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What does this actually mean? And what is your evidence for this? Have you spent time among Chinese researchers in China? Have you spent time in China? Not saying I don't believe you, just curious what you're basing your opinion on (hoping it's not just papers and Chinese social media).
This actually means, for example, that a strong paper from a Western lab will be about one big idea, big leap or cross-domain generalization of an analytical method, like applying some physical concept. Eg nonequilibrium thermodynamics to image generation. Or consider dropout (Hinton, Sutskever):
I can scarcely remember such a Chinese paper, although to be honest a vast majority of these big Western ideas turn out to be duds. A strong Chinese ML paper is usually just a competent mathematical paper.
Whereas a typical Chinese paper will have stuff like
And then 10 more tricks by shorter-range combinatorial noticing of redundancies, similarities, affinities. It doesn't look like much, but three papers later you see a qualitative, lifelike evolution of the whole stack, and you notice this research program is moving very quickly. They do likewise in large hardware projects.
I have Chinese friends. I have read a lot of papers and repositories and watched as research programs developed, yes, sorry to bash your hopes. I have played their games, consumed their media, used their technology, acquainted myself with their tradition a little. I have considered the work of the allegedly greatest Chinese mathematician, Terence Tao, and his style of work. And there is the oft-repeated thesis that Asians tend towards holistic rather than analytical thinking which is exactly about the bias in exploration style I'm talking about.
I am interested in whether you find this an impoverished or wrong perspective.
I don't know enough about AI to say anything about the current state of things. But I have spent the last ~20 years hearing ridiculous takes about how China is an unstoppable juggernaut that is just so much more efficient and growing so much faster than the West, with a growing middle class! and a cashless society! and giant dragon drone formations! and cyberpunk LED skyscraper forests! and, and...! They must be doing something right! Look how much more advanced they are! They're going to eat our lunch!
All of that just flies in the face of my actual experience over there (in one of the richest cities no less). Everything was Potemkin, everything was corrupt and chabuduo, everyone lied to your face with a smile, the gaslighting was off the charts. Buses broke down, parts of my quite expensive apartment fell off, litter and human feces were everywhere, and eating at an unknown restaurant was truly a gamble, especially when the weather was warm. Business dealings were (are -- my team in Japan is currently half Chinese!) a game of brazeness and information warfare where you try to hide your true intentions for as long as possible and, when you are caught, you just shamelessly tell outrageous bold faced lies ("I never promised that." "But I literally have your promise here in writing." "Well, I never promised that.") And somehow despite this incredible culture of shoddiness and aggressive deception there were plenty of Americans taking Chinese news outlets' and and China boosters' reports of the incoming Chinese Century at face value with zero skepticism.
Of course, there were also the "China is collapsing!!1" set. I had slightly more respect for some of them. Their predictions were equally dumb, but at least a few of them seemed dimly aware of the very deep rot. Although, the majority were of course mere chauvinists, racists, or grifters.
Both the optimists and the doomers' predictions were based on little to no verifiable evidence, especially since most people had never been to China or spoken to non-Westernized Chinese, much less read a Chinese newspaper in Chinese (an important distinction!). I'm surprised you're not more skeptical -- isn't the Western reporting on "Russian intentions" and "the Russian mind" just completely laughable to you? And Russian society and culture that (AFAICT -- low confidence) are considerably more accessible to the average Westerner.
To return to the main topic, because of the above, I simply don't trust any alleged incredible scientific miracles coming out of China. I think that if they were truly crushing America in AI, they would be hiding that fact (能而示之不能，用而示之不用 / 謀密則無敗). When the Deepseek news came out about it costing 95% less to train, my bullshit detectors went off. Who could verify their actual costs? Oh, only other Chinese people. Hmm, okay.
I have no ability to judge whether this is true, so feel free to Euler me if you like. But if Chinese research is so superior, why aren't Western AI companies falling over themselves to attract Chinese AI researchers? I know we all spend too much time online, but many Western countries are still much nicer places to live than all but the absolute richest areas of China (source: Chinese friends living in China, Chinese friends who permanently emigrated to America, and having lived in a rich area of China myself).
