China would prefer USA to have less data centers as well. This could help them get and edgeon AI where they are currently like 10 months behind the USA. Dont get me wrong. I don’t want a data center in my backyard. But USA needs better infrastructure planning like china and not leave it up to billionaire, their companies and their short sighted quarterly reports.
A constriction on GPUs is literally the best thing to ever happen to Chinese ML dev.
It made them thrifty, it made them focus, it forced them to go open weights, it made them build proper ASICs, research new techniques, pay engineers to implement them, and now their models are supremely efficient, dirt cheap, running Nvidia free on Huawei NPUs, and close to better tools than the US models.
Meanwhile, US models are all (except maybe Google) enshittifying and getting benchmaxxed. Engineers are wasting man hours hopelessly trying to scale training, which does not scale like people think, and are literally giving GPUs busywork to meet utilization quotas. They’re trying to scale data and parameter count, without improving architecture or data quality or even basic problems like random token sampling, and it’s not working anymore.
At the same time, the big US AI houses have squashed nearly every bit of “garage innovation” I’ve seen. Cool teams, hero devs with proven work on a budget, they all just disappear into the maw of Microsoft or whomever like it’s a black hole, their work never integrated into anything.
US AI is GOING to collapse because we gave all the money to tech bros so they can poison the well. The ML research community has been screaming this since like 2022. And apparently before, as Aaron Swartz allegedly identified Altman as a sociopath right before he died by suicide.
Sorry to rant.
Not that China doesn’t have significant dev issues, to be clear.
Europe, too.
But this is a sensitive point for me. Hobbyist machine learning has been a passion of mine for a decade, and it makes me sick to hear people quote Altman, like throwing GPUs at tech bros going to fix this. That. Is. A. LIE.
I don’t have a solution either. In the AI space, I do not even see a path back to moonshot-style cooperative innovation like the US has repeatedly pulled off before.
Keep in mind, while China is aggressively pushing for Data Centers and AI expansion like the US is, the one thing the US has to deal with is property rights and disjointed regulations. A lot of infrastructure projects in the US end up running over budget or get halted entirely, whereas in China, if the Government wants something built, they relocate you and take the land.
Many years ago, I remember Verizon wanted to build a Data Center in my area located in the middle of a farm field for their Terremark and 5G MEC projects. They had the ability to purchase the land. It was located in an industrial area near a power plant. The owner of an adjacent plot of land, who was doing absolutely nothing with said land (it was all weeds and brush), and still hasn’t done anything with said land, ended up blocking the entire project to the point where Verizon just gave up. This was before we got into the weeds with AI and Crypto, but back when the intent of a data center was still do something useful with it rather than waste power on unprompted/unasked requests.
Given China’s determination, the US will likely end up losing on the Infrastructure front, like it has been with many infrastructure projects. The US will continue to remain on the forefront for a while on engineering and development. But long term usage and deployment? That’s going to depend on who can open source all of this crap the fastest…
China would prefer USA to have less data centers as well. This could help them get and edgeon AI where they are currently like 10 months behind the USA. Dont get me wrong. I don’t want a data center in my backyard. But USA needs better infrastructure planning like china and not leave it up to billionaire, their companies and their short sighted quarterly reports.
A constriction on GPUs is literally the best thing to ever happen to Chinese ML dev.
It made them thrifty, it made them focus, it forced them to go open weights, it made them build proper ASICs, research new techniques, pay engineers to implement them, and now their models are supremely efficient, dirt cheap, running Nvidia free on Huawei NPUs, and close to better tools than the US models.
Meanwhile, US models are all (except maybe Google) enshittifying and getting benchmaxxed. Engineers are wasting man hours hopelessly trying to scale training, which does not scale like people think, and are literally giving GPUs busywork to meet utilization quotas. They’re trying to scale data and parameter count, without improving architecture or data quality or even basic problems like random token sampling, and it’s not working anymore.
At the same time, the big US AI houses have squashed nearly every bit of “garage innovation” I’ve seen. Cool teams, hero devs with proven work on a budget, they all just disappear into the maw of Microsoft or whomever like it’s a black hole, their work never integrated into anything.
US AI is GOING to collapse because we gave all the money to tech bros so they can poison the well. The ML research community has been screaming this since like 2022. And apparently before, as Aaron Swartz allegedly identified Altman as a sociopath right before he died by suicide.
Sorry to rant.
Not that China doesn’t have significant dev issues, to be clear.
Europe, too.
But this is a sensitive point for me. Hobbyist machine learning has been a passion of mine for a decade, and it makes me sick to hear people quote Altman, like throwing GPUs at tech bros going to fix this. That. Is. A. LIE.
I don’t have a solution either. In the AI space, I do not even see a path back to moonshot-style cooperative innovation like the US has repeatedly pulled off before.
Keep in mind, while China is aggressively pushing for Data Centers and AI expansion like the US is, the one thing the US has to deal with is property rights and disjointed regulations. A lot of infrastructure projects in the US end up running over budget or get halted entirely, whereas in China, if the Government wants something built, they relocate you and take the land.
Many years ago, I remember Verizon wanted to build a Data Center in my area located in the middle of a farm field for their Terremark and 5G MEC projects. They had the ability to purchase the land. It was located in an industrial area near a power plant. The owner of an adjacent plot of land, who was doing absolutely nothing with said land (it was all weeds and brush), and still hasn’t done anything with said land, ended up blocking the entire project to the point where Verizon just gave up. This was before we got into the weeds with AI and Crypto, but back when the intent of a data center was still do something useful with it rather than waste power on unprompted/unasked requests.
Given China’s determination, the US will likely end up losing on the Infrastructure front, like it has been with many infrastructure projects. The US will continue to remain on the forefront for a while on engineering and development. But long term usage and deployment? That’s going to depend on who can open source all of this crap the fastest…