability, but no desire.
It's more accurate to say everyone who wants to do the right thing is a Democrat, than to say all Democrats want to do the right thing. Most of them are just the lite version of Republicans.
Oh, they know. The industry has been lobbying quite badly for exactly this to happen. Why spend a fortune on innovation when a few bucks of lobbying can get the government to ban your competition because "China bad"?
As the comment you responded to said: it's all about the next quarterly profits. The fact that we are getting leapfrogged by China doesn't matter to those CEOs: that's a long-term thing, and it doesn't impact their next bonus.
Legislators aren't interested in actual expertise. They only need to know what each constituency wants and how much money they have.
Call me a cynic, but legislators own stock in these companies. Their true interest in them is also "line go up".
> calling legislators
Good joke. Probably a couple of tech billionaires will eventually say something and then something will happen.
this is one of those 'elections matter' cases. There's no strategy. Americans made it clear they want a country run by real estate crooks, crypto bros, gambling advocates and bizarre entertainment personalities. A country sized Las Vegas maybe and the beauty is the people get always what they deserve.
Or, to play Devil's advocate, people called in the rabid dog because they felt they had been sold down the river starting in the 1970s. The hollowed out industrial towns weren't good places to grow up, and when they did manage to go to college and play by the rules the ladders were already in a fast retreat up the walls..
Damned if you. Damned if you don't.
In fact I think both you and the parent are right simultaneously.
And their mistake lies in believing that populist rhetoric is going to make their lives better…
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GP was talking about where he'd rather hang out between the U.S. and China. Gaza wasn't in the running.
If you expect people to engage with you in a way that requires effort from them, the least you could do is not use a burner account.
They learn really fast. I will not take the past as a prediction of the future.
I took the previous comment as satire, considering that - for example - Chinese electric vehicles are now far more affordable than anything produced domestically in the US.
Just to give a hint of how we plan on dealing with this, how many of those cars can you buy in the US today?
You can expect to be able to buy exactly that many chinese GPU or neural processors.
You are 100% correct on that, I fully expect that importing cheap GPUs and NPUs will be banned in the US, or tariff'd so heavily that it doesn't matter should they become available. But that will just allow Nvidia to fall behind until they get surpassed like AMD passed Intel.
A move like that will seriously hurt our ability to train and raise new software developers and the domestic game market.
Importing might be banned until the US loses access to its main source of GPU manufacturing. And what are the US going to do about it? Defend Taiwan? With missiles made with components and materials processed where, pray tell?
The US does need to start protecting its manufacturing again, but it’d be lucky to start at a level as high as high end semiconductors. That’d be like a stroke victim trying to run before they re-learn to walk.
As others have pointed out, this means less services, more manufacturing, less consumption, a probably a lower standard of living. But with the business as usual alternative looking a lot like business as usual in the western Roman Empire circa 450 CE, taking a hit to your standard of living while investing in a future which you still have the slightest control over, maybe feels like a decent trade.
Bringing a car in is hard. Bringing a GPU in is easy.
The fact that we banned the better products out of spite doesn't mean they're not better products.
Imagine if in 2010 the USA had banned itself from using computer hardware more powerful than they had at the time. Where would they be in the AI race? That's the situation the USA is heading for.
When it comes to China and its ability to quickly mass produce items while incrementally improving on them, I absolutely will view the past as an indicator of the future.
It's just what they do as a nation.
Which then goes on to be repurposed into weapons of war.
Something to think about if considering the purchase of a DJI drone.
the attack drones being used in Ukraine are not DJI anymore. both sides produce extremely cheap, light, disposable drones en masse.
also, consider that a $50 smartphone can drive an ICBM.
I remember when my Linksys was considered a controlled device because it could be used to fly missiles.
We thought it was the coolest thing.
One function of R&D involves how to manufacture things cheaply, quickly + en masse.
Those efficiencies that started with consumer drones now serve drones used in war. DJI being used at the start of the war is the evidence of that.
Continuation of that investment in R&D will also lead to new technologies: such as quieter drones, drones that can carry more, go further, and be controlled through difficult to counter means.
It's blithely short sighted to think that the technology is already at its maximum, or that these concepts are disconnected from each other. It's a type of naive thinking that people on the internet do to rationalise a false sense of security.
Also: to address another set of comments in this thread - China aren't looking at EUV so they can break into the graphics cards market or lower the price of RAM. Absolute utter numpties.
>China aren't looking at EUV so they can break into the graphics cards market or lower the price of RAM. Absolute utter numpties.
they do it to protect themselves from sanctions and tariffs. scandalous, I know.
that's comically* naive, and plainly false - China itself has already stated their objectives.
* Actually, wilfully naive would be a better fit.
provide a direct quote, then.
中国制造2025 aka MIC 2025
https://jamestown.org/civil-military-fusion-and-the-plas-pur...
Now read, since you clearly haven't.
Yeah PRC probably going to dump 1T into indigenize semi efforts by end of decade, but IMO good chance they're going to treat strategic semi as commodity utility business than make NASDAQ lines go up model. When western semi has 1st tier suppliers taking 30% margin, asml taking 50%, tsmc taking 50%, nvidia taking lol 70%, there's alot of fat on the pyramid to trim. PRC doing cost plus 10-20% will basically be able to brrrt chips stupid cheap if they have mature domestic tool scaling, enough to wipe litho+yield inefficiencies.
Western semi still "safe" since west+co aren't going to source from PRC leading edge due to national security, but pretty soon they're either going to need to compress margins to compete which means cutting costs, which means cutting R&D because shareholder going to get theirs or western semi business model going to run on permenant subsidies. Which is what will probably happen considering their performance is why stonk lines go up right now. That 1T PRC spend and choose to simply discount for utility chips is going to wipe multipel trillion of western semi market cap and all the economic implications that entails so it might not even be bad idea.
The NASDAQ line go up model is why the AI boom is happening and a major factor in why it is Western companies leading the charge. The more bigger issue is that the west refused to sell chips to China so they had to figure out how to make their own. And margin compression is what free markets do. That is one of the big motivators to putting free markets everywhere, the freer the market the more compressed the margins become. All the people working hard at crappy jobs start working hard at high paying jobs instead until the competition drives the money out of the sector.
There is a theme in the industries China does well in - western regulators ban cut-throat competition, China competes very hard and wins. The situation at scale is pretty straightforward. Usually it is environmental or labour policy, so this case of the root cause being sanctions is a bit unusual. But, once again, how Nvidia is meant to compete in China when their best products can't be sold there?
Free markets suppose to compress margins, perfect market theoretically drive profits down to zero (aka involution). But you compress margin and you lose current western semi business model that is functionally monopoly suppliers/producers who can sustain 50%+ margins to keep their monopoly. Shed those margins down to 20% because competitor enters market, harder to fund R&D to keep lead, it's still "enough" to be profitable, but then western commercial companies have to think harder how to split that compressed margin between investors and R&D. Right now we know what this leads to. Investors get paid, companies beg for subsidies. Not that PRC companies aren't concerned, look at PRC stock capitlization, not nearly to the same degree.
Free markets? No, competition does that. Competition requires free markets but free markets don't guarantee competition.
I poorly paraphrased profits converge to zero under perfect competitive market. Yes real world not perfect competitive markets. Oligor/duo/monopolies form, sometimes subsidies other shenanigans pick winner(s), winners extract huge margins/rents to build moats lock out new competition. Sometimes they collude / settle on business model with higher margins, i.e. 10-20% being normal/commodity, 50% for software and semi is top end of luxury goods. New state backed competitor enters and decides they can live on 10% margin, and then incumbants business model falls apart unless state also steps in to match.
E: And state can, but I don't know if state generally willing/able to backstop companies to 50% margin long term. I can't think of any, maybe some major state oil. Nvidia/TSMC with $$$ margins getting some CHIPs injection really meant for bailing out broke ass Intel was already anomalous, and it was basically to bribe them to onshore production.
Note "converging to zero" doesn't really mean zero because economics includes opportunity costs. It just means that outsized gains don't exist over the longer term without some kind of market power. In the long run, most industries end up making the same returns.
I've found that this does not match reality. People have strong beliefs in value of specific things, even when that value is not economically there. The value of software is indeed zero, which seems to make people value hiring software engineers greatly over paying for software, and, tbh, that makes approximately zero sense in a lot of cases. The value of medical care is high, even when it's not (meaning there is plenty of medical and "medical" products that don't have real value). The value of houses is high and absolutely certain. Thinks like certain brands (even when the company behind them has disappeared), most obviously of watches.
This tends towards the economic reality but it certainly does not match it.
> margin compression is what free markets do
Except the market pretty much can't do this with Nvidia. Nobody is showing any sign of catching up: it is entirely possible we are seeing a runaway train and without the intervention of a massive state like China to create a viable competitor, there will never be one.
This situation has been going on for 5 years now. It's ridiculous to assume there will never be competition. You. could have said the same about Intel a couple of decades ago.
> There is a theme in the industries China does well in - western regulators ban cut-throat competition,
The problem is not regulation, it is the lack of it: anti-monopolist practices and deregulation of the finance industry has led us to insane bubbles, dead markets and extreme wealth concentration. Any competition gets bought, crushed, or undercut via bankrolling. This is what you get when the 0.0001% gets to pull the strings again. Must watch (3 parts): https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...
I think you have no idea how a command economy works. Haha.
It’s literally state sponsored monopolies.
They flood an industry with funds and let them all compete with each other. Then they back the biggest winner. A command economy usually mandates X units of Y good. This isn’t quite that.
That’s only the first year after that it’s command and control for the vast majority.
Also you take is highly simplistic. Even the small players are command and control. You’re likely just not aware how it works.
Its a pretty big detriment to American thinking that they take cold-war era characterizations of the Russian economy and then apply them to 2025 China.
The current Chinese worries are about having too much competition rather than too little, Google "involution" to read about it.
work with china every day.
I am talking about the economy in the Western model, it works well if there is competition. And it usually needs the state to do moonshots, like the literal moon shot or Silicon Valley. But the American economy was the most impressive during the Roosevelt years. The war production was insane, with 75% state planned, state built and state owned factories. The private sector was dominated by oligarchy owned monopolies, which means it wasn't impressive¹. The government had no time for conservative fairy tales and needed to take initiative.
What helped was the public outrage over the insane profits the American oligarchs reaped during WOI. This enabled Roosevelt during WOII to set a maximum profit margin for the oligarchy owned factories and fined those who evaded the law. It was a shock for the conservatives to see how the bureaucracy turned America's mediocre output around with a fast, efficient and lean production monster. The monopolists had to resort to propaganda, claiming the government's success as theirs, injecting the falsehoods we now all take for granted.
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1. As an exercise, think what would be possible if all the cash piles didn't sit at big tech, but instead enabled competition. Meta isn't still more than a useless addiction factory.
"your margin is my opportunity" - bezos
The absolute irony of China being more capitalist than the US in some ways.
Your analysis is out of date I think. This has already happened. Poor NXP just got their asses handed to them by the PRC. The fab they have in Italy looks nice but PRC has many of those.
Also Texas Instruments, STMicro, Onsemi, Microchip Tech, i.e. what PRC is doing after going big in mature nodes last few years they likely will also do in leading edge. IMO there's argument that since leading edge will definitely be strategically bifurcated PRC and western semi can pseudo collude to maintain higher margins, especially if PRC wants to claw back investment. But if western semi continues to drive economy/growth there's also incentive to weaponize margins.
You don't need CUDA for gaming but software is still just as big of a moat. Gaming GPU drivers are complex and have tons of game-specific patches.
With their new Radeon/RDNA architecture it took AMD years to overcome their reputation for having shitty drivers on their consumer GPUs (and that reputation was indeed deserved early on). And I bet if you go read GPU discussion online today you'll still find people who avoid AMD because of drivers.
That won't stop them, but it's a big barrier to entry.
Oh and that's just to get the drivers to work. Not including company-specific features that need to be integrated by the game devs into their game codebase, like DLSS / FrameGen and FSR. And in the past there was other Nvidia/AMD-specific stuff like PhysX, hair rendering, etc.
Cuda is 20 years old and it shows. Time for a new language that fixes the 20 years of rough edges. The Guy (Lattner) who made LLVM is working on this: https://www.modular.com/mojo
Good podcast on him: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-swift-to-moj...
What I gather from this comment is that you haven't written CUDA code in a while, maybe ever.
Mojo looked promising initially. The more details we got though, the more it became apparent that they weren't interested in actually competing with Nvidia. Mojo doesn't replace the majority of what CUDA does, it doesn't have any translation or interoperability with CUDA programs. It uses a proprietary compiler with a single implementation. They're not working in conjunction with any serious standardization orgs, they're reliant on C/C++ FFI for huge amounts of code and as far as I'm aware there's no SemVer of compute capability like CUDA offers. The more popular Mojo gets, the more entrenched Nvidia (and likely CUDA) will become. We need something more like OpenGL with mutual commitment from OEMs.
Lattner is an awesome dude, but Mojo is such a trend-chasing clusterfuck that I don't know what anyone sees in it. I'm worried that Apple's "fuck the dev experience" attitude rubbed off on Chris in the long run, and made him callous towards appeals to openness and industry-wide consortiums.
Most of the stuff you pointed out is addressed in a series of blog posts by Lattner : https://www.modular.com/democratizing-ai-compute
Many of those posts are opinionated and even provably wrong. The very first one about Deepseek's "recent breakthrough" was never proven or replicated in practice. He's drawing premature conclusions, ones that especially look silly now that we know Deepseek evaded US sanctions to import Nvidia Blackwell chips.
I can't claim to know more about GPU compilers than Lattner - but in this specific instance, I think Mojo fucked itself and is at the mercy of hardware vendors that don't care about it. CUDA, by comparison, is having zero expense spared in it's development at every layer of the stack. There is no comparison with Mojo, the project is doomed if they intend any real comparison with CUDA.
what is provably wrong ?
mojo been in the works for 3+ years now.... not sure the language survives beyond the vc funding modular has.
Yea, but less than in the past. Modern graphics APIs are much thinner layers.
This was even proven in practice with Intel’s Arc. While they had (and to some extent still have) their share of driver problems, at a low enough price that isn’t a barrier.
> Gaming GPU drivers are complex and have tons of game-specific patches.
I don't think the Chinese government will be too upset if cheap Chinese GPUs work best with China-made games. It will be quite the cultural coup if, in 20 years time, the most popular shooter is a Chinese version of Call of Duty or Battlefield.
They made the most popular RPG last year already - why do you think it'll take 20 years for them to make the most popular shooter? For that matter, the Singapore-HQed SEA makes Free Fire, which topped Google Play in 2019.
Im aware of Genshin Impact, and that NetEase is behind Marvel Rivals. FPS tend to have sticker fanbases, but I chose 20 years because that's what I guess is how long it may take not only for the domestic EUV to launch and get yields good enough for a cheap but competitive GPU out the door.
FPS like Valorant, owned by Riot Games, owned by Tencent?
Gacha mobages are rarely considered the same kind of entertainment as actual RPGs, and even then the Japanese and the Koreans give them stiff competition. When it's not a skinner box FOMO with titillating skins the Chinese barely register on the radar.
I think OP is about Wukong, not gachas.
On the other hand, all it would take would be one successful Steam Deck/Steam Machine-style console to get all the developers of the world making sure that their games work on that hypothetical GPU.
I don't think that it will happen in the next 5 years, but who knows?
I believe the software will follow the hardware. Not immediately, of course, but if I want to learn to do ML and have to pick between a $2500 Nvidia GPU and a $500 Chinese GPU that's 80% as fast, I would absolutely take the cheap one and keep an eye out for patches.
When it comes to drivers, IMO all they really need is reasonable functionality on linux. That alone would probably be enough to get used in a budget steam machine or budget pc builds, with Windows 11 being a disaster and both RAM and GPU prices shooting through the roof. The choice may soon be Bazzite Linux with a janky GPU or gaming on your phone.
Its not really just that AMD drivers are not that great (they are not) but they have been stable for a long time.
Its that nvidia relentlessly works with game developers to make sure their graphics tricks work with nvidia drivers. Its so obvious you miss it. Look in the nvidia driver updates they always list games that have fixes, performance ect. AMD never (used?) to do this they just gave you the drivers and expected developers to make their game work with it. The same strategy that MS used for their OS back in the 90's.
Thats at least how things got where they are now.
AMD provides this. Example: "Fixed Issues and Improvements
Intermittent driver timeout or crash may be observed while playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 on some AMD Graphics Products, such as the AMD Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370.)
Lower than expected performance may be observed in Delta Force on Radeon™ RX 7000 series graphics products.
Intermittent stutter may be observed while playing Marvel Rivals when AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 3 frame generation is enabled. "
https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/release-no...
Glad to see. Ive been 100% certian that nvidia will ultimately abandon the gfx market since 2022. If AMD doesnt pick up the torch computer gfx will stagnate for at least a decade. Its already regressing.
The whole “improve a game’s performance on the driver side” thing: does AMD simply not do that at all? Or just far less?
They definitely do it some, like Starfield came out with FSR out of the box but they didn’t add DLSS for several months. I got Starfield for free when I bought my 7800X3D which was a nice bonus. Definitely to a lesser degree than Nvidia though.
Frankly, this always seemed like dirty hacks - either the game or the drivers don't actually comply woth the graphics API and then the drivers need to hack around that. :P
I don't work in the industry but as I've understood from reading stuff from people that are. Basically the entire industry is dirty hacks from the top down and bottom up.
That is not to say this is good or bad. Just that it appears common.
There is nothing magical about CUDA
The general trend of the industry is to move computational resources from the hands of users into data centers, so that they can control what can be done and how much they'll charge for computational services. In the medium term, a lot of what we take for granted nowadays will only be accessible from cloud providers and companies will pay more and more in subscriptions for these services.
Computer freedom is dying. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is dying. Truly depressing...
lisan al gaib
Isn’t that mostly economics? I definitely prefer using Claude to GPT-OSS120B for a code assistant.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $500,000 laying around to buy myself a DGX B200 with a TB of HBM and 2TB of system ram, nor the 14.3kW of power to run the thing.
But will you still be able to afford using it once you have to pay the real price ? Once the venture capital dries up and the dumping stops ?
I'm pretty sure all of these LLMs operate in the black on inference costs.
If I were to set up a DGX200 in my garage, say the 5 year TCO is a million dollars. Split that among 500 people and we can get it done for maybe $30/mo per user in total operating cost. I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server.
> I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server.
Seems like on hn a lot of people pay for the subscriptions.
I don't personally know a single person who pays for any type of llm subscription. I am a staff sw engineer, been doing this a long time.
I acknowledge this is an anecdote. I just happen to know a lot of people at a lot of different companies from my network. Nobody pays for any of this. My company has banned llms, even if I wanted to use one, I can't.
I actually even gave one a shot tonight. I asked for a list of repos I needed to clone to build a yocto image for an nxp board. This was the result:
mkdir -p sources && cd sources
git clone -b $BRANCH git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky
git clone -b $BRANCH git://git.yoctoproject.org/meta-freescale
git clone -b $BRANCH github.com
git clone -b $BRANCH github.com
git clone -b $BRANCH git://git.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded
git clone -b $BRANCH github.com
I then pointed out that three of those lines were useless and asked it to fix those lines. The result I got was even more hilarious, and just as useless.
Disclaimer: this was the "dive deeper" button on a google search. No idea what fucking model it tried to use.
I think your skepticism is warranted. Top comments look a lot like ads to me.
How much of the current usage is paying at least 1 cent per inference? AI providers are giving away AI for anyone to use. Only professionals and big companies, that are at most 1% of the market, are paying anything at this point.
Who knows? LLM providers losing money on every user and making it up on volume is a problem for them to deal with. I’m simply saying that the products are here to stay, even if (hopefully) the companies need to right-size their growth strategies. If Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 is the pinnacle of models and we never see a new one again, I think they’ll be useful and cash flow positive. OpenAI and Anthropic will, of course, go bankrupt. But the models themselves are absolutely valuable.
How will that work, exactly? The chip makers are going to have a list of approved "cloud providers" and they will refuse to sell to anyone else?
Cloud providers will use cheap investment capital to buy chips at increasing prices, while the public will be economically forced to get computational services from these cloud providers. After a few years, most software will work only when connected to cloud infrastructure, either for performance or for "safety" reasons. We're already seeing this with AI.
Cloud was there for many years and it's not that cheap, compared to ordinary servers you can buy. It's not clear how anything will change in the future.
aka "return of the Minitel"
Because of this I hope the current AI fad is a bubble and it bursts soon. So instead of cheap investment drying up the market for individual consumers, we'll have lots of used corporate hardware selling at scrap prices to end users.
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It makes me feel so gross that these companies are leaving gamers behind. The whole idea of a GPU was from gaming and games. And the whole AI evolution was subsequently born over the fact that gamers/software engineers could toy around with incredibly powerful CUDA without having to shoehorn a weird graphics Api in the middle to do mathematics.
They did the same thing with the COVID crypto era boom. There really is no honor for these companies and I will be buying the first Chinese made silicone out of absolute spite and anger
This is nothing but good for normal people in the west. Chinese competition is needed to remove some of the rent seeking from the system.
At this point I’d straight up buy their PC components, because fuck Nvidia for doing that. Same goes for other manufacturers throwing the consumer segment into the dirt because of their greed.
I already got an Intel Arc to support more market competition (A580 was rough, B580 is a decent daily driver) and if the prices weren’t absolutely insane would have gotten the 245K (better than my 5800X, but not for the price).
scale down or not, we will see consumer GPU from China in the future. might be a copy or rip of existing GPUs, but it will happen. 3 of my GPU rigs are chinese MB built for the chinese market, ripoff of dual x99. They work, they are cheap, I got them for under $100 a piece. So maybe 5 years from now, we get cheap GPUs, and maybe they will be equivalent to 5090s, but who cares if the price is right?
There are the More Threads GPUs.
They're kinda rubbish, but as a starting point / MVP for a parallel gaming hardware ecosystem its 100% viable.
> scaling down their consumer GPU production [0]
>> Due to Memory Shortages
I don't think Nvidia wants to give up on consumer. They're a gateway into the overall AI ecosystem.
Having feet planted there also make sure they can play the local game when that begins to blow up. Nvidia wants a robotics play, too.
This is a pragmatic choice. And most of the money is in commercial.
> I don't think Nvidia wants to give up on consumer... This is a pragmatic choice.
You mean, NV is after the money with a heavy heart and a sad tear or two over the abandoned consumers, like "We love you so much but sorry, we must go pragmatic on you"?
> And most of the money is in commercial.
This is a serious systemic failure and it's even wilder that it's accepted without question.
That's not the right light to view this chess move.
If Nvidia had infinite supply and infinite resources, they would absolutely continue doing consumer. There are constraints that prevent them from doing so at the typical volumes.
Giving up on consumer also means giving up on a gateway to more CUDA ecosystem users.
They're still selling GPS. They just want people to rent them instead of buy. Its definitely shitty, but it's not like they're quitting.
It's just a matter of time until they show up on AliExpress - you can already order LoongArch systems (3A6000) and have them shipped to your doorstep.
Is AMD abandoning consumer market though? They seem to be much less in demand by AI industry.
AMD is selling close to 10% of what Radeon* used to sell 15 years ago and yet it's all nVidia's fault: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/amd-grabs-a-share...
Edit: I meant ATI but I guess AMD bought ATI in 2006! I thought that happened in the 2010s for some reason.
At this point, the only reason to be in the consumer GPU market is because that's the first rung on the ladder that leads to the AI data center market.
Nvidia folding would be the best day of my life.
Would be interesting if the US decides to ban or heavily tariff these chips and if the consequence will be significanly cheaper data center access through chinese-owned sites/platforms
There's still AMD and Intel doing dGPUs
If that happens, hardware trust becomes non-verifiable.
We will also see talent pipeline erosion.
Just further Western industrial policy failure.
> If that happens, hardware trust becomes non-verifiable.
Unfortunately I already have to run a binary blob just to play fps games from 10 years ago. I can't even load a new OS onto my phone anymore.
Ultimately I'm not sure hardware sourced from China changes the trust equation very much, at least for me individually. I have much more concern about the FBI, which has recently decided to ramp up investigations into queer people [0][1][2], than I do about foreign powers - at least as long as it's not actively destructive malware or something.
> We will also see talent pipeline erosion.
We absolutely will, and to some degree I wonder if we aren't already with how popular tablets and phones are. I've noticed many young people these days don't really know how to interact with anything on a computer that isn't an app. GPUs and RAM becoming more significantly more expensive will take a huge chunk out of the hobby market and in doing so they will intensify the pipeline erosion.
[0] https://www.advocate.com/politics/pam-bondi-trans-equality-b... [1] https://ncac.org/news/advocacy-isnt-terrorism [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/09/26/us-trump-targets-opponen...
Is it verifiable now?
Fair question. The technocrats are less than trustworthy.
Non-verifiable by what standards?
Modern GPU's often have on device firmware, secure boot chains, microcontrollers, etc. If you don't control silicon design, firmware signing and update pipelines you can't meaningfully attest to what the advice is doing.
But for most of us, that's already the case, isn't it?
For the average paranoid person who is wasting their life on it, sure
But large organizations like defense are all about distributed trust anyway - even if you could verify the hardware, the guy you order to do it is going to be a whole command chain removed and likely a contractor with a clearance in the civilian world.
Whereas your high level political and military leadership having direct contact with managers and designers in production facilities is extremely valuable.
What if my high level political and military leadership are the threat scenario?
Remember Snowden.
You're screwed. An individual is completely powerless against the combined might of the entire country they live in. Nothing you touch and nobody you talk to can be trusted.
But realistically, they'll just bring out the wrench[0].
[0]: https://xkcd.com/538/
Or more likely you're just not that important and will be imprisoned without cause because close enough is good enough.
People always seem to imagine tyranny worries about a standard of evidence. Tyranny has arrest quotas, evidence optional.
If I were running this show, I would have a second concurrent project as a hedge and as a chance of leapfrogging the West: trying to make free electron laser lithography work.
Free electron lasers have lots of (theoretical) advantages: no tin debris, better wavelength control, the ability to get even shorter wavelengths, higher power, higher efficiency, and it’s less Rube Goldberg-ish. Also the barrier to entry for basic research is pretty low: I visited a little FEL in a small lab that looked like it had been built for an entirely reasonable price and did not require any clean rooms.
So far it seems like Japan is working on this, but I have the impression that no one is trying all that hard.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.35848/1347-4065/acc18c
Yeah I think it's likely they get an EUV machine working but with less efficiency than ASML just because of how long it takes to tune these beasts and work out all the kinks.
The big brain move is to try leap-frog the whole thing with XFEL. Smaller wavelength, way brighter source, no vaporized tin particulate, etc. It's a much bigger lift, new optics, new resists, etc. So a completely brand new supply-chain from scatch but with no competitors on that tech yet and low will for Western companies to try compete on it because they need to get money out of existing EUV tech first.
This is very similar IMO to Chinese auto manufacturing. Their ICE cars never really did meet the same standards as European or Japanese manufacturers despite JVs etc.
However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.
> However EVs and green-tech are analagous to the XFEL path, they built from scratch and leapt over the competition that was happy to sit on it's existing profitable tech instead.
I'm not convinced Chinese EVs are technologically better. They've just command economied demand and reduced costs via mass production. The technology seems pretty inline with anything available in the West but demand isn't there to take advantage of scale. China is ahead in EVs by metric of quantity for sure but I don't think they're got next gen battery tech they are keeping secret.
Making batteries for $80/kWh IS the next gen tech. I’m pretty sure China invented lipo (EDIT: I meant lfp) (at least they’re the only ones making it) and they’re currently pushing ahead on sodium ion. They are also the ones who have pushed lithium ion to the point it is today. My first EV was a Nissan Leaf that cost 40 grand and could drive 80 miles. Now you can buy 300-mile cars for about that. That was all China’s doing and nearly every EV on the road today uses their batteries.
They have done to the battery market exactly what Taiwan did to the chip market. You can buy an EV made anywhere the same way you can buy a laptop made anywhere. But guess where the chips and batteries were made.
They didn't invent LiPo (and you probably don't want those in a car), nor did they invent LFP (LiFePO4) but they did license it when no one else wanted to and turned it into probably the best EV battery tech you can buy today. They didn't innovate a ton on the chemistry but they did on the packaging side, BYD and CATLs structural pack designs exploit the low thermal runaway characteristics in a way that wouldn't be safe for NMC etc to reach near parity on density but with better longevity and cost.
They will be the first to sodium ion and solid state though.
It's kind of ironic that BMW pushed CATL into the EV market [1].
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/30/how-herbert-diess-zeng-...
XFEL is going to be destructive to the chip. It can't be the future.
One could tune an FEL to precisely the same wavelength as ASML’s setup if one were so inclined. (Subject to all kinds of complications, as the high energy electron sources needed are complex and EUV light is hard to work with. But there isn’t much of a fundamental constraint on the ability to adjust the wavelength of a FEL.)
But not an XFEL. If it's an XFEL you are going for destructive exposures.
DARPA funded a bit in this space a while ago. (Example: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/01/darpa-maskless-nanowri...) I'm not sure how you get over the bandwidth limitations, even with multi-beam.
This is a totally different technology.
A free electron laser (FEL) uses free electrons (electrons not attached to a nucleus) as a lasing medium to produce light. The light would shine through a mask and expose photoresist more or less just like the light from ASML’s tin plasma contraption, minus the tin plasma. FELs, in principle, can produce light over a very wide range of wavelengths, including EUV and even shorter.
That DARPA thing is a maskless electron beam lithography system: the photoresist is exposed by hitting it directly with electrons.
Electrons have lots of advantages: they have mass, so much less kinetic energy is needed to achieve short wavelengths. They have charge, so they can be accelerated electrically and they can be steered electrically or magnetically. And there are quite a few maskless designs, which saves the enormous expense of producing a mask. (And maskless lithography would let a factory make chips that are different in different wafers, which no one currently does. And you need a maskless technique to make masks in the first place.) There were direct-write electron-beam research fabs, making actual chips, with resolution comparable to or better than the current generation of ASML gear, 20-30 years ago, built at costs that were accessible to research universities.
But electrons have a huge, enormous disadvantage: because they are charged, they repel each other. So a bright electron beam naturally spreads out, and multiple parallel beams will deflect each other. And electrons will get stuck in electrically nonconductive photoresists, causing the photoresist to (hopefully temporarily) build up a surface charge, interfering with future electron beams.
All of that causes e-beam lithography to be slow. Which is why those research fabs from the nineties weren’t mass-producing supercomputers.
What bandwidth limitations are you referencing? My understanding is that deep euv lithography is limited by chromatic aberration, so the narrow bandwidth of a single beam FEL would be an advantage. If you need more bandwidth, you can chirp it. Is the bandwidth too high?
They mean bandwidth as in rate at which one can expose a mask using an electron beam, because they’ve confused two different technologies. See my other reply.
P.S. Can you usefully chirp an FEL? I don’t know whether the electron sources that would be used for EUV FELs can be re-tuned quickly enough, nor whether the magnet arrangements are conducive to perturbing the wavelength. But relativistic electron beams are weird and maybe it works fine. Of course, I also have no idea why you would want to chirp your lithography light source.
I don't think it's strictly chirping, but there are methods to achieve that sort of time/ bandwidth trade-off with FELs. I've seen references to it pop up in high speed imaging, though the details of anything that fast and small are quite outside my expertise. Wasn't sure why you would want high bandwidth either, hence my confusion.
I'm not all that familiar with the intricacies of this industry but it seems they have at least one corporation with ambitions in this area:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3333641/chin...
That mention of "quantum" seems suspicious, but it's beyond me to judge whether their presentations are credible:
http://lumi-universe.com/?about_33/
If they actually produce machines that can do ~14 nm stuff on "desktop" sized equipment, perhaps we'll see a lot of it eventually. As far as I can remember a lot of decent processing and storage chips were made with ~14 nm processes over the last decade or so.
Oh, that’s neat. It uses high-harmonic generation.
My sole personal experience with any sort of harmonic generation was being in the room while some grad students debugged a 266nm laser that consisted of a boring 1064nm Nd:YAG laser followed by two frequency doublers. Quite a lot of power was lost in each stage, and the results of accidentally letting the full 1064nm source power loose were mildly spectacular.
I wish Lumiverse luck getting any appreciable amount of power out of their system. (FELs, in contrast, seem to be cable of monstrous power output — that’s never been the problem AFAIK.)
P.S. never buy a 532nm laser from a non-reputable source. While it’s impressive that frequency doubled Nd:YAG lasers are small and cheap enough to be sold as laser pointers these days, it’s far too easy for highly dangerous amounts of invisible 1064nm radiation to leak out, whether by carelessness or malice. I have a little disreputable ~510nm laser pointer, which I chose because, while I don’t trust the specs at all, 510nm is likely produced directly using a somewhat unusual solid state source, and it can’t be produced at all using a doubled Nd:YAH laser. The color is different enough that I’m confident they’re not lying about the wavelength.
China has several teams working on FEL and several experimenting light sources, the latest being built in Shenzhen https://www.iasf.ac.cn/
It's wild to me that so many skeptical westerners who want to nitpick certain unproven technicalities, when the entire world only gets bits and pieces of the on the ground reality of China's progress, like the original Reuters article which was clearly fed information by insiders.
You should be living in the world of "China has successfully developed EUV and equivalent litho supply chain" and basing your decision making off of that.
I also cant understand people being in denial about, or claiming other imagined moats or whatever. They're whipping the pants of us right now industrially, if the west has any advantages left its that we speak the truth about stuff even when it hurts, why live in denial.
Also this stuff was figured out and built once before, other than the effort and resources involved (which China has lots of), why wouldn't someone else be able to figure it out again?
The west is still underestimating China. There is a great anecdote, I think it's from the book 'Apple in China', about their engineers visiting a Chinese production plant. Some changes needed to be made to the place. The Apple people estimated that that would take two weeks.
They came back the next day. It was finished, the Chinese had done it overnight.
> The west is still underestimating China.
What do you mean by "The West"?
Because in Western Europe, nobody serious is underestimating China, quite the contrary. We know that there's no going back, and quality is no longer a criteria to choose local over imported.
Only bigotted people are still viewing China as a country mass-producing cheap crap.
I think that's the EVs that definitely sealed the deal in lots of people's minds.
I believe Tim Cook himself has said Apple is manufacturing in China not because of cheap labour, but because of good engineering.
It's ironic that a lot of western domestic manufacturing takes place using machines that were engineered and manufactured in China.
I recommend the HTX Studio YouTube channel. The things that they release on a regular basis would be year long engineering projects on other channels.
I often wonder what is it that's driving the Chinese to work themselves to death to get this stuff done? Surely there must be some limit. I guess we can see it in the low birth rates, the youth unemployment, and I guess the desire to just survive because there's just so many people there. But still, I just don't get how Chinese just keep going and going. What is their end goal on a person to person level? Are they just going to keep killing themselves for the rest of their lives? What happened to the lie flat movement?
Their parent's generation toiled really hard and lifted the entire country out of poverty and everyone was pretty well rewarded for it.
They feel working hard brings benefits.
In America, working hard brings your manager benefits. We are multiple generations into this. Most people have learned to not work hard because it is just free benefit to your employer.
Sure, we could pressure Americans to work harder by making the entire country even more afraid of losing their jobs and terrified of not overworking themselves, but even then, all that hard work will just be captured by a spoiled managerial class playing bonus games and extracting all that wealth for themselves, not for American advancement.
Even in the shithole that is American managerial culture, you can still find young Americans working hard, often in spite of themselves, because they get into some project. In the past, projects were small and your team had substantial agency, so this sort of "The team really gets into the project" outcomes paid huge dividends, and resulted in a lot of success. Things like the IBM PC, lots of stuff at Bell Labs.
I wonder how the police state works into this. China spends a lot of money on internal surveillance and suppression of information.
If the belief was genuine, would this be necessary?
This really isn't that different from South Korea / Japan work culture isn't it?
Atleast as far as hours clocked in at work is concerned, no?
I don't know. You are correct that the Japanese/Korea has this mentality to spend time at work just to spend time but there is a noticeable delta in effective results between those countries and modern China.
[dead]
>we speak the truth about stuff even when it hurts, why live in denial
Unless you are talking about Israel :P
It's more like the genocide in Gaza is the uncommon case where western propaganda was openly rejected by the population, at least by younger people, despite a concerted top-down effort to try to convince people that genocide is actually concordant with western values. Though it did take some time.
It's the propaganda that nobody questions that is most insidious.
We can't dismiss the role TikTok played in breaking the standard media narrative in the west. I grew up following this issue since I am in a group that is on the receiving end of this conflict.
I occasionally think about software that has truly transformed the trajectory of humanity. So much software is just disposable or is only useful for a small group of people. But the folks at TikTok should be commended in some ways for the drastic changes their algorithm made to the views of worldwide youth. Was it altruistic or nefarious? I suspect we won't know for sure until its written in the history books but man did it have an impact. Even though TikTok is probably gone now that its been taken over by the same people who used to shape the narrative its impact wont be easily forgotten.
How many of us developers get a chance to write software that really changes the direction the world takes?
Oneshotted by refusing to update priors from 1990s-era 'End of History' thinking.
> we speak the truth about stuff
Western propaganda works in mysterious ways.
A better question here is, would china be doing this, if "the west" wasn't threathening (and implementing) all kinds of sanctions on them, giving them no choice but to go "the bender way", by making their own chips (with blackjack, and hookers!).
Yes? The replication of the foreign capability domestically has been a driving force of China's economy for the last 20 - 30 years. No major R&D program in which china is catching up or even exceeding the western capability was started there, even the quite recent AI boom is mostly based on the work of American companies and labs.
If anything the constant underestimation of Chinese capabilities caused "the west" to react way to late.
It's wild that every comment section about China these days must paint the picture of these rabid anti-Chinese Westerners who are saying that China is an eternal backwater, yet one never sees actual comments like this, and how all of Western media is pushing anti-China propaganda, when the submitted article is just a neutral bit.
It's an overcorrection for years of western arrogance being expressed in the past decade+. I think most people have woken up by now to the reality of Chinese manufacturing dominance and what that implies, at least those in power and journalists.
It is always like that. Most people just don't have the attitude of getting things done, and they can barely believe it is possible when they watch what the people who do accomplish.
A lot of things require sacrifice beyond reasonable means. I see these books on how Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla developed their innovations, its groups of people that are extremely talented and became that talented due to sacrifices from their families/communities that go and sacrifice everything themselves to achieve amazing goals. Some of that resultant wealth goes to them but most goes to the shareholders/tech bros.
Eventually less and less people want to go down this route so we get "people just not having the attitude of getting things done".
The real question is will Chinese people go down that same road or will the fact that there is so much cutthroat competition there keep people in line?
A "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist.
If they're cobbling together old parts, it sounds more like something you'd to to keep things running in case a conflict erupts:
> The availability of parts from older ASML machines on secondary markets has allowed China to build a domestic prototype
> A "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist.
You’re missing forest for the trees. ASML at the moment has the monopoly on these machines. This is not only a great tool for the West to keep China at bay, but also a way to maintain economic dominance. Even if they can’t get the machine up and running until 2030, and the machine is a generation behind, China has effectively gained leverage in world theater.
From geopolitical perspective, it’s huge. Right now Taiwan produces the world’s chips, so China plays nice. The minute they can produce their own chips, even an older generation, they can invade Taiwan anytime they want. And then the rest of the world won’t even have older chips.
Taiwan’s geopolitical position is vastly more complex than the fantasy where invasion would follow merely from fab parity.
It won’t. But again you’re missing the point. It’s one less incentive not to, a big one too.
> And then the rest of the world won’t even have older chips.
This basically just means Europe wont have older chips.
TSMC is already producing a significant percentage of their chips in Arizona. And they've even slated ~30% of their total production of 2nm chips and better will be produced in USA by 2028-2029.
You mean the TSMC factory that it's workers hate and has been facing heavy delays and power outages???
https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/
From a China/Asia-centric newspaper? I would expect them to say that.
The article mentions the language and cultural barriers, and the rigid hierarchy with old bosses who demand blind obedience, even when the rules are counterproductive.
I have been living in Japan for years now and I have had the same experience, so I am inclined to believe the article. Mixing Western workers with East Asian management is extremely difficult, to put it mildly.
A “manhattan project” can just mean a massive secret scientific war project? Seems apt.
They have high security, and obfuscating the premises is part of it, but is it really secret in any way ? I mean, we're knowing exactly what they're aiming for and could compare notes at the end of it.
Is it war ? in a "everything is a war" political sense, perhaps, but not in any other sense.
We're left with "massive project" for the analogy, that's kinda weak really.
>> is it a war?
people love to be reductionist... i wonder what aspects of a culture make everyone so black/white us/them ingroup/outgroup. Is it particular to the US, or like, is France the same way? Or Ghana? Or is it just human that everything is a war? Naqoyqattsi.
and a critical nation scale ambition
I think the Manhattan Project is a poor analogy. Moonshot is more like it.
> A "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist.
Once they break even they can overshoot into shocking new technology territory.
They are acquiring parts to reverse engineer them and build their own
+ industrial espionage to be able to reverse engineer it at all.
If someone likes you, trade secrets flow like wine. That's basic humanity. It's not unique to China, though the relationships involved are a little bit different. It's not a bad thing either, we all live in the same society.
> setting a goal of producing working chips on the prototype by 2028
They might be, but if they plan on getting a factory running in 3 years, they're presumably planning on using what they purchased.
>A "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist.
I think that both Germany and USSR were not in the least shocked ... just the USA had the resources to finish it.
Well, USSR did finish, just 4 years later.
Maybe it was because we had all those immigrants working on it (e.g. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, and John von Neumann)!
There's a whole regiment of immigrants who worked on the Manhattan project, as we all know. We also know that the USSR obtained much of their knowledge on how to build the bomb through espionage.
Espionage? Gasp. The US would never do that to get ahead. I'm so suspicious of claims without external sources of provenance about American exceptionalism during the cold war that I take all if it with a large grain of salt. Back then, everything Russia said was propaganda, and everything the US said was truth from the mouth of god.
I have no sympathy towards China, but it is dumb and arrogant to think that such a big and powerful country with enough time and determination won't be able to achieve this goal. They have the industry, the manpower, the education system, this is only a question of time now.
Good for them, I don't see this as a big deal other than my fear of west china invading china (taiwan! :) ).
Don't get me wrong, I want the west to succeed, but a competition from China is exactly what is needed. They're building datacenters in arizona and india for TSMC because of this competition.
I really hope we get past historical political rivalry and get along with China better. Competition is good, hostility sucks.
Give you some more historical context: China (ROC) planned to invade west China until the plan was given up in 60's. Both sides wanted reunification by force. When China's navy and air force was superior in early 1950's, it tried to "establish blockade of trade with west China (PRC) along the Chinese coast" (1)
China eventually gave up the plan in 1960's not because it didn't want to but because the balance of the power weighting over to west China. In 80's and 90's both agree to make peace given the premise that both sides belong to China.
TSMC was a product of industry policy from None-democratic China government. The founder Morris Chang ， an American born in the west China ，never visited China before 50 years old.
Both China (before 90') and west China used to want reunification , by force or not. China changed a bit later. The motivation of west China to invade China has little to do with chips although US thought that's the critical incentive. West China will still let TSMC provide the chips to the world in case it would have successfully invaded China in my view.
1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_the_Tuapse
Thanks. In my view, the PRC is making a huge strategic mistake. As is Taiwan. The PRC is too focused on full control, normally they're more long-term-minded, but in this case they're rushing it too much. Establishing a trade-bloc and peaceful relations first and then aiming for full reunification would be the smart play, since there isn't anything huge to gain outside of TSMC (that I know of) by way of an invasion.
Taiwan is too dependent on the west, it too should know it can't actually resist an invasion, and that the west won't do much when it comes down to it. Its interests would have been served best if it sought good trade relations with the PRC, so that the PRC will continue to rely on TSMC. it should be providing west-china with all the nice chips the west is forbidding it from having. It should have been more like india and less like south korea.
> there isn't anything huge to gain outside of TSMC (that I know of) by way of an invasion.
