[Nifty3929]

China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China.

China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

[hedora]

I'm not sure how much of it is subsidies. If the open weight models are anything to judge by, China is taking price performance seriously, and the US model vendors are looking for performance at any cost. Like any other Pareto optimization, we end up paying 10x more for the last few percent improvement on benchmark scores.

Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer.

Also, of course, China's way ahead of the US on things like renewables, batteries, and electrification of their economy. All of that feeds into cheaper power to run the models, but I suspect it's a second order effect vs. "improve the software".

[layoric]

They also banned crypto mining which previously was using the free to cheap electricity, so if AI data centres are using those now under utilised supply, very possible subsidies are very low.

[aftbit]

And yet despite the ban, China's contributions to Bitcoin mining remain very large.

https://cryptonews.com/news/china-doubles-down-on-crypto-ban...

[submain]

It seems to me China is chasing widespread adoption, while the US is chasing the AGI dream.

[ifwinterco]

This is my read as well - Chinese labs don’t really seem to believe in AGI and instead the focus is on optimising the transformer architecture so it can be actually useful for specific tasks, ideally at a low cost

[mxschumacher]

not just renewables, also massive nuclear capacity and huge modern coal plants. They can really crank up capacity if they want to. How long will it take to get a new nuclear power plant operational in the US?

[ian_holt]

I agree with that too. Whilst we here in the "Land Down Under" (Australia) seem to have a fixation on NOT wanting to go down the nuclear energy route and we seem rather keen on tearing down our last remaining coal-fired power stations and 'trying' to rely on so-called renewables. From direct experience, our energy costs have gone through the roof and regardless of what our 'wonderful' