| I state that China advanced immensely but nowhere close to the level of the hype now. I'm laser-focused on the developing markets (although China is already past that stage). Moreover, I hold investments in mutual funds for emerging markets, including those with stock in Tencent (for instance). But I can't name anything in China except: * bigger supercomputers * bigger bitcoin mining facilities * clone cryptocurrencies * bigger number of patents filed by Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu * hiring of Andrew Ng and then him quitting Baidu * proliferation of cashless payments * excellent team work of techies and business people resulting in WeChat, which would not have succeeded elsewhere * I no longer buy the claims of ML applications (speech recognition, face recognition) surpassing human accuracy - I've been hearing these for years and then reading refutations, but yes, sure, let's assume a few algorithms were tweaked successfully Does it all work, yes. It's far beyond the China where I was doing business a decade ago wondering whether the developers I was in contact with have a functioning brain. But is it "more advanced than Silicon Valley" - nowhere close to it, it's well-managed cookie-cutter tech. If anything, the credit goes to the Chinese tech-savvy business people not prone to the American corporate waste syndrome and forced to dive deeper into the tech. Can you name 3 (three) projects where the tech was not licensed or borrowed elsewhere and is indeed so advanced it did not surface elsewhere? I'd be sincerely interested to learn of such. |
I haven't heard of anything 'pure tech', but there's a big network effect to having the world's electronics industry on your doorstep. If you're building a microscope, you don't have to wait for months for the parts to arrive. If you're building a new kind of centrifuge, you have a massive pool of great engineers who can do it for you, just a phonecall away.