The reunification of Taiwan is a fundamental national policy, enshrined in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. The primary intention behind the desire for national reunification stems from the realization of reunification itself, rather than from other interests. This reflects a complex national sentiment and shared aspiration.
We consider the people of Taiwan to be our compatriots. Therefore, even though our military strength far surpasses that of Taiwan, the mainland is unwilling to resort to force and has always hoped for peaceful reunification. This is because we do not wish to harm or even kill any of our compatriots in the process of achieving it.
Essentially, it has been the United States that has been obstructing this unification process and using propaganda tools to influence public perception in Taiwan. As a result, many Taiwanese people are shocked by the stark difference between the mainland and the propaganda portrays them when they visit. It is truly baffling that, despite living so close to the mainland, their understanding of it is almost in sync with that of Americans.
> I don't see this as a big deal other than my fear of west china invading china (taiwan! :) ).
Isn't that "other than" clause a big deal, though? I've read a survey and a number of articles from defense and foreign policy types, and the general feeling is there's a ~25% chance that China will invade Taiwan this decade. That's really damn big. If there's rollback in Taiwan then the first island chain could plausibly fall, or if not you will surely see Japan and maybe South Korea nuclearize. Why must we keep assuming the best with these security calculations instead of believing someone when they keep saying what they're going to do?
> get along with China better.
This will probably never happen. All countries are rivals, and the semblance of cooperation is really just the manifestation of a power imbalance.
China grew into their big boy pants and can hold their own on the international stage. They have no need to be cooperative because they are in the International Superpower Club. Their strategic ambitions do not align with those of their rivals, and they are strong enough to not need to play nice anymore.
Now that the US has also dropped their visage of being the benevolent world leader, there's even less reason for China to pretend to be cooperative. At this point, it's a matter of who is more apt to invade your country, US or China? And you buy weapons from the other one.
Maybe we see more "cooperation" between China and the EU or South America. But that will be entirely because those regions are under duress.
Yeah, all those countries China has invaded really shows how apt they are to do that.
Tibet. Their ongoing border disputes with India. Island disputes along side their bullying of nearly every maritime neighbor in the region. Stationing destroyers outside of Australian cities as a show of force.
Plus, their current antagonistic relationship with Japan, where they make direct public threats to Japanese leaders who respond by seeking nuclear weapons.
They are currently probing for weakness in their neighbors because of territorial ambitions. Just because they don't invade countries on the other side of the world like the USA does, doesn't make them pacifists. They just have different goals.
yeah they really shouldn't be blockading their neighbors while claiming every country around them is their sphere of influence and openly interfering in their allies domestic politics while leveraging their size to force other countries to accept asymmetric economic deals...
How is this different from what the US is doing? See Monroe Doctrine for example and recent events concerning Venezuela?
thats the joke
Please spare us. China invaded Vietnam to protect Pol Pot while he was mass killing millions of innocent civilians. They have territorial disputes with over 10 countries, which they've been unable to decisively act on because those neighbors either have nukes (India) or are protected by a more powerful country (US). Not because their government is some benevolent entity. They're basically an authoritarian dictatorship that's kind of cornered at the moment (like Saddam after the Gulf War) but would kill a bunch of people and expand if the US wasn't around.
China has resolved a lot of its border disputes already. The border disputes with Kazakhstan, Krgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Tajikstan have all been resolved
They do it in the sea already. Just look at that nine dash line...
For all the talk about how they are an equal player on the international stage PRC is still a developing country by their own assessment and WTO.
You don’t think NZ and Aus are truly good friends?
The more China advances domestically, especially in this area, the less it has to gain from invading Taiwan. China is getting to the point where the conquest is finally doable (rapidly advancing and massive military, plus a weak US president), but the potential gains are diminishing year to year.
I'd speculate that if they don't invade during Trump's term, they never will, and will pursue a different course down the road. China is nothing if not patient.
The motivation to invade Taiwan is rooted in the PRC's political and historical narrative about it's legitimacy and purpose, a narrative internalized by most Chinese, including especially the military. It's in a sense existential, not economic or realpolitik, and I don't see that motivation diminishing anytime soon. If anything it's growing stronger, as evidenced by the suppression in Hong Kong, which made zero sense without reference to how Chinese political institutions sustain themselves. The risk of an invasion sparking a conflict with the US is primarily what held them back, and at best economic and foreign strategic pain only secondarily, but all those risks diminish by the day, leaving China's raw existential motivation unchecked.
The biggest victory for CCP will be Taiwan willingly joining PRC. Nothing else will be a better testament to the CCP model
Reunification with the mainland isn’t a completely unpopular idea in Taiwan. The economic ties are already extremely deep (largest trading partner by far).
Reunification in Taiwan has nothing to do with chips, and militarily PRC was able to do so a long time ago. The political will in PRC to "kill other Chinese" is zero.
> The political will in PRC to "kill other Chinese" is zero.
Counts for nothing, these narratives are built on sand. Russians also saw Ukrainians as "brothers", as did South/North Koreans before the war, among countless other examples.
>Russians also saw
"see". Many people in Russia view this war as a civil one.
Their is always a political will in China to kill other Chinese since thousands of years ago. This works vastly different from the western humanitarian philosophy.
Is that's why China has started building loads of troop transport ships recently? To peacefully transport them to Taiwan?
Invading Taiwan isn't about chips at all, and in fact chips are actively disincentivizing invasion. Semiconductor fabs and the oodles of atomically precise ultra clean and ultra expensive equipment inside absolutely do not mix well with bombs.
A better title would be "New EUV light source built in Shenzhen". Light source said to be working, not fabbing chips yet. Few technical details in the Reuters article.
The light source is the “easy” bit. The mirrors, masks, and the rest of the machine are all individually as difficult if not more so.
The wafers have to be positioned to nanometer accuracy repeatedly and at high speed! It’s hard to believe that’s even possible, let alone commercially viable.
Managing the light source, specifically the 13.5nm length on the wave spectrum, that gets generated from overheated tin plasma, is in fact the most challenging part of the machine. Here "managing" includes the process of hitting a rightly sized tin droplet with lasers at the right angles, and all the rest of the complicated fluid math necessary to get the most of that precious lighting moment, as well as the proper handling of that spark event's after-effects, of course. As opposed to the rest of the machine parts (like directing the EUV light to the reticle through those mirrors you mention), the light generation part is dynamic, very easily to get wrong, and very costly to iterate on.
They built the project, the bomb hasn't gone boom yet though.
There's a lot of machinery for moving the wafers around precisely in vacuum. But that's ordinary engineering, although the speeds at which ASML moves wafers are impressive.
I'd argue ASML's moat isn't the machine itself but the ecosystem: Carl Zeiss optics, decades of supplier relationships, institutional knowledge.
This is clearly a significant achievement, but does anyone with semiconductor experience have a sense of how far "generates EUV light" is from "production-ready tool"?
They are nowhere close to beat ASML.
This isn't a moat ASML can keep for long though. There can be alternatove technologies to achieve the same goal. So far only China has that incentive. The real problem is process scaling is slowing down. How many more generations of lithography machines will ASML design? Probably not many. This means there will be no edge left in 5 or 10 years, as eventually brute force will work and China will achieve the same lithography resolution.
Till that point, they are just going all in with cheap coal + solar, so even if they use older machines and run longer exposure times, even if they achieve lower yields and toss away a lot of the dies, they are still economically competitive. At the end cheap enery solves a lot of the issues.
Nowhere close, but pace now seems faster than estimated, i.e. original western estimate is they won't even get EUV prototype up until 2030s.
Right now their chips are already "economically" competitive, as in SMIC is starving on 20% margins vs ASML/TSMC/NVIDIA getting gluttonous on 50-70%, at least for enterprise AI. Current scarcity pricing = litho costs borderline rounding error, 1500 Nvidia chip flips for 30000, 6000 huawei chip flips for 20000. The problem is really # of tools access and throughput. They can only bring in so many expensive ASML machines, including smuggling, which caps how much wafers they can afford to toss at low yield. They figure out domestic DUV to 2000 series and throughput is solved.
Hence IMO people sleeping on Huawei 9030 on 5nm DUV SAQP, still using ASML DUV for high overlay requirement processes, domestic DUV to fill rest. But once they figure out SAQP overlay, which will come before EUV, they're "set". For cost a 300m-400m ASML EUV, PRC can brrrt tools at BOM / cost plus margin. Think 40 domestic DUVs and associated infra for price of one ASML EUV to run 8x lines with 30% yield and still build 2x more chips normalized for compute that they can run on cheap local energy to match operating costs. Then they have export shenanigans like bundle 5nm chips with renewable energy projects and all of sudden PRC data center + energy combo deals might be globally competitive with 3/2nm. Deal with our shitter chips for now, once they deprecate we give you something better when our processes narrows gap, and you have bonus power to boot because some jurisdictions, building grid is harder than building fabs.
How does one even smuggle an ASML machine? I'd assume the machine stops working if the GPS position doesn't compute, at end of life I wouldn't expect ASML to allow these devices nor their components to end up on the second hand market, I'd expect the future transfers to require continued permission of ASML, much like weapons distribution.
The machines live indoors, far from being able to see GPS signals. Sure, you could require that there be an antenna run to the roof, but you can spoof that stuff.
The thing that helps prevent smuggling of ASML machines is that a) there are few of them (i.e., people would notice), b) it requires tremendous effort to move them at all, let alone without anyone noticing.
it might contain accelerometers, which burn away cryptographic fuses ( setting them all '1' or all '0' so to speak)?
Considering that these tools are installed in seismically active areas [0], the last thing a customer would want is for the tool to zeroise itself because of an earthquake.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-says-all-its-sites-o...
earthquakes tend to be predicted a few minutes beforehand, so plenty of time for ASML to sign a temporary exception order for their machines.
These machines are not like John Deere tractors. If you own the hardware, you own it. They won't be connected to internet. Security first!
Smuggling part is happening on the old machines before EUV. There's a lot of them available on the second hand market thanks to Europe and US keep shutting down their old fabs. I don't think any DUV machine is smuggled. Even if they physically smuggled one, you need a team of ASML engineers to set it up and calibrate. You can guess what ASML will do in this case.
By the way, let's don't forget: ASML doesn't have any problems with China. They are incredibly annoyed with US and Dutch governments. This is potentially the biggest market they are missing out. Even then, they won't tolerate a summugling operation.
I don't think entire machine, more components to keep current machines, some export controlled after purchase, running.
> So far only China has that incentive.
The US is close to having that incentive, if the rift between the US and Europe keeps widening. The Netherlands has one lever, but damn it's a long one.
ASML develops and ships their machines at the pleasure of Uncle Sam because the USA licensed them the tech and remains a crucial part of the supply chain intentionally. It's not a lever. It's a partnership that is mutually beneficial and neither side can really ruin the other without damaging themselves.
If Uncle Sam pisses off Europa Regina enough, she won't give a damn about licenses.
ASML will instantly stall at that point. The EUV light sources are built in the US under US export control regulation. No EUV light source means no ASML EUV machine. I get that some European chest-beating sounds good because there's not very much tech in Europe, but this is an intentional transnational supply chain. It's no accident that the US chose ASML to develop this tech rather than Canon or Nikon. Close ally deep within the US military shield from nearby air bases.
