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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   34949 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Honestly this feels like a cope to me. There obviously was a breakthrough in LLMs in the West: politically, economically, technologically, culturally. It wasn't born in China, but they obviously have a significant part to play downstream of their undeniable talent pool.

What are you talking about? Have you stopped reading my post there?

It's hard to say Deepseek would have accomplished these things without drafting on OpenAI's introduction of LLMs to the world,

Here's what I think about this. The Chinese are not uncreative. It's worse: they're cowardly, conservative, and avoid doing exploratory shit that seems high-risk, and they buy into your theory of their own inferiority, and steelman it as “good at execution”. As Wenfeng says:

Another reason that domestic large models have rarely dabbled in innovation at the architectural level before is that few people have dared to go against the stereotype that America is better at the technological innovation from 0 to 1, while China is better at the application innovation from 1 to 10. Not to mention that this kind of behavior is very unprofitable -- the usual thinking is that, naturally, in a few months, someone would have made the next generation of models, and then Chinese companies can just follow the leader, and do a good job of application. Innovating the model structure means that there is no path to follow, and there are a lot of failures to go through, which is costly in terms of time and money.

There will be more and more hardcore innovation in the future. It may not be yet easily understood now, because the whole society still needs to be educated by the facts. After this society lets the hardcore innovators make a name for themselves, the groupthink will change. All we still need are some facts and a process.

You are watching these facts come in.

I repeat, I've been a believer in this theory of “fundamental Western progress, incremental Eastern refinement”. Eight years into Transformer era (Ashish Vaswani et al., 2017), I start to doubt it. Whites are just people who are sexually attractive, relatively trustworthy, and provide linear labor to verbal-tilted Brahmins who max corporate KPIs leveraging even more verbal-tilted Ashkenazim like Altman who are good at raising capital.

That's about it at this point.

The most credible, big-brained, innovation-heavy alternative to Transformer was Mamba (Tri Dao, Albert Gu). It also didn't go far. I've read perhaps hundreds of Western papers of purportedly brilliant innovations, they're narcissistic shit that doesn't scale. Sepp Hochreiter is peddling his xLSTM that has no utility, Schmidhuber is making some boastful noises as usual, Sutskever and Karmack are supposedly doing… something. Mistral is dead in the water…

I am not saying this out of racism. I am reporting on what I see happening. All historical inventions and discoveries of note? Yes, those were White work. But time is accelerating. Maxwell's equations seem not far from "muh gunpowder" of the Middle Kingdom now, to my eyes. Do something new, folks. You're losing face.

On the other hand we know OpenAI did not need Deepseek.

Sure, OpenAI needed another company. OpenAI built its legend on scaling up a Google paper. By your own standards, it's not creative brilliance. It's the sort of talent you condescendingly concede Chinese people have.

I start to doubt it. Whites are just people who are sexually attractive, relatively trustworthy, and provide linear labor to verbal-tilted Brahmins who max corporate KPIs leveraging even more verbal-tilted Ashkenazim like Altman who are good at raising capital.

That's about it at this point.

Again, it seems very doubtful to me that these groups have significantly different distributions of sexual attractiveness, trustworthiness, labor value, verbal, IQ, but they are all the same when it comes to affinity for breakthrough innovation. People think differently...

I actually agree with Wefang's summary you posted, but Wefang is implying basically stereotype threat: that the Chinese don't innovate from 0 to 1 because there's a stereotype that job belongs to the West. Ok, so we are in the familiar HBD-denial territory by using Stereotype Threat to explain a very long-standing disparity in behavior: the Chinese don't innovate from 0 to 1 because there's a stereotype that they don't do that. I think you're leaning into that as well.

I don't think architectural innovations, even very clever ones the Chinese come up with, are the "0 to 1" that was already accomplished by OpenAI and the West. And as my last post said, that is not just or even mostly about the papers, it's about the technological, political, economic, geopolitical influence- they got the ball rolling on those fronts. I don't doubt the ability of the Chinese to perhaps even outcompete the West on going from 1 to 10 for the reasons you said, but 0 to 1 was already done by the West and this pattern is consistent with that stereotype which HBD stans claim is derived from differences in cognitive profile.

I am not saying this out of racism. I am reporting on what I see happening. All historical inventions and discoveries of note? Yes, those were White work. But time is accelerating. Maxwell's equations seem not far from "muh gunpowder" of the Middle Kingdom now, to my eyes. Do something new, folks. You're losing face.

Sure, maybe we'll be proven wrong! But it hasn't happened yet, LLMs are following the "West does 0 to 1, then West competes with China on 1 to 10" pattern that follows the basic stereotype.

Wefang is implying basically stereotype threat: that the Chinese don't innovate from 0 to 1 because there's a stereotype that job belongs to the West

Wenfeng.

No, it's not a stereotype threat argument, it's an argument about perceived opportunity cost of exploration vs exploitation which is miscalibrated in the age of large domestic revenue generators. He's not arguing they should be like Whites. He's arguing they can now afford to do what Whites do compulsively, if you will.

Your condescension and willful misinterpretation will be your undoing in this dialogue and outside it.

I look down on WEIRDs for one more reason. You are ultimately tool-like, your mentality is that of servitors and cowering peasants. Your "internal dignity" is inextricably bound to collective judgement, you feel the need to justify your value to some imagined audience, to some Baron, some market or some Moral Community. You are ashamed of brute, terminal-value ethnocentrism the sort of which Judaism preaches, so you need to cling to those spiritualist copes wrapped in HBD lingo. "H-here's why we are Good, why we still deserve a place under the sun, sire!" This exposes you to obvious predation and mockery by High-Skill Immigrants like Count.

On the object level: yes, probably on average the Chinese are indeed less "creative" even with optimal incentives, and this has obvious implications at the tails. (though if we think OpenAI is an impressive example of bold creativity, what about NVidia? What did Jensen "merely improve"? As a CEO, he's roughly in the same league as Altman and Musk, I think). The question – raised by R1 there – is, how many more True Breakthrough innovators do we even need before innovation begins to accrete on itself without human supervision? Maybe just a handful. Again, there's been virtually no fundamental progress in AI since 2017, and we're all doing just fine. It may be that architecturally V3 is more sophisticated and innovative than the modern OpenAI stack. Imagine that. After all, Western geniuses are afraid to show their work these days.

Incidentally, I myself have submitted several minor ideas to DeepSeek; maybe they found use for those, maybe not, but I'll find use for the result of their labor and not cope that they needed my input.

It may be that the mode of production implied by the stage of our technological development makes your race, with all its creative perks and industrial drawbacks, less economically useful than it used to be. This only means you need to move that much faster to find reasons to protect your interests unconditionally, before everyone turns equally economically useless.

On the object level: yes, probably on average the Chinese are indeed less "creative" even with optimal incentives, and this has obvious implications at the tails

Started arguing, seemingly about Chinese HBD, leaned into some tangential points at best, non-sequiturs at worst, gave some half-baked takes about why white people suck, then unceremoniously conceded the argument. Scratching my temple wondering what was your game here
My guess is you had something pent up that might have been interesting had it been properly developed and formatted as a top level post

Incidentally, I myself have submitted several minor ideas to DeepSeek; maybe they found use for those

DeepSeek results copped from the White Man, confirmed.

Seriously though, my only point was that I don't think the HBD perspective is surprised that the Chinese are doing well competing on the development of LLMs, after that technological race was kicked off by the West. No more, no less. And I think a lot of your criticisms of Western AGI establishment are cogent. I don't think race is a deprecated question, it may even become more important on the eve of AGI.

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