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DaseindustriesLtd

late version of a small language model

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joined 2022 September 05 23:03:02 UTC

Tell me about it.


				

User ID: 745

DaseindustriesLtd

late version of a small language model

76 followers   follows 27 users   joined 2022 September 05 23:03:02 UTC

					

Tell me about it.


					

User ID: 745

That's what you find noteworthy?

People consistently underestimate Musk. In particular his ability to pick a niche with apparent incumbents, say «that could be done better», bulldoze through cringe and come out on the other side with a product that redefines and expands the market. Sometimes he fails and abandons the effort. I think this could happen here, too. But not necessarily, nor even likely. He wants to do to Wikipedia what he did to Roskosmos and other legacy launch providers. He has emotional stake in this, he has the resources and allies for this, and he has the flow of Grok interactions on X to lean on. He can make it work.

There will be a Grok 5, and Grok 6, and they'll be vastly more powerful, not just as modern-day LLMs, they'll have continuous learning and strong multimodality. The main feature you need for good article generation is aggregating tens to hundreds of data points and deeply processing it, meaning context in the millions of tokens and probably weight updates or something functionally close; Grok will be there. Layout, flow etc. are easily solved if you apply work to it, it's trivial compared to general coding and we've come very far with coding LLMs (people who say they're terrible lack the sense of perspective, 2 years ago they were ≈unusable). Even if currently many higher-quality pages are handcrafted, that'll be useful data.

Judge this thing by its strong points, not by its slop and cringe.

Compare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd

https://grokipedia.com/page/George_Floyd

Should I read the book or can you briefly explain the motives of Willoughby here?

I mean, economic Armageddon doesn't imply that Chinese assets will do great. And in fact they're doing poorly, this is a lose-lose move. I'd be investing into… idk, India?

American reactions are pretty bizarre, I don't understand how these people take themselves seriously. Take this «House Select Committee on the […] CCP»:

“China’s action today is an economic declaration of war against the United States and a slap in the face to President Trump amid his efforts to fight for a level-playing field. China has fired a loaded gun at the American economy, seeking to cut off critical minerals used to make the semiconductors that power the American military, economy, and devices we use every day including cars, phones, computers, and TVs. Every American will be negatively affected by China’s action, and that’s why we must address America’s vulnerabilities and build our own leverage against China. We should immediately pass my legislation to end preferential trade treatment for China, build a resilient resource reserve of critical minerals, secure American research and campuses from Chinese influence, and strangle China’s technology sector with export controls instead of selling it advanced chips. Xi Jinping only respects strength and I am ready to work with patriotic business leaders, our congressional leadership, and the Trump Administration to show China that its belligerent trade actions will be met with serious efforts to protect the American people, secure our supply chains, and cut off the flow of U.S. capital and technology into China."

Man, why the pearl-clutching? Why the shocked Pikachu face? It's unbecoming. This is explicitly a retaliation for your ongoing and already very impactful attempts to throttle their tech sector, you've declared this war many years ago when you sentenced Huawei to death. Moreover the fact that they'll eventually be in a position to retaliate via REE dependence has been known for well over a decade, and there's been a warning shot in Japan over Senkaku. You chose this route, your team was consistently rejecting all offers of deescalation because you believed to have escalation dominance. So own it. The extent of third-worldist hypocrisy is breathtaking:

China’s new rare earth export controls prove one thing: Beijing will weaponize any leverage it has.
America needs a new normal—not tit-for-tat.
We must strategically decouple and throttle the PRC tech sector before it’s too late. 🧵

Chinese export controls are obviously tit-for-tat for US export controls, so by new normal they basically mean unrestricted always-defect economic warfare. It seems that the US isn't really capable of negotiating, the notion that you can't always bully your way to an objective is alien to these folks (we've already seen this with Bessent's "China has revealed itself as a bad actor"). There's the assumption that the US (or at least "with allies") necessarily possesses some hidden strength that can be activated to indignantly reject the adversary's offer.

Well, maybe there is. I'm optimistic that out-of-China production can be scaled up in a matter of years, if no deal is made. Primarily China intends to cripple defense applications, and frankly how can you object to that, this idea «greedy communists will sell us the materiel to shoot them with» has always been risible. They are also likely going to suppress the planned reindustrialization and (very dubious) robotic labor revolution in the US. All of that «just» reduces CAGR in a wide range of industries for the next 3-7 years, while Chinese physical productive capacity keeps growing exponentially. The demand for chips, though, will definitely be met. In the meantime, the US will have to capitalize even harder on its software/AI advantage. We'll see which is more important.

The first reasoning model for which we have decent documentation, and one which basically defined the research field (as OpenAI/Google/Anthropic hide their recipes) is DeepSeek R1. They've finally had it published in Nature, too. The supplementary has been very informative, because people kept speculating about implementation details.

…we aim to explore the potential of LLMs for developing reasoning abilities through self-evolution in a RL framework, with minimal reliance on human labelling efforts. Specifically, we build on DeepSeek-V3 Base8 and use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)9 as our RL framework. The reward signal is only based on the correctness of final predictions against ground-truth answers, without imposing constraints on the reasoning process itself. Notably, we bypass the conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) phase before RL training. This design choice originates from our hypothesis that human-defined reasoning patterns may limit model exploration, whereas unrestricted RL training can better incentivize the emergence of new reasoning capabilities in LLMs. Through this process, detailed in the next section, our model (referred to as DeepSeek-R1-Zero) naturally developed diverse and sophisticated reasoning behaviours. To solve reasoning problems, the model exhibits a tendency to generate longer responses, incorporating verification, reflection and the exploration of alternative approaches within each response. […] During training, we design a straightforward template to require DeepSeek-R1-Zero to first produce a reasoning process, followed by the final answer. The prompt template is written as below. “A conversation between User and Assistant. The User asks a question and the Assistant solves it. The Assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the User with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within ... and ... tags, respectively, that is, reasoning process here answer here . User: prompt. Assistant:”, in which the prompt is replaced with the specific reasoning question during training.

Then they do a large number of rollouts for questions, automatically verify, GRPO creates gradients based on answer correctness within each rollout, model is updated, continue for thousands of steps and that's basically it.

As well as the progressive enhancement of reasoning capabilities during training, DeepSeek-R1-Zero also demonstrates self-evolutionary behaviour with RL training. As shown in Fig. 1b, DeepSeek-R1-Zero exhibits a steady increase in thinking time throughout training, driven only by intrinsic adaptation rather than external modifications. Mak- ing use of long CoT, the model progressively refines its reasoning, generating hundreds to thousands of tokens to explore and improve its problem-solving strategies. The increase in thinking time helps with the autonomous develop- ment of sophisticated behaviours. Specifically, DeepSeek-R1-Zero increasingly exhibits advanced reasoning strategies such as reflective reasoning and systematic exploration of alternative solutions provided in Extended Data Fig. 1a, substantially boosting its performance on verifiable tasks such as maths and coding. Notably, during training, DeepSeek-R1-Zero exhibits an ‘aha moment’, shown in Table 1, character- ized by a sudden increase in the use of the word ‘wait’ during reflections, provided in Extended Data Fig. 1b. This moment marks a distinct change in reasoning patterns and clearly shows the self-evolution process of DeepSeek-R1-Zero.

At the time there's been a lot of suspicion about it but now it's pretty solidly settled and replicated science.

Not enough to make a really useful model (I've tested R1-Zero, it was somewhat unhinged), but for reasoning as such. Everything else is basically a quality of life or speed-increasing implementation detail. Using reward models to grade qualitative queries, branching and merging, iterative dataset augmentation and dozens of other tricks add little to the core principle.

I mean my entire post, of course. If you want to see how biased they are in less clear-cut cases, feed the wiki page of Kobi Kambon and ask if this is science.

Tanner Greer is extremely blackpilled on this:

One theme that Xi Jinping repeats eternal is that his cadres must have “calamity consciousness” — real awareness that if they get things wrong they will be responsible for historical disaster. The country is only ever a few steps away from catastrophe.

If you believe that the single largest priority of the US Navy is physical fitness and hazing then you just don’t have that consciousness.

This reform program is decadent. it is superficial. It has no respect for the depth of the Navy’s problems or the catastrophe they might result in.

We are in a very bad place. Culturally, even, the Navy is in a bad place. Had they done something crazy but real on that stage—like promote half a dozen men from the submarine service in a desperate bid to fix the Navy’s operational culture—I would not be writing this.

But Hesgeth did not do anything of the sort. Even on the terrain that he chose—service culture and readiness—what he had to say fell woefully short of the problems we now face.

We are running out of time.
I am being hard on these guys, yes.
I am on hard on them because we are running out of time. We do not have the time to squander attention or resources.
There is need for a calamity consciousness.

Greer is a major China hawk, though. And Hegseth isn't.

I believe this is part of the broader strategic posture adjustment, or at least a hedging bet (not clear if it'll be maintained). The US defense/war department, in Hegseth's vision (I don't think he's intelligent enough to have a coherent strategic vision like, say, Elbridge A. Colby, but there probably are people behind him making this functionally true), is going to implement Monroe Doctrine 2.0, focus on the Western hemisphere. Tough, masculine, no-nonsense, scary bunch, unencumbered by rules of engagement, to more easily topple regimes in South America and pressure neighbors into resource and trade concessions. Death squads eliminating suspected narcos, National Guard prepared to pacify Portland. More like Russian Airborne Forces that exist to terrorize the domestic audience. This is all, of course, noise in the context of conflicts with peer powers, which realistically mean just China and require far more logistical and industrial competence than warrior ethos or indeed individual warriors (only so many guys you can fit on an aircraft carrier). But on that level, the US will rely on strategic deterrence and the hope of transformative results from AGI.

This is the part of Uncomfortable HBD Facts that is very underdiscussed: Blacks More Likely to have paranoid schizophrenia.

African Americans were four times more likely than Euro-Americans to receive a Schizophrenia diagnosis … race was the strongest predictor of an admission diagnosis of Schizophrenia after controlling for the influence of other demographic variables. Interestingly, Barnes showed that Schizophrenia subtypes were not equally distributed by race, with African American consumers significantly more likely to receive a diagnosis of Schizophrenia-paranoid subtype or Schizophrenia-undifferentiated subtype than Euro-American consumers.