The biggest losers from any such actual attempt by Europe will be Western Europe and the US.
I really like that Europeans are starting to be more patriotic. It's good to see. It's also fortunate that European leaders are aware of Europe's position and role in geopolitics.
Well, it sounds like an alternative supplier for EUV light sources just became available...
An alternative manufacturer, but not a supplier, no.
The US exerts sufficient control over ASML that this will not happen without NATO ending. And the end of NATO (which would be a geopolitical shift more profound than the Fall of the Berlin Wall) and a replacement with some Chinese EUV light source risks the scuttling of all ASML facilities and devices. This is vapor above a coffee cup.
The scenario I'm imagining is in fact the US further destabilizing NATO, in which case Europe wouldn't feel bound by any of the agreements we've made with Americans. Failing that, I don't think any of what was said above is relevant.
ASML owns the company that builds the light source. They acquired it, it's a US company, which is why US export controls apply, that's all. If needed, they could replicate the subsidiary in the EU.
This is too far from correct for any correction to be anything but a full restatement of the facts. Moving the tech over requires US approval. Listen, the Dutch are not going to risk it. Even if they were, ASML would not risk it because all of their customers wouldn't buy anything from a company that's on the EAR Entity List (which is where they'd end up if they tried this without the US allowing it) without US approval. I don't get why people are saying this stuff. It's like saying "Oh yeah, so you divide by zero and then multiply both sides and ta-da". Like, the whole statement is nonsensical.
To enable the whole thing to work you'd need the US to have shrunk to the equivalent of Canada in influence. I'm not saying that's impossible, but in that scenario, the Dutch might well be trying to keep Russians out of Amsterdam and the Turks out of Germany rather than trying to pull an IP heist on the Americans.
You can buy an e-book on Kindle and Amazon still controls what you do with it, right? ASML's ownership of Cymer is like that, except it's the US instead of Amazon.
> Moving the tech over requires US approval
Of course it does, that's why I wrote about export controls but the context is not current state of the world, but what OP wrote:
> If Uncle Sam pisses off Europa Regina enough, she won't give a damn about licenses.
And in this very different state of the world, export controls are worth the same as paper they were written on.
Specifically control is related to the Foreign Direct Product Rule, where in which the US claims jurisdiction over any foreign product containing 25% or more of US-origins (Cymer, etc)
In ASML's case it is the Dutch government banning them, because US government openly threatened them. It's the logical thing to do for an ally.
I think Europe is bluffing that they can go their own way. They can't. They won't try. Europe has been whining that they're going to catch up since the 80s, but they've yet to do it.
ASML has long lever against the Dutch government too. They keep threatening them to move to another country.
No, they won't beat ASML but they'll be good enough and most importantly cheap. And they'll catch up eventually.
That's basically what I said, no?
> even if they use older machines and run longer exposure times
How do longer exposure times and older machines enable 2nm process nodes?
If you didn't care about exposure time, you could build 2nm chips with brute-force electron beam lithography. But the limited throughput confines EBL to research and very low-volume applications. ASML's EUV-based processes are what permit industrial-level scaling, ultimately because parallel beams of electrons repel each other while parallel beams of photons don't.
I don't personally understand why suitable EUV light sources are so hard to build, but evidently, they are. It sounds like a big deal if China is catching up in that area.
They can do 7nm and 5nm. Multiple patterning basically. I don't know when it doesn't scale anymore. Moat likely 4x patterning is the max you want to do.
They are "extracting" optical devices from other machines, imagine how desperate they are for this "machine".
As I ironically said in another comment, all you need is a retired Chinese ex employee at Zeiss.
Nothing can stay private or secret forever, and they have the money and people to achieve that. Even if it takes them another 5 years to reach what we have today.
I bet the ex employee doesn't even have to be Chinese. I'm not, but get me FAANG-level salaries and decent working hours I'll 你好 all you want.
> I bet the ex employee doesn't even have to be Chinese.
That bit struck me as naive, given the instances of Americans who aren't Chinese nationals, or even ethnically Chinese at all, caught committing actual espionage on behalf of China.
我们不会大声说这种话。
Given the current high prices for chips and memory due to "AI" artificial resource scarcity, the world will welcome the additional chip production from China.
I agree. They have a long way to go. There is also something happening in Shanghai but I don’t know the progression.
Plus the deliberately overcomplicated parts.
I can't wait for China to put its full heft in manufacturing advanced graphics cards, fast storage and much more. We need competition.
This article is more skeptical:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ch...
I've read both articles and they say basically the exact same information. Only the tone of this article is a little more skeptical. It also just includes less context/information in general than the featured article
The "problem" with China is that they move from "the amazing thing about a dog playing the piano is not that it plays it badly, but that it plays it all" to Franz Liszt very fast.
This is undoubtedly a good news story, and the most wonderful part is that the article mentions that 14 organizations declined to comment on the matter.
The "Manhattan Project" part is that the research lab was confidential...which doesn't seem that unusual for a high profile research lab, but that aside.
Comparing China's public efforts to build a computer chips industry to the US effort to nuke Japan is kinda wild. Outside of the bait part, the piece coming from Japan Times makes it that much spicier.
Well if anyone gets a pass to be flippant with the analogy… it’s probably the Japanese
Was the manhattan project specifically stood up so that the US can bomb japan? Or was Japan just the first unfortunate target?
> It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (EUVs)
This seems like the obvious conclusion of an ethnic bloc against a mercenary creedel nation?
Any westerner reading this right now wouldn’t die for their country, it’s almost absurd. It’s like asking them to die for Walmart.
Also interesting huge project: China is building a $116 billion dam which, according to Bloomberg, is expected to generate 70 GW, just to compare: UK whole capacity (de-rated) is around 70 GW.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAwJESmfy10
The current largest hydroelectric dam in the world is the Three Gorges Dam in China. It can generate 22.5GW (40% more power than the dam in 2nd place, which is also Chinese).
Since Jan 2024, China has on average constructed 23GW of new solar power every month. So China has effectively been adding a "world's largest dam" worth of solar power, every single month for the last 24 months.
Chinese dam projects have not always gone well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
intensive vs extensive quantities
Love how people (americans) are always framing it "China vs the west" or "Russia vs the West" when in reality it's just China vs the US. It's convenient and makes people think that the whole western world is allied and agrees with the US. While it's true in theory, the reality is much more nuanced than this.
China, Russia, Iran, have shared interests and are known to help each other out, in some cases finding ways to go around sanctions. It's wrong to look at it as one country "vs the west". It's two sets of countries. Even if you don't fully agree with the US, a western country will have much more disagreement with countries from the other group.
Even that is true, it still doesn't make the west one block, and such title makes it believe so. There are no chip makers in Europe, so why even include it on the title ?
Because ASML exists, and it's based in Europe.
China has interests at direct odds to Europe like assisting the Russians to victory in Ukraine. It also has interest to dump exports onto European markets. Regardless of whether you agree with the US, China is going to be looking out only for itself from now on.
ASML is a Dutch company.
Why is it that whenever China is concerned, their most non-violent aspirations are always framed as evil? Manhattan project for anything outside a literal nuke is pretty wild for a headline.
It’s really not. It just is short hand for a government deciding that something really important is worth throwing a lot of resources at. I’ve heard it used to describe plenty of things western governments do too.
You think the headline isn’t a violent superlative?
No, it isn’t. The media uses that term to describe any big strategic R&D project. Anyone that reads English language media would know this.
That’s not how it’s used, no. It’s also not a superlative, it’s a metaphor. Superlative would be something like “biggest” or “best”.
Why not Moonshot projects? like Google X.
Also good.
Because they will become violent to us once they can afford to be violent to us.
“Manhattan Project” is an ubiquitous metaphor that has nothing to do with nukes or weapons. The media describes everything from climate research to AI this way. Companies often refer to their own strategic internal projects as a “Manhattan Project”.
In 1945 as World War 2 wrapped up and the Cold War started, many in the US believed that it would take the Soviet Union 20+ years to build the atomic bomb. It took 4 years. There were several reasons for this. It became a national security interest, there were leaks to the USSR by people who thought the US shouldn't have a monopoly on the bomb and Americans in general viewed the Soviets as backward farmers.
I see the same thing with China. It's not so much espionage now (although there might be that) but China instead will just hire people with the right knowledge, so former employees of ASML, Nvidia, TSMC, etc.
I've been saying for awhile that China won't tolerate the export ban on ASML's best lithography machines and NVidia's best chips. It's a national security issue. And China is the one country on Earth I have faith can dedicate itself to a long term goal.
And yet I got the same reaction. "The Chinese will never catch up", etc. Reports have been comiung out that Huawei has started developing and using their own 7nm chips.
Weirdly, the US created this problem. By restricting exports of chips to China, Chinese manufacturers had no choice but to develop their own chips. Had China been flooded with NVidia chips, there would be far less market opportunity.
The American economy is essentially a bet on an AI future now. Were it not for like 7 tech companies, we'd be in a technical recession. I also believe that bubble is going to burst. But the economy as a whole pretty much now requires US dominance of an AI future and I think a lot of people are in for a rude shock as China completely disrupts that.
China hasn't caught up yet. There are still many steps in the supply chain and chip design as a whole but making their own chips at sub-7nm is a massive step in that direction.
The knowledge came from former ASML employees. I wonder if countries will sanction these individuals given the geopolitical implications of their assistance.
> The team includes recently retired, Chinese-born former ASML engineers and scientists — prime recruitment targets because they possess sensitive technical knowledge but face fewer professional constraints after leaving the company, the people said.
> Their recruitment was part of an aggressive drive China launched in 2019 for semiconductor experts working abroad, offering signing bonuses that started at 3 million yuan to 5 million yuan ($420,000 to $700,000) and home-purchase subsidies, according to a review of government policy documents.
I guess they won't leave China anyways. So what's to sanction...
Sanctioning won’t do anything. These former ASML employees know that their professional careers in the western world are finished. I bet they know when they are signing that they are going to stay in China or countries friendly with China for the rest of their lives.
>for the rest of their lives
You overestimate length of the western outrage.
Anyway what's to sanction? Almost no country recognizes Taiwan. Diplomatically they changed one job in China to another
A good benchmark would be how long the west remains mad at Russia for invading Ukraine.
This time or last time?
(For those confused: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Russian_annexation_of_Cri...)
Who is "the west" in your eyes? I personally know plenty of people in the USA who are openly cheering for Russia in the conflict. So I don't think we could say that "the west" is mad at Russia. Certain people in western countries are, but plenty are quite happy with Russia and wish them well in their endeavors.
Cheering for the "West" means if West wins then please expect 1 million Iraqis (replace Iraq by any other country) dead just because.
They were under NDA, probably
But the science was probably not
I don't think this is classified technology, although asml would like it if they were punished.
And even if it's patented, China has been stealing everything with little consequence
Patent system is an abomination anyway.
One interesting and ironic part of the article is that one of the mentioned optics research groups has been submitting a lot of patents on EUV sources. Are we meant to be mad about it?
Why would Holland sanction people who switch jobs? Don't get me wrong, I can absolutely see how it might have happened if ASML had been an US company. I'm just not sure how you figure that it would happen in Europe.