I'll stop my rant here, and also offer some preemptive defenses. First, I'm no Anthropic/OpenAI fanboy. I think it's probably a good thing if they fear Chinese competition since I'd bet they're slow rolling progress to maximize profit. Second, I'm not a European/white chauvinist. The Chinese people I've known were mostly quite intelligent, some even brilliant. But as I said before in the post you linked, Chinese mind games and information warfare are simply on a different level than that of the more candid and credulous Westerner (note that I do not say "honest" or "virtuous").
tl;dr Chinese are intelligent and have a rich and deep culture, but they are next-level deceivers and should be treated as such until proven otherwise
When have you last been there and in what city? This was like watching Serpentza's sneering at Unitree robots back to back with Unitree's own demos and Western experiments using these bots.
I simply call bullshit on it as of 2025 for any 1st tier city. My friends also travel there and work there, as do they travel to and live and work in the US. They report that straight from the gate in JFK, US cities look dilapidated, indeed littered with human feces (which I am inclined to trust due to your massive, easily observable and constantly lamented feral homeless underclass) and of course regular litter, squalid, there is a clear difference in the condition of infrastructure and the apparent level of human capital. I can compare innumerable street walk videos between China and the US, and I see that you guys don't have an edge. I do not believe it's just cherrypicking, the scale of evidence is too massive. Do you not notice it?
And I have noticed that Americans can simply lie about the most basic things to malign the competition, brazenly so, clearly fabricating «personal evidence» or cleverly stiching together pieces of data across decades, and with increasingly desperate racist undertones. Now that your elected leadership looks Middle Eastern in attitude, full of chutzpah, and is unapologetically gaslighting the entire world with its «critical trade theory», I assume that the rot goes from top to bottom and you people cannot be taken at your world any more than the Chinese or Russians or Indians can be (accidentally, your Elite Human Capital Indians, at Stanford, steal Chinese research and rebrand as their own). Regardless, @aqouta's recent trip and comments paint a picture not very matching yours.
They are not currently crushing the US in AI, those are my observations. They don't believe they are, and «they» is an inherently sloppy framing, there are individual companies with vastly less capital than US ones, competing among themselves.
This is supremely pathetic and undermines your entire rant, exposing you as an incurious buffoon. You are wrong, we can estimate the costs simply from token*activated params. The only way they could have cheated would be to use many more tokens but procuring a lot more quality data than the reported 15T, a modal figure for both Western and Eastern competitors on the open source frontier, from Alibaba to Google to Meta, would in itself be a major pain. So the costs are in that ballpark, indeed the utilization of reported hardware (2048 H800s) turns out to even be on the low side. This is the consensus of every technical person in the field no matter the race or side of the Pacific.
They've opensourced most of their infra stack on top of the model itself, to advance the community and further dispel these doubts. DeepSeek's RL pipeline is currently obsolete with many verifiable experiments showing that it's been still full of slack, as we'd expect from a small team rapidly doing good-enough job.
The real issue is that the US companies have been maintaining the impression that their production costs and overall R&D are so high that it justifies tens or hundreds of billions in funding. When R1 forced their hand, they started talking how it's actually "on trend" and their own models don't cost that much more, or if they are, it's because they're so far ahead that they finished training like a year ago, with less mature algorithms! Or, in any case, that they don't have to optimize, because ain't nobody got time for that!
But sarcasm aside it's very probable that Google is currently above this training efficiency, plus they have more and better hardware.
Meta, meanwhile, is behind. They were behind when V3 came out, they panicked and tried to catch up, they remained behind. Do you understand that people can actually see what you guys are doing? Like, look at configs, benchmark it? Meta's Llama 4, which Zuck was touting as a bid for the frontier, is architecturally 1 generation behind V3, and they deployed a version optimized for human preference on LMArena to game the metrics, which turned into insane embarrassment when people found out how much worse the general-purpose model performs in real use, to the point that people are now leaving Meta and specifying they had nothing to do with the project (rumors of what happened are Soviet tier). You're Potemkining hard too, with your trillion-dollar juggernauts employing tens of thousands of (ostensibly) the world's best and brightest.
This is unverified but rings true to me.
Grok 3, Sonnet 3.7 also have failed to convincingly surpass DeepSeek, for all the boasts about massive GPU numbers. It's not that the US is bad at AI, but your corporate culture, in this domain at least, seems to be.
How much harder do you want them to do it? 38% of your top quintile AI researchers came straight from China in 2022. I think around 50% are ethnically Chinese by this point, there are entire teams where speaking Mandarin is mandatory.