There's a ton of results in this vein, and his Arabic name makes me suspect that his parents were into Nation of Islam stuff, Yakub doctrine and all that, which is of course schizophrenic throughout (very funny though), so it might be hereditary for him, on top of direct schizophrenia-promoting nurture.

But I don't think the beancounting method really explains the problem. Many, many, many more Blacks who don't get any diagnosis and generally function well buy into this zany conspiracist bullshit. In the limit, the whole narrative of Black existence under the yoke of Systemic Racism and mass slaughter of unarmed black men by the police in the US is a giant conspiracy theory with clear paranoid motives, and spotlight cases like Nick Cannon going off about melanin, people buying into Jussie Smollett hoax, Candace Owens spiraling into even crazier hypotheses about secret societies behind Macron's wife being a man, "black scholars" with mind-bogglingly idiotic and racist doctrines propped up as real intellectuals (I like Kobi Kazembe Kambon a.k.a. Joseph A. Baldwin, read it up), etc. etc. all add up to a general schizophrenic-paranoid tone in the Black community. Except – wasn't it Whites (and Jews, but in any case, the well-off, educated non-Black demographics) who championed the doctrine of systemic racism? Aren't Whites also buying into many of these hoaxes and libels today?

These are accomplishments he is very proud of, that frequently come up during his expositions. He will start by telling me how the people at the Social Security office are stealing from him (AFAICT, that was either taxes or a garnishment of some sort), then veer into reciting all the vegetables he eats because he knows how to eat healthy, he cooks for himself, but these people they not eatin' right and it causes problems, mental problems in they head they be havin' mental problems because they don't eat right, not like him because he eats his green beans, real food that he cooks for himself because he knows how to eat right, act right because he learned it in school, third grade, food pyramid, he learned that here in Jersey in school, third grade, and these other people should have learned it but they not acting right, that’s just Jersey, lotta bad people in Jersey, obsessed with money, takin’ from you, takin’ your money.

Unless you exaggerate greatly, Hassan sounds like he has quite a low IQ on top of his "schizophrenia". Mentally, he's close to an 8-10 year old White or Asian kid.

And I think this is the elephant in the room. There is simply not enough capacity to suppress delusions induced and exacerbated by the information environment. There is no clear separation between delusions and sincere confusions, Hassan won't have a mature enough epistemology to distinguish things that he pathologically overfixates on from things that just kinda legit sound right, even if you pump him full of antipsychotics. This is the ground zero of Black American Madness, along with smarter people than Hassan who also have a more profound illness and/or higher ego strength so they keep it together and spread their nonsense around. Then there are borderline cases who are relatively gullible and either propagate the message or simply do not push back, like that smart and non-insane Black guy once did for another celebrated Guggenheim scholar, Ibram X. Kendi:

"They are aliens," I told Clarence, confidently resting on the doorframe, arms crossed. "I just saw this documentary that laid out the evidence. That's why they are so intent on White supremacy. That's why they seem to not have a conscience. They are aliens."
Clarence listened, face expressionless. "You can't be serious."
"I'm dead serious. This explains slavery and colonization. This explains why the Bush family is so evil. This explains why Whites don't give a damn. This explains why they hate us so damn much. They are aliens!" I'd lifted off the doorframe and was in full argumentative mode.
"You really are serious about this," Clarence said with a chuckle. "If you're serious, then that has got to be the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life! I mean, seriously, I can't believe you are that gullible." The chuckle turned to a grimace. "Why do you spend so much time trying to figure out White people?" he asked after a long pause.
Clarence had asked this question before. I always answered the same way. "Because figuring them out is the key! Black people need to figure out what we are dealing with!"
"If you say so. But answer me this: If Whites are aliens, why is it that Whites and Blacks can reproduce? Humans can't reproduce with animals on this planet, but Black people can reproduce with aliens from another planet? Come on, man, let's get real."
"I am being real," I replied. But I really had no comeback. I stood and turned around awkwardly, walked to my room, plopped down on my bed, and returned to staring at the ceiling. Maybe White people were not aliens. Maybe they became this way on earth. Maybe I needed to read more Frances Cress Welsing. I looked over at The Isis Papers on my nightstand.

Well, Clarence then probably got a normal job and never achieved prominence as a thought leader for his people. He wasn't exuberant enough to be made a champion.

…and then comes everyone else, who is simply overwhelmed by moral blackmail, the volume of second-hand "corroborating evidence" and plain emotional confidence. And here we are.

In short my thesis is that a small (large relatively, but still amounting to fractions of a percent of the total population) difference in the rates of paranoid schizophrenia, compounded by significantly lower IQ, creates a critical mass of self-propagating cultural madness in the Black community, which lowers general epistemic standard to rock bottom and then spills over to the broader society, warping the entire default narrative of what it is about. And now we're training large language models on this oeuvre, which seals the bubble of the consensus reality. I bet if I feed this exchange to any frontier LLM, it'll rebuke me harshly with the usual tut-tutting routine about how systemic racism is totally real and Scholars say so.

Regarding your actual question: I think paranoid schizophrenics, no matter how "functional" for the moment, certainly can't have guns. This isn't hard.

you've acknowledged China's demographic issues and your solution to it was essentially ai enabled robotics to handle elderly care in order to keep the ratio of dependents to workers manageable correct? The happy case for China multipolar strength seems to rely on a pretty narrow outcome where AI is powerful enough to do a huge amount of menial labor but not powerful enough to where being ahead a couple years differentiates world power standings.

Americans have invented themselves a lot of cope about China, to the extent they're not paying attention to similar domestic issues.

Right now Mainland Chinese are younger by over 4 years than White Americans (40.1 years in 2025 vs 44.5 in 2020 median). By 2040, they'll become about on par I think (46-47). I don't trust fertility projections after that, we've seen nations rapidly fall into the East Asian model, including throughout South America (Central America for now is holding up admittedly). American solution to American demographic issues is importing assorted Hispanics to take care of white boomers and hoping that Hispanics will somehow also become a replacement for the working population. I don't believe this is happening as far as O-ring economy goes (software, finance, deep tech jobs now ride on adding Indians and Chinese to local numbers; Indians don't have that deep a well of talent and they're having a demographic transition too, especially for higher castes; Chinese net flow is reversing), so in my view your productive working populations are shrinking at a similar pace. After seeing stories of elderly abuse by immigrants in the US, I am positive that robotic caretakers will at least reach parity soon for augmenting blue collar work and and caretaking. Americans are trying to add robots to industrial workforce and will likely begin to automate retirement facilities too, they're not that dumb and there are Western robotic projects clearly aimed at home labor. Robotic mobility is now at this level, and this is a blind policy. Progress in manipulation is similar, China reigns supreme in actuators market and casually make dexterous hands now, it's a very nice fit for their industrial model so they'll only increase their lead there. Robots will suffice for menial labor, both in China and in the US (probably marginally more so in China but it's not a crux). Finally I don't believe in the necessity of unproductive population to "provide consumption", rich people with robot slaves can consume as much and grow GDP as much as multiple poor people. On the whole, I am of the mind that demographic trend difference is a dumb and, again, Zeihanite red herring that ignores medium-term predictable AI progress.

So abstractly, it's not a narrow outcome, because as I've just said, the floor is basically established, and China won't have to make up for a large extra deficiency. The whole question is about those huge gains of productivity on the right tail, it's the US that will have to make up for having fewer and lower IQ people, NIMBYism, alienating allies, degraded supply chains and retarded and worsening political culture with geniuses in a datacenter, by gaining a couple years of edge in AI progress and not fumbling the application of gains (and starting at 7:44 here, Molson gives me a reason to suspect that China will also be better at applying what gains they make with AI throughout the period).

Now, I believe AI is going to be really useful. A review commissioned by DeepMind predicts that at a minimum, 2030 level AI will boost productivity for desk-based research by 10-20%.. That's a lot. All things considered, is this enough to "compound" your way to lasting hegemony after 2030? I wouldn't bet on it, but Americans are Winners by nature, so they might. The upside of hegemony is, in theory, near-infinite. The downside is just having a worse place in the eventual bipolar world. Whether to take this bet depends on the odds (and nuances of the value function). I'd say the US has maybe 25% chance of "winning the race" to hegemonic condition.

Except GPUs are even more interchangeable than other weapons systems.

This is just prolonged "nuh-uh". CUDA and CANN will continue to evolve divergently, Chinese models will likely be built around extreme sparsity and multi-tier memory (like ByteDance's UltraMem), scheduled Huawei systems are increasingly different from Nvidia's lineup (vaguely like Google's pods but Google doesn't yet sell those). We see that American providers took almost a year to implement DeepSeek and it's been just slightly unconventional, actually trained on H800s; SiliconFlow rolled it out on CloudMatrix 384s weeks after they were delivered. Lock-in happens on the software and hyperscaler level.

That said, all of this is beside the point because your idea is "hopefully we'll leave them so far behind their market won't matter much".

I don't think Xi is playing factorio but the CCP does obviously practice extensive industrial policy. Making it kind of ironic to go this hard against one piece of American industrial policy.

Industrial policy is about advancing domestic capability, protectionism and targeted subsidies – CHIPS act, banning Huawei in the US, not Nvidia in China. You're just calling any policy that has something to do with industry "industrial policy" I guess, but your argument is purely geostrategic and has no direct bearing on industry development in the US.

It's kind of incredible to point out how China is willing to force some of their largest companies to supply demand for their domestic chip industry

Incredible propaganda, yes. DeepSeek has maybe 300 people. And they weren't forced to do shit. If you mean that story, I've checked with the reporter and the report is basically unsourced rumor. This isn't happening, you're working purely from assumptions. There is now, indeed, effort to subsidize the adoption of domestic compute, but that's inevitable when Americans are deliberating on whether they can afford to sell even obsolete inference capacity.

Absolutely. China has found its success through world trade on sea lanes policed by American military might in an environment built by American diplomats. That's what Pax Americana is.

You mean, it's a self-congratulatory, narcissistic Zeihanite myth? You're not protecting shit. You've just lost to Houthis, the first nontrivial challenge to sea lanes in forever. Your navy is designed around offensive operations against nation states and deterrence in nuclear war, not patrolling sea lanes, and its crown jewels are aircraft carriers and submarines. Maybe it would do great to block sea trade, at least that's the plan for Malacca. The global trade will certainly go on fine if it's scrapped.

