Gwern on creating your own AI race and China's Fast Follower strategy.

Strong upvote. I feel like the China-US AI race debate is laden with ideology and confused lack of specificity. It is like how "capitalism" is used. People throw the term around and it can mean hundred different things. Every mention of China in relation to AI should be specific. Are we talking about AI-enabled cyberattacks against civilian infrastructure in the West? Are we talking about some weird pathway where they will create a communist super-bot that will both rule China and the rest of the world? Are we talking about only the GDP impact? Or how increased GDP will allow them to build a larger military? Or some subset of these multitude of ways in which "China winning on AI" is important?

Currently, without the lack of specificity I feel that the China AI debate is less about any specific threat and more about creating some appealing, overly simplified narrative that can lubricate the bureaucratic machine, get buy-in from a range of private sector stakeholders and fabricate some sense of urgency for people to push through various agendas. My fear is that this sounds eerily similar to "threat of the communists" during the Cold war which can be argued led to the disastrous outcome of thousands of nuclear warheads still being pointed at some of the most dense clusters of civilians around the world.

I have read far from everything about AI, so if someone has pointers to material on why China as a one-word concept is useful to point to I would be grateful. I see this issue has been raised many times on the Forum and have not read everything but decided to comment any way as I think signal boosting here is important, especially as the China one-worder is being quite casually thrown around by people with lots of influence.

I think that Gwern is acting as somewhat lossy reflection of what Hsu actually said. (https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/letter-from-shanghai-reflections-on-china-in-2024-73/transcript):
 

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

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

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

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

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

But I think quiet confidence and a sense of inevitability in that sector, but across all sectors here.