Between 2019 and 2022, «Leading countries where top-tier AI researchers (top 20%) work» went from 11% China to 28%; «Leading countries where the most elite AI researchers work (top 2%)» went from ≈0% China to 12%; and «Leading countries of origin of the most elite AI researchers» went from 10% China (behind India's 12%) to 26%. Tsinghua went from #9 to #3 in institutions, now only behind Stanford and Google (MIT, right behind Tsinghua, is heavily Chinese). Extrapolate if you will. I think they'll crack #2 or #1 in 2026. Things change very fast, not linearly, it's not so much «China is gradually getting better» as installed capacity coming online.
It's just becoming harder to recruit. The brain drain is slowing in proportional terms, even if it holds steady in absolute numbers due to ballooning number of graduates: the wealth gap is not so acute now considering costs of living, coastal China is becoming a nicer place to live in, and for top talent, more intellectually stimulating as there's plenty of similarly educated people to work with. The turn to racist chimping and kanging both by the plebeians since COVID and by this specific administration is very unnerving and potentially existentially threatening to your companies. Google's DeepMind VP of research left for ByteDance this February, and by now his team in ByteDance is flexing a model that is similar but improves on DeepSeek's R1 paradigm (BD was getting there but he probably accelerated them). This kind of stuff has happened before.
Sure, the West is more comfortable, even poor-ish places can be paradaisical. But you're not going to move to Montenegro if you have the ambition to do great things. You'll be choosing between Shenzhen and San-Francisco. Where do you gather there's more human feces to step into?
There is something to credulousness, as I've consistently been saying Hajnalis are too trusting and innocently childlike. But your nation is not a Hajnali nation, and your people are increasingly draught horses in its organization rather than thought leaders. You're like the kids in King's story of how he first learned dread:
I think Americans might well compete with North Koreans, Israelis and Arabs in the degree of being brainwashed about their national and racial superiority (a much easier task when you are a real superpower, to be fair), to the point I am now inclined to dismiss your first hand accounts as fanciful interpretations of reality if not outright hallucinations. Your national business model has become chutzpah and gaslighting, culminating in Miran's attempt to sell the national debt as «global public goods». You don't have a leg to stand on when accusing China of fraud. Sorry, that era is over, I'll go back to reading papers.
I'm not sure if my travels could cut cleanly in one way or the other on this honestly. If someone's vision of China is of cities openly falling apart then that's at least definitely not true of Shanghai or Nanjing. It may have been due to the older, mostly to my experience solved, problem of smog but I do remember the buildings browning more than I've noticed in American big cities. I certainly didn't stay long enough or speak enough of the language to get a sense of any kind of society wide duplicity. My wife reported that obeying traffic rules had improved since her last visit and you did still see pretty frequent incidents of scooters riding on the walking area. I was in the familial ingroup for most of the people I spoke to, someone living and breathing the culture would have a better idea.
I'll recount the story of a friend of the guy I met in Osaka who is hopefully getting out of Chinese prison soon, call him Andrew. I do trust this Osaka friend but am less sure how much I trust Andrew. Supposedly Andrew moved to Beijing on a business visa partnered with some local to start an American BBQ business that took off pretty well, growing to a couple locations. Fast forward to covid and Andrew needed to go home for some reason, can't remember if it was family or Chinese policy. When he returns he finds that his previous partner has opened a competing chain and claims that Andrew lied on his original work visa, landing him in Chinese prison while the previous partner took possession of all of his restaurant assets. This is of course an anecdote and perhaps a dubious one, Osaka friend vouches that Andrew isn't the type to falsify business documents but you have no reason to believe that and I give it maybe a 20% chance he's at fault. My wife found it plausible if that means anything. I like almost all the Chinese people I met, but I don't think I'd want to try and live in China full time.
I've noticed a trend of our Russian posters being very obsessed with framing American views on geopolitics in a racial angle. I haven't seen a single American call Russians orcs but seen many Russians accusing Americans of thinking in those terms. If Americans have a racial view of Chinese people it's as nerdy math kids, hardly the kind of people you'd be prejudiced against when it comes to ML research. Among the researchers I've known there has definitely been some sneering at the research paper output of the mainland, Wife and Mother in law both say that in the past it was a problem where China produced a lot of not very good papers but supposedly this has gotten better. Americans certainly have some neurosis around race but not in the way you should be merging it with American Exceptionalism to form American Racial Exceptionalism. Much ink has been spilt on how Americans deal with being a very multi-racial society and how that experiment is going. American's views on China has much more to do with their communist government than with their racial character.
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