This is an ironically Trumpist take on things for as much as you rightly excoriate his team's perspectives elsewhere.

Trump generally campaigns on real if exaggerated problems and popular frustrations, it's just his solutions are often hare-brained. China would definitely like to increase value-add, of course, but it wouldn't mean canceling "industrial policy" and shedding dominance in stuff like photovoltaics, they'll simply make factories more automated. Interestingly, in this case I even agree with Trump on selling GPUs to China, for once his mercantile instincts are appropriate.

Demand is also a pretty important part of this all as well

Demand as such has zero value because it is easily produced at infinite scale and, for the purpose of this conversation, it's a malign concept. People don't sell to the US because the US pays back with some demandium, they just trade their work for a piece of liquid and appreciating American assets (insofar as those descriptions apply). Also, we've seen that as trade with the US fell due to tariffs, Chinese exports to ASEAN increased (and no it's not transshipping, the composition of goods is totally different) and fully canceled the drop in trade surplus. The world can produce plenty of "demand". You aren't that big anymore.

multipolarity doesn't seem very stable in any case

I think it's pretty stable (dysfunctional shitholes like Russia and even Iran stand strong), AI is likely to make it more so. Cybernetic superweapons are unlikely because hardening systems when you have unlimited time and root access is easier than pen testing; we'll get to verified kernels for everything much sooner than AIs become expert hackers. Material science and engineering advances promoting lasers, drones etc. are great for defense. Panopticon angle is obvious enough. I strongly doubt AI will enable some sort of super-nukes. This of course is a matter of opinion.

Then I return to being very confused as to why we're going to regret this.

Selective quotation is a hell of a drug. On a single chip basis, even Huawei admits they can't compete and won't be able to in the foreseeable future (EUV breakthroughs may change that). They can make do with better systems integration and produce competitive (also due to more electric power, better grid) systems and that'd suffice to serve domestic demand, for lack of better alternative.. For the end product (AI), they'll be slowed down relative to the world of uncontested Nvidia dominance. I posit this is not critical. The critical thing is that this market will keep growing exponentially, and before too long you're forfeiting not tens but hundreds of billions, on not selling one of your few truly unparalleled products. Is the idea to make up for that with Singularity stuffa nd extorting allies in the meantime? This is a Hail Mary.

I guess this is the crux. In your world, where unipolarity is the default trajectory, it makes perfect sense to cling to Pax Americana and play negative-sum games hoping to outlast the opposition. Like, what is the alternative, capitulation, suicide? In my world, China is basically guaranteed to not only exist in 30 years but have comprehensively stronger economy than the US plus closest allies, no matter what you sell or don't sell, buy or don't buy. And the US will have to figure out how to exist, and exist well, without boons of global strategic superiority, in a bipolar world, and hopefully remaining a hegemon in its own backyard. That figuring out has got to begin now.

I have to note: I am undecided on what's better for me. I argue for the sake of argument. I believe the current US policy will end up making everyone poorer and American global standing lesser, as in the long term it will guarantee a separate technological civilization existing and building in and around China. So, given how undesirable your hegemony is, maybe that's overall a good thing and I should shill for export controls. Maybe this mad bet on the AGI race will work and I'm wrong, though.

The traitor, the treasonous little worm

This made me smile. Very "nationalize SpaceX" energy. You do realize that your Hail Mary attempt at preserving hegemony largely depends on him? For some reason, Loyal Americans run their hardware companies into the ground. I do think he believes that this game will continue for decades, and China is not going anywhere, it's not going to critically fall behind, and so he wants to keep a piece of that market for the US. And that can be done.

China is already exerting the maximum amount of demand and political pressure it can to try and compete on chips. The internal market demand is irrelevant. The government will guarantee every chip is sold and prop up all the companies making them. Whether or not AI labs can use NVDIA hardware has zero actual influence on the development of their ecosystem. Hardware "lock-in" on these labs is an entirely made up concept.

The internal market demand is irrelevant. The government will guarantee every chip is sold

Asinine. As it's said, "there is nothing to be learned in matters of faith". If anything, this describes Intel. No, market demand is not irrelevant, PRC corporations actually have incentives beyond 5-year plans, largely because they have slim margins. Americans really have worked themselves up into a frenzy with this doctrine that everything in China is massively subsidized and so can be unprofitable forever. It's not about subsidies, they're just more productive than you and have a more ruthless market, to the extent that the state is trying – and failing! – to arrest "involution".

Just because you hate the CCP really, really hard does not give you the license to spew bullshit. Being very confident doesn't help. It is not, in fact, possible to create a competitive ecosystem by decree, even if it's super-duper maximum pressure. This just takes too many people. I know DeepSeek has been asked to and declined to do serious training runs on Huawei due to immaturity of CANN stack. They have this choice, for a little longer. They're typical. There are maybe 2 Chinese companies doing large-scale training on Ascends, and one is iFlyTek, which has been on entity list since forever and has no choice; they haven't achieved much. Even Huawei themselves are yet to release a single compelling model, they literally can't keep top-tier people interested as they leave to companies like DeepSeek. Huawei has 200K employees, for reference.

On a smaller scale, we've seen this when Microsoft attempted to make Windows Phone a thing. Tremendous effort went into it, a formidable corporation was banging against the wall for years, subsidizing the app marketplace, and it all fizzled out. No developers, no users, no network effects, no future.

We know what PAX Americana looks like and it looks pretty good actually. Billions rising up out of poverty

One of those "billions" is in China, can you really take credit for it? I call bullshit, mostly it's just post-WWII economic growth the nexus of which was the US for reasons of not being bombed out, not some profoundly benign and productive doctrine or culture or people. India is illustrative: they wanted to latch onto Pax Americana and get something out of it; what have they got so far for India proper? I am in your "sphere of influence", so to speak, and it really doesn't look like you're spreading prosperity around. In fact it looks like you have nothing to spread, you don't invest, your own riches are a speculative bubble and you mainly "supply demand". You're demolishing your nuclear infrastructure, you don't build anything except datacenters, certainly you can't boast of turning Pakistan into a solar-powered economy or something. Outside a few premium items like these very GPUs, your wares are non-competitive trash that people abroad have to be compelled to buy, you're even pathetically forcing third parties to share your tariff regime to cling to some markets (very funny in this context of "market share is useless"). Yes, in theory you could cheat with AGI, but ask yourself, if a cheat on the scale of AGI is needed to redeem your claim to hegemony, what do you, as a people, stand to contribute? Having created the solutions where you've got AGI earlier than others?

But CCP dominance hasn't even been particularly good for them. China is host to the poorest and least prosperous Chinese people in the world.

This is a very tiresome talking point. They didn't have the benefit of a sane administration until 1978, after which they've consistently had the highest growth rate of all major economies. In any meaningful sense, including consumption spending, general QoL. GDP per capita comparisons are misleading. I've been reading on Taiwan recently and it seems that they're straight up having poorer lives than coastal Mainland Chinese in comparable population centers; like, they have higher costs of living and don't have meaningfully higher salaries. This, too, is Pax Americana; not even the smallest and most important clients can be sure to prosper. What else do we compare to? Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong? Please.
Now, history doesn't start in 1978. But nations change, even under the same regime and slogans. The US of today is not the US of 1960s either.

surely you understand the "equals across the sea" isn't an option on the table. That isn't what is in store if we give up all our advantages in this sector.

No. I don't understand. Why? What happens to the US that did not "win"? Unlike the USSR, China doesn't even have a messianic revolutionary project.

I think this is just wounded ego. You're used to hegemony, it's part of your personal identity, and it slipping away, likely forever, is perceived as existential horror, with appropriate rationalizations. This sounds about as compelling as Russian noises about NATO threat and absolute rationality of going all in to "denazify" Ukraine. In reality Russia could well survive Ukrainian integration with the West, it was merely humiliating (and deserved, certainly so after 2014 when we've demonstrated our mettle in managing "people's republics") but not affecting the survivability of the Russian state, and the costs of war have already far exceeded any sane estimate for costs of doing nothing.

China will take the chips, use them to accelerate their position, including in advancing their own semiconductor industry

Like what, using AI to design floor maps? They're doing it already, it doesn't take a lot of compute. A rather contrived concern.

As soon as China has even slightly competitive chips they will crumple up NVDIA and toss it out like so much garbage.

The thing is, chips are very, very hard and ensuring the supply chain is all outside China has been one of the few truly great American political successes (not that it was hard, this chain was mostly complete when China was around $2000 GDP per capita) . The trifecta of ASML-TSMC-NVDIA (nevermind their multiple one-of-a-kind suppliers like ZEISS, and EDA software) will genuinely take China a decade or more to even approach. They will not have competitive chips. They will have (already have announced for Q1 2026) competitive systems, but those only exist because NVDIA is prevented from exporting the good stuff.

Again, I don't know what I should "rationally" shill for here. And anyway this might be too late. The US has clearly stated its hostility, burned the bridges, and will have to "lose", in a war of its own creation.

but to do so below market rate?

This is pretty asinine. You're defending export controls with the claim that their absence would… distort markets? Do you think that's what Nvidia is trying to do, sell GPUs below market rate, despite having an unsaturated domestic market that would generate higher margins? Why do you imagine they would hurt themselves like that? Might it be time to install some loyal apparatchiks on board, or do a little witch hunt for Communist agents?

China is not going to forego building their own echo-system and hasn't for any other sector they've found strategically important.

As I've said before, "China" is not omnipotent and cannot create an ecosystem solely through political will and subsidies, they've been trying for decades and it hasn't been working so long as Nvidia was the obvious superior choice. Even now, nobody wants to use CANN if afforded the chance. I think this is how Jensen views this: he's straightforwardly fighting as the CEO of American company Nvidia, not just for line going up in quarterly reports but for enduring global dominance of his stack.

It's banking on the certainty that surrendering our major advantage in the AI race to china for no reason or gain will turn out badly for us, obviously. I can't even fathom how a thinking person could convince themselves otherwise. You've already highlighted their advantages, is your position that the race is already over despite us currently being ahead?

Are you avoiding the question, or does it not parse for you?