Unless things have changed much since the days of AQ Khan, that's probably the case.
Controversial and possibly politically incorrect take, but the People's Republic of China sends many, many, of its citizens to study at top universities and work at top companies all over the world. I'm sure even at sensitive defense related orgs too.
While I am sure that the vast majority of them are just regular people, I'm also pretty sure there are True Believers amongst them whose mission is to go out into the world and enrich themselves with the skills and knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals. Some of them might even attain citizenship in the country they go to while inwardly retaining full allegiance to the PRC.
Heck, I know people from other, friendly/allied countries who obtain US citizenship who, if you pose the hypothetical question "If your former country and the US got into a shooting war, who would you fight for?", they would pick their former country without hestitation.
And despite public policy and rhetoric sometimes stating how the PRC is becoming a rival or even existential threat to the Liberal Democratic World Order (TM), the Western democracies don't do anything to secure things. And quite frankly, I don't know if there is anything that could be done, short of getting into... highly controversial territory. Which if the situation were reversed, the CCP would probably not bat an eye to do.
Controversial take: Democracy and the US are awful at keeping secrets, and are incapable of winning by an information delta, if we followed your strategy we would surely be doomed. Our greatest advantages come when we work in the open, and share knowledge and empower ordinary people and the world with technology. As things stand, we are funneling our brightest minds into creating proprietary (secret) technologies... And it turns out the only people for whom the technology is uncopyable or secret are... American citizens. The "proprietary" technology is trivial to steal, and legal protections don't matter outside of our borders, the legal protections and subsidies afforded to those building proprietary (secret) technologies only deprives Americans of the ability to innovate, while in peer nations like China, individuals and startups are totally free to use and enjoy American technology without any restrictions.
But that only works if China reciprocates, which they show no sign of doing.
I’d imagine a Chinese citizen living, studying, or working in the US has access to a lot more advanced knowledge than a US citizen trying to do so in China.
Up to this point, the US has been the one with the advanced knowledge. We now face a world where the opposite might become true.
But using the previous example, I’d imagine a future hypothetical American going to China to study or work would face a lot more roadblocks to obtaining and extracting any advanced knowledge, especially anything with strategic importance.
It doesn't require reciprocation because it is a generalized version of the rebasing problem in software.
Over a big round table with cigar smoke in the air it's natural to come to the conclusion that the closed party can always outpace any set of open parties since it can take the public work and extend it with an advance that it keeps a secret.
In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party. In the rebasing metaphor, the reason for this is the free coordination an open party gets with other open parties. The closed party never gets to insert its advance into the shared state-of-the-art, so it loses all of the free maintenance of coordination, and it has to choose between paying the maintenance cost of integrating its secret advance with the public SOTA, dropping the secret advance and going back to parity with the public SOTA, or disconnecting from the public SOTA and going all hands in on its own ideas. The maintenance burden of integrating your ideas with the constantly moving SOTA may sound trivial but in practice it is usually prohibitively expensive if there are a lot of parties collaborating on the public SOTA and doesn't leave you with much time/budget to find new secret advances.
Right now in the US, we have all of the disadvantages of the open model: the closed parties of the world can cheaply take ideas they like from Meta, Google, OpenAI and mix them with private advances, and all of the disadvantages of the closed model: our domestic tech industry keeps all of its technology a secret from other domestic competitors, and gets none of the coordination benefits of open research / technology, independents and startups are not only unable to access information about the SOTA, but they are actively attacked by the existing monopoly players with any means available when they approach it independently, including using their access to massive capital to drain the talent pool, or being bought outright. And, as we are all too familiar with, the entrenched players don't even care that much about whether or not they can even use the talent efficiently, denying it to competitors is worth more.
> In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party
An obvious counter-example to this is the NSA/GCHQ and cryptography. They've repeatedly shown that they're a good 5-15 years ahead of everyone else.
Is this still true? I feel like I haven't heard of any crazy cryptography revelations for a while now. My assumption was that cryptography was a bit of a special case because it was only government/defense entities putting significant work into it, up until the Internet/digital telecommunications became prominent enough that there was great individual and private-sector demand for crypto. (Plus the whole mess with it being export-controlled, obviously)
Aside from doubts about whether or not this is actually the case the pertinent question that comes from my point is:
If cryptography researchers were keeping their results secret to within their institution / research circle, instead of sharing with academic community / public, would that advantage or disadvantage the NSA relative to the researchers? I think the answer is obvious, and it's a pretty excellent analogy for the US-China situation.
We haven't always been awful at keeping secrets, see the actual Manhattan Project. I like the optimism of your proposal, but how would those US companies continue the same level of R&D investment without those extra profits? If the government just directly invests, then you've just become the enemy.
Didn’t the actual Manhattan Project leak to the USSR?
Yep Stalin literally got daily reports about it. He probably knew as much as Roosevelt.
In late 2022 our telco soft eng team got purged and everyone who was even friends with people who might be Chinese were removed from the project. That included the original architect and product owner, both Americans but with Chinese roots. So there that!
I wonder if there would be more outrage if this was done to those with Israeli connections? Yes, Israel is an ally but they have been known to spy on us and share our secrets with other nations, like China.
I don't like this. Feels like easily become racist. E.g. people from Southeast Asia, Japan, or Korea who might not even speak Chinese but getting fired because they "look Chinese"
I don’t like this either. It falls under what I referred to as “highly controversial” choices.
But I also don’t doubt that if the coin was flipped, China would not hesitate at all to fire any non-Chinese person from such sensitive projects, and all without any outcry you would see in the West.
Racism against Chinese fuels Chinese patriotism and nationalism which is weaponised by the CCP.
I believe that a democratic China would still want to beat the West and become a superpower.
> knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals
You're forgetting to mention that they're also getting paid a lot of money. Quite a lot of people will sell out, given the right conditions, for that amount of money especially in lower CoL areas. To be honest, I'm sure Western governments and companies could do the same if they wanted to bring in the expertise from China.
Is there any other way to see it than just we are too divided and 50% of our own people just think we are the bad guys? What you describe is so obvious but one political side in the US at least pretends this isn't happening and actively does anything they can to hamper any response to it. I would love to be convinced otherwise because I am also part of the division, I truly don't understand the other side at all.
I think there was a time when the other side truly believed globalization and economic progress would turn the CCP into a democratic ally. Maybe both sides believed that for a while. What you see now is just the fragmented and incoherent remains of a failed philosophy that hasn’t yet come up with a coherent replacement, so we’re left adrift with no rational foreign policy from either side (in my opinion).
Why is China not an ally to the US other than the fact that it is a growing economy may be too big for US? What happens if US does not want to contain China any more? Are there fundamental issues which will put China and US as enemies?
China is communist and systemically atheist. That's basically it. Americans have always (or at least always since WW2) viewed communism as an existential evil and themselves as chosen by God to eradicate it from the world by any means necessary.
Well, they first saw the opportunity of cheap manufacturing. Then they saw the democratic ally. But let's say...at the very bottom of the top 1000 reasons to do what they did.
For me many Western politicians don't see past 5-10 years. Short-term China was Heaven (for big corp), so they used all the resources they had to justify what they did. Many called BS on that, but were treated like right wing, populists, old conservatives, naive, fear-mongering, etc. Almost a dejavu.
It seems most of those ASML employees were already Chinese engineers. I doubt they would care if they got caught and had their careers restricted to China
Well real question is how much would that limit PRC talent from working abroad. PRC will be producing plurality of STEM / high skilled talent for decades. They're going to be the only country with project intergrated circuit talent glut in next 10 years, every other semi power projected to have 100,000s shortage. No PRC talent, and you cap western semi talent pool.
Ultimately a lot western innovation run on brain drained PRC talent. There is bamboo ceiling in western tech for east asians, specifically to restrict reverse knowledge transfer. Side effect is once PRC talent hits this ceiling they know big title and fat paychecks and upward mobility is back home, where frankly QoL is off the charts. Ultimately PRC wealthy enough to reverse brain drain aka brain recirculation and PRC talent aren't retarded enough to limit their career aspirations because west decides to cap their career trajectory and try to lock their future behind noncompetes, especially in cold war vs their birth country. Worse, PRC wealthy enough even if there's no bamboo ceiling they can afford to reverse brain drain top 1%, hence current equilibirum. West needs PRC talent, west cannot afford PRC talent to climb too high, PRC can afford to take them off west's hands.
Until west figures out another source of talent, they're stuck in this talent trap. And IMO India ain't it, they don't have the integrated industrial chains and academic structure to produce same kind industrial ready workers yet.
Your point is right on. And additionally, why would an average Indian refuse the pay package to work in China? The top r&d guy at SMIC is from Taiwan after all. Liang got both Samsung and SMIC into the advanced nodes.
Handing out sanctions without at least a plausible legal cover, sounds like a recipe for disaster that would come back to bite.
I wonder what could be used here, non-compete? IP infringement? Or doing it "for all mankind"?
As for knowledge, the YouTube channel Branch Education explained EUV lithography in great detail, sponsored by ASML itself.
My impression is that the knowledge is not that secretive, the precision required at every step is the key.
Yeah it reminds me of the Smyth report, published in August 1945 about atomic bombs, commissioned by the director of the real Manhattan Project. It’s fine to reveal knowledge in detail, if it doesn’t reveal anything related to constructing the apparatuses (the chemistry and the metallurgy) needed.
The press release following the bombing of Hiroshima specifically stated which method of refining Uranium was used. The U.S. spent a great deal of time, effort, and money on researching and testing four different enrichment systems. Just that one detail saved the Soviets 3/4s of a sizeable chunk of the A-bomb effort. Sometimes you don't need to leak much detail to give away a great deal.
Do you have the press release in question? I'd be very curious to see it. All I found at a glance was Truman's well-known one (https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/hiroshima-...) which was followed by the Secretary of War's (https://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1945/450806b.html) and neither seem to mention anything about enrichment methods or even the concept of isotope separation.
Hmm, it was not quite a press release, but it's in the Smyth report from August 12, 1945: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/publi... (search for diffusion).
Neat! Thank you!
I am kind of skeptical about the report, as there are almost no details revealed. Everyone knows that China wants to build its own semeconductor manufacturing devices. The question is how close it is to be used in real production. The report just throws out a very vague number, maybe ~2030, which I can give the same guess, too.
2030 is around the corner though.
Of course China will probably catch up, and surpass, in this and most things that it sets its mind to.
Instead of the US recently veering into batpoop-insane policy, the US should be focused on promoting a peaceful and equitable world that it would like to live in when it's not top dog.
Are these necessary "AI Chips", not just "Chips"?
If - hear me out - this whole LLM AI thing turns out be be overhyped, won't this capability be useful for a lot of other things , from consumer electronics to combat drones.
e.g. Useful in the growing Chinese EV sector. And lessening dependence on chips made in Taiwan seems strategic.
It seems broader than a bet on "AI" specifically. A more strategic move.
From the article, first paragraph:
> cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance.
It's kind of nasty that a fresh society of capable people has the drive to achieve technological excellence and the incumbents do whatever they can to delay this, even though it's inevitable and there's a lot to gain by empowering them. All in the name of "they are not us".
World has gained so much from modern Chinese industrial revolution. Why suddenly everyone got cold feet? Nobody was stopping Germany or Japan on their way up even though they were literal former enemies with history of brutal warfare. China never done anything even comparable to others.
> Japan
Pretty sure the US pressured Japan to up their exchange rate which was one of the factors in their stagflation. Germany never threatened the power of the US
So the US has always been terrible to the countries which growth they exploited?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization_in_Ca...
Give China 50 years and I'm sure they are gonna be properly sad about what happened to Uyghurs, western style.
Or not. Measures applied to Uyghurs were done under the banner of fight with terror, which the West waved fervently as well. Although US decided to direct their zeal outside, bombing several countries and killing countless "enemies" which were defined as everybody within the blast radius. Were attempts of China at controlling their islamist minority so uncomparably worse?
Especially when we compare them to how they approached the problem of pandemics. They obviously have no qualms about attempting sweeping solutions regardless of religion and ethnicity of those affected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
I mean, if we’re going to make that comparison, China today looks much more like pre-war Germany and Japan— set on expansion. That’s pretty clearly what the anti-China crowd is worried about. Tibet, Taiwan, Philippine islands, ever expanding naval bases, aggressive displays of power around Australia, prison camps and sterilization programs, and so forth.
How does it compare to the last 50-70 years of US actions? Even if all narratives are true and significant, China could still massively benefit the world same way US did despite its vast shortcomings.
China has never had expansionist ambitions. On the contrary, modern Chinese foreign policy is explicitly grounded in non-interventionism and respect for sovereignty (the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence). Xinjiang, Tibet and, per Beijing, Taiwan, are internal matters. The "Philippine islands" have been claimed by multiple states long before the PRC existed.
Western strength is not tech that we have today, but the velocity we're moving forward. Any tech can be and will be stolen, copied and improved, the only way to remain ahead is to run faster.
It was kinda inevitable.
A country with technical ability and ambition like China was never going to go "Oh only one company in netherlands can do it? Damn I guess we're snookered then".
Hopefully this doesn’t stoke a third and final world war.
I feel the American media and general public has gotten psyched by the recent announcements coming from China. This might be new weapons or Deepseek or conveniences in the cities. I wish the Chinese people all the best and sincerely hope they prosper. At the same time, I really wish Americans would get out of this panic mode. You answered several challenges over the last 250 years. Some were existential threats. America generally lays out its problems for everyone to see. Americans tend to be extremely self-critical. This is often misconstrued by some to be signs of weakness. Anyone who believes this is, in my opinion, delusional.
As an aside, there are some comments about the "Chinese way of thinking" and the "American way of thinking". I generally think these discussions veer off into notions of cultural superiority. That, also in my opinion, is the mark of weak minds. The fact is once something is shown to be possible, it is exponentially easier to duplicate and improve it. America did this with German technology, China did it with American technology and I am sure countries like India are going to quickly get there too (I am not suggesting the Germans didn't learn from others themselves). This sets a firm base for iterative improvements.
To riff off another comment, China's progress wasn't done by God. America will learn and adopt what's valuable and discard what's not. If I have learned anything about Americans (of all backgrounds), they don't shy away from a challenge. For all its faults, I still personally will root for a society based on something like the American constitution.
Seems like demographics, AI, and tech parity are converging on a Taiwan takeover attempt in the 2027-2030 timeframe.
If China actually catches up and surpasses the West/TSMC in fab technology and production, I think they'd have a better option, which is simply flooding the world market with high-end chips and obliterating the Taiwanese economy. Eventually, joining an economically dominant China might become more palatable, or a necessity.
At this point I'm willing to wave around the little red book for a 1TB of ram.
I don't have that many kidneys left to buy gpus, ram and ssd at the prices they are now, let alone the prices next year.
How much money would Taiwan have to be offerred to voluntarily place their heads under the boot of China
The leadership will have a price in mind and they won’t be the ones under the boot. Everyone has a price to look the other way even if they think they are principled now.
This would be more in-line with their strategy in other areas. Quietly massively improve technical capability and then utterly out-compete international competitors. They did this with solar, multicopters, are in progress with doing this with TVs, nuclear power, etc. War is expensive and destructive, it's easier and nicer to just negate the economic relevance of your opponents if you have the time and resources to do it (which they do).
China is also doing this with weapons. It's just a little more difficult normal people to see the results because people can't get a Dongfeng 2x series rocket from Ali Express.
Realistically, the general public doesn't have access to an honest appraise of their capabilities. So we are left to infer from their accomplishments in other high-tech areas what their military industry is capable of producing.
China is building all kinds of suggestive tech including invasion barge piers to land heavy stuff quickly once a beachhead has been established http://www.hisutton.com/Chinese-Invasion-Barge-OSINT.html
I know mass media keeps pounding this "eventual scenario" (manufacturing consent and all). Maybe it will happen, but the Chinese think on longer timelines than the ADHD West and are probably banking on A). Out-attriting, B). Out-innovating. If both happen, we might find ourselves with a situation where Taiwan voluntarily wants to align closer with China as the West flails.
China know that the one child policy has fucked their demographics and that their future isn't as rosy as it might appear now
Why would the nation that implemented the one-child policy be unable to implement a three child policy?
Reversing demographic momentum isn’t so easy. You have a cascade effect which happens, and high costs of a massive elderly population can’t be borne by a sudden baby boom. Also, through the medical system, etc, you can force people to abort their children, but it’s harder to force them to make children.
They will just tax condoms to sponsor the elderly homes.
And that's more of the "propaganda narrative" (google that term) getting pounded at us from all channels over the past several years. It's so 1984 - remember when we were told they were growing too much and getting overpopulated and the planet was going extent any moment? So which one is it? Anyways, their population decrease will be offset by AI and automation all while they still pump out more honor students than the entire West combined. They'll be fine is what I'm saying.
> manufacturing consent
I think it's more like smearing/projection, like Republican conspiracy theories about Democrats being pedophiles. Guess where the real pedophiles were hanging out the whole time.
The track record says China will probably just buy Taiwan.
If you hate invasions so much, you should probably focus your energies on Venezuela. Looks like Trump might start a war for Christmas.
Wars are old fashioned. This is a “special military operation”
is 1950 old-fashioned? The Korean War was originally called a "police operation"
Peaceful democratic transition is also on the table when KMT wins back the presidency next.
Read as "anyone connected flees to the US, anyone deemed political gets a free relocation to a Xinjiang re-education camp, and lots of new mainland 'mothers' live with those allowed to remain".
Why would anyone voluntarily sign up to have Winnie the Pooh's boot on their face?
You have brain worms
Some competition for Nvidia is good, might drive down prices. One can only hope.
Reverse-engineered is a nice way of writing stole.
Sure, by the time China clones this generation of tin droplet ASML EUV machines at production scale, the market will have shifted to free-electron lasers.
And the prices go up ...
They really need to pay us all compensation money. And I mean literally EVERY single company that has been responsible for driving the RAM prices up. Free market my ... ...
It seems extremely dishonest to frame the project of improving computer chip manufacturing to the development of weapons of mass destruction— weapons that went on to be used against civilians. Sensationalist and propagandistic framing for what is otherwise an interesting article.
The term 'Manhattan Project' is a common and widely used metaphor for R&D programs with effectively unlimited resources applied to them. The actual Manhattan Project is simply a very famous exemplar of such a program.
Use of that term is not propaganda, it's normal English.
It's not just about the use of the term "Manhattan Project". It's about the framing and wording of the article. There is literally an image of a PRC soldier in front of a rocket in the article.
When referring to the efforts nation-states, I'd be very interested to hear how often such metaphorical usage is used to describe the work of adversarial vs. friendly countries. I would be shocked if it's as often (in the Anglophone press) used to describe the work of US-aligned countries as it is that of US-adversarial countries.
This is literally by the country that suffered the most from it.
Well, the description is attributed to "two people with knowledge of the project" of unclear national origin.
Never forget the continual parade of "experts" when the chip ban was being promoted who all said in unison:
"China is 20 years behind"
Horribly dishonest. But they all talked in lockstep: lawmakers + "experts".
Correction: sanctions worked and now they’re building better chips than us
archive link??
It's quite easy to do it yourself - just open archive.is and paste the original URL in.
https://archive.is/tKZmn
FWIW, this seems to be a Reuters report reprinted in Japan Times. Previous HN discussions got just a couple comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307819
"the people said"
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Most of that entire network is easy to replicate, as in it's not technically hard, the hard part is validation, no one in PRC wants to use unproven PRC inputs if risk is 100m wafer run goes to trash. Hence PRC now basically insuring domestic fabs on risk runs using domestic inputs, which are being validated on full scale production, instead of taking 5 years to verify, it'll take 2. Export controls help this, i.e. domestic resist basically required now after JP export controls.
The hard part, i.e. optics, light source. Zeiss had like 3k engineerings, Cymer 1k, ASML 13k during EUV commercialization process. PRC can (and is) just throwing bodies at problem, lots of parallel execution with clear second mover road map. That and as this article suggest, they're literally poaching people with the tacit knowledge which will help speed run. I'd wadger they get there sooner than later.
China seems to be doing well on supply chain integration (with the exception of the trust part).
Being how strategic this is, I imagine that the investment won't be entirely laissez faire and there will be lower tolerance for cheating in this endeavor. I think that ultimately they'll do quite well with their efforts.
> China’s prototype lags behind ASML’s machines largely because researchers have struggled to obtain optical systems such as those from Germany’s Carl Zeiss, one of ASML’s key suppliers, the two people said.
So, now they just need an old retired Chinese that worked for Zeiss and build a prototype for the optical devices they need.
They use armies of graduates just to literally copy, when they could build something new or different.
Is "Manhattan Project" supposed to be sounding threatening or something? Is anyone in on Japanese newspapers and whether they often us such rhetoric, when reporting things about China? It reads really kind of idiotic. As if chips are to be equal to atomic bombs and could be dropped on Tokyo any moment now. Maximum alarmist. That on the background of recent clumsiness of the Japanese PM ... It starts to paint a certain picture.
When I hear Manhattan Project, I don't think about the outcome. I think about the massive amount of effort for a singular goal that might not even be possible.
We learn that before 2023 EUV lithography was worthless. "AI" is the only reason why China would want this technology!
EDIT: Given the dramatic downvotes, I repent: China will use these EUV machines to build AI sharks with lasers that will swim towards Taiwan! Is this better?
How did "we" learn that?
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Complex systems evolve by learning. They grow more complex. Same for the brain as for organizations and societies.
China is a redistribute centralist State. It has to be: a narrow coastal region is hyper wealthy and to maintain territorial integrity it requires a strong government to tax there and spend elsewhere. Hence the infrastructure and construction boom. The high debt is a feature of the system, these are State backed enterprises that live on subsidy.
The upshot is this limits complexity. ASML is in NL for a reason. NL is a feature of Western Europe decentralization. Arguably, Europe conquered the world because its internal fragmentation fostered a rapid gain in complexity.
The US has cemented this into its own constitution and political culture. All talks about "Europe innovation" and "China catching up" are moot. Europe became a colony of the US post WWII and the integration needed to foster internal peace capped its capacity to grow complex. The US is now the most complex society on Earth and no other region can cope with that much complexity on that scale. Both Russia and China are held together by trading complexity off centrality.