I think that to discuss whether "the race" is over, it's important to establish whether a race is happening and what it is that you are racing towards. The US is ahead in AI. Again, without American chips, China will be developing AI slower for the next few years. Is that a "race"? What happens when you reach the finish line? Don't huff and puff, say concretely. Do you build an AGI superweapon that disables their nukes with nanobots? Or what? What's the end goal, in the face of which every thinking person would deem hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of profits a mere short-sighted distraction? Can you spell it out?

Our one chance at dominance in this sector is remaining ahead in AI and reaping compound interest on that lead whether it's AGI or simply accelerated AI and chip development. If it's not enough

Not enough for what? Like, what's the theory of victory here? Repeating the Great Divergence, now with automation, relatively growing so quickly that China is forever left in the dust? Lights-out factories spawning across the US, producing ungodly goods optimized by AGI, incomprehensibly advanced weapons systems, Pax Americana becoming permanent?

How likely do you think that is? And what happens if this doesn't work out?

I think the answers are basically "yes/likely/better not to think of this", and personally, I believe this is all deluded and very much in the spirit of last days of Nazi Germany. Both sides will have adequate AI to increase productivity, both will have "AGI" at around the same time, you're not going to have some dramatic inflection point, you will not leave them in the dust as a military or economic power, you'll just slow down global economic growth somewhat, and in the long run end up poorer and have a smaller slice of the global market. That's all.

We benefited our rival for... What? A few quarters of sales for a couple of firms?

Do you realize that the entire windfall from Trump's tariff nonsense would be an order of magnitude less than those quarters, even as it destroys similar value (hundreds of billions)?

It seems Americans aren't happy with this whole concept of trade anymore. If they buy foreign stuff, that's bad because they're losing dollars, gotta reindustrialize and implement tariffs. If they're selling stuff to foreigners who aren't completely inept and subjugated, that's also bad, because then those foreigners may develop and get richer, and for an American, the world is zero-sum, so the only Deals Americans are now willing to make are that which make the other party poorer, like the humiliation rituals you subject "NATO allies" to. Trump's rhetoric around coercing South Koreans and others to "invest" (he apparently understands FDI in very childish terms, "they give us moneys because they're our bitches") completes the picture.

Yes, I admit this makes me even more sympathetic to China.

5G/6G is not very relevant to this issue, but they have extremely advanced datacenter network architecture and their new systems are based on it. This will allow them to cope with lower performance of individual chips.

If China has the ability to leapfrog Nvidia and other western AI tech, they're gonna do it irregardless of any sanctions on chips

This is not true. People act like "China" is a perfectly coordinated single entity, a game of Factorio Xi plays, but it's still a country with different economic actors. If Huawei can't sell their crap because everyone in China who is actually good at AI uses CUDA and Nvidia hardware (like, again, DeepSeek), Huawei will not improve as rapidly. Subsidies in isolation cannot replace organic ecosystem support, they just prolong the agony, and at the current level not even China can subsidize the development of the entire supply chain, it's to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

What is the end goal here? Or any goal?

OK, you're slowing them down alright. They will not have as capable models, as quickly or cheaply, in the next 4-6 years. Then what? Is this just banking on an AGI superweapon to make economic dimension irrelevant, or on the windfall from economic growth this is supposed to beget? Huawei is superior in networking equipment, China has an overabundance of energy and skilled labor, if they scale up production of even past-generation compute chips (and mainly HBM), they will have a fully adequate and incompatible domestic ecosystem and Nvidia and others will never reenter their market, and American slice of it will be that much smaller.

I think everyone here recognizes that the George Floyd sanctification was extraordinarily pathetic and even humiliating for the US. It will be very hard to beat, frankly impossible in this case, not least because Kirk was a normal and respected person (no matter how little worth I personally see to his political work) and Floyd was scum of the society. But this is not a good reason to try.

I do think I am far smarter than you, to the extent that you are incapable of modeling my thoughts.

What? How is that a "vs"? That was a national manhunt, the EU Parliament almost had a minute of silence for said father of 2. If the killer can be traced to 4chan, and with OwO shit he almost certainly will be, the blood in the visceral video is also on their hands. I am not proposing some far-fetched guilt by association here, this is imageboard slang, and people were getting ready to obliterate trans rights when it was suggested that casings have some "trans" stuff, why do you think another guilty group would suffer less ire?

A market where the stronger party selects whom it gets to compete with is not a very good market for evolving ideas. I am a snob but I'm a snob from 2ch, a cognitive elitist, opposed to self-appointed aristocracy. Compete on an open field with whoever is strong and willing to fight, live by the dunk, die by the dunk (which is why it's inappropriate that he literally died by a bullet from a hidden assassin, a total violation of the spirit). I like Fuentes more because he and his groypers invaded his debates and disrupted Kirk's silly scheme with even more insidious gotchas, and made deserved gains on it.

will be very unfortunate for Fuentes if it was one of his more mentally ill followers.

I admit I expected to get modded on moderately unfair grounds when I scrolled to this username, a nice surprise

Until very recently, top of the line iPhones were totally getting more expensive. And iPhone is not the luxury phone any more, that's more like some overengineered thi-fold Huawei (to be matched by a folding iPhone when it comes out). But fair, iPhone index is worse than Big Mac index and if we want to study premium consumption, we need something else.

"OwO notices bulge what's this" is a gay 4chan joke, nothing to do with trans, it's more femboy-coded if anything but first of all anonymous imageboard coded. I'll spare the inane details because the truly funny thing here is that 4chan "investigation" pinning this on some random weird transgender went viral, and that was fueled in large part by initial reports of "trans" messages on casings. This can be spun into "radical far right killer 4chan tried to pin the blame on trans", and to an extent it will be. This is such a disaster.

It's not an illusion due to the stock bubble, Europeans are poorer and only now starting to dimly appreciate how much poorer. But Conrad Bastable had a good blog post on this back in 2020. Unequal Growth: The Zero-Sum Games You Don’t See. Since then, everything became even more grotesque. I strongly recommend reading.

This essay began with one observation: In the first decade of the 2000s, the top 2 nations generated 31% of all the Economic Growth. In the next decade, their share double to 60% of Global Economic Growth. Growth is now a 2-player game.

……… The only escape is to grow faster than the median. Salary, investments, wages, bonuses, stock options, etc. etc. Whatever it takes. If you can grow faster than the average person, you’ll grow your personal Wealth quicker than the costs of these mandatory purchases are being raised.

That’s the only path to individual Wealth.

But the lesson applies at the national level too. Grow faster than the median or cost disease will eat your Wealth.

The first iPhone launched in mid-2007. You think Apple is going to lower prices in foreign markets just because those markets aren’t growing?

Don’t be silly. This chart applies all through your economy, for consumer and industrial goods alike.

Sure, there’s a bottom-tier product that exists to capture the revenue potential of whoever exists at the bottom of the market. But the top-tier product, the new technology, the new release, will continue to be priced under the assumption that those who purchase it are growing.

“Just economize, silly, nobody needs the newest iPhone” — yeah, I agree, I’m still using my 2016 model #pleb. But there’s a huge middle class in Japan and Europe that expects to have a certain purchasing power. A certain economic relevance. They’ve had it for 60+ years in most cases.

One imagines that feeling it slip away is a painful experience.

………

Conclusion

If United States GDP shrinks by $264B, while German GDP shrinks by $332B, as happened in 2009, both nations are hurting.

And Germany clearly hurts more — $68B more on an absolute basis, and by a greater percentage of its 2008 GDP. That difference widens the gap between the two nations.

But if the United States GDP grows by $2.5 Trillion while German GDP grows by $0.5 Trillion, as happened from 2016-2018, the gap between the productive capacity of the two nations widens by ~$2 Trillion.

Relative to the United States, Germany perhaps performed better in 2009 than 2016-2018.

Rationalists will be quick to point out that this is an unreasonable lens, as rational human actors should rather increase their personal income by $[X] even if their neighbour’s income increases by $[2X], than see their own income decrease by $[Y]. Assuming prices are static, I agree wholeheartedly.

But the lesson of Considerations on Cost Disease, The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth, and The Uncharity of College is that prices for the most important purchases will rise to consume most of the increased Wealth a society generates.

Globalization means the societal reference frame for many prices now becomes [the Most Productive society on Earth].

US GDP growth isn’t going to skyrocket your local rents in Germany (although Chinese GDP growth does appear to impact rents in Vancouver), but some of your favourite consumer goods will be priced according to US growth expectations.

You can grow or not grow, but that new iPhone will cost more regardless.

But "the morality of a child" is, I think, putting it too kindly. Kirk was not a child, he was a cynical propagandist in the job of training unprincipled partisans, ever changing his tune precisely in alignment with the party line and President's whimsy (see the pivot on H1Bs). I admit I despised him and his little, annoying gotcha act of "debating" infantile leftists, milking them for dunk opportunities. They deserved the humiliation, but the pretense of "promoting dialogue" was completely hollow, and the massive number of shallow, cow-like people in the US for whom it is convincing depresses me. I find his more resolute enemies still significantly more repulsive, and more so now that they're libeling him with absurd exaggerations of his less liberal views and gloating about a callous murder (of a man who was quite aware that political violence is a risk in his line of work, yet did public appearances; so at least in bravery quite deserving). But it is what it is. It's the morality of a soldier. You want to be a soldier in a culture war, because it's easier this way. Soldiers are obligated to suspend most of their moral judgement that is not directly instrumental to following orders, and this makes things so much easier.

Kirk was recruiting soldiers. He didn't care about Israeli victims of Oct 7, he cared that Israel is Our Greatest Ally (according to the President and GOP consensus; he started calibrating this message to go with the times recently). Kirk certainly didn't care about civilians in Gaza and anywhere else. He wasn't very sharp, but I think he understood well that a war with a just cause is not necessarily a just war, that even a just war can be fought by unjust people and with unjust methods. That it is possible for "good guys" to turn into "bad guys" depending on how they act in pursuit of their alleged goodness, and that remaining marginally better guys on the balance of evidence can still be not good enough to justify participating in a race to the bottom.

I much prefer the types of Fuentes or, better yet, Sam "Hitler's Top Guy" Hyde to those disingenuous establishment figures who pollute the commons with fake debate, fake intellectual engagement, fake morality. Kirk, PragerU, Bari Weiss stuff, it's all such fraud. Better yet have some beliefs and openly say what you mean. Even if you don't seek debate, it at least becomes possible in theory.

P.S. mild suspicion of Hlynka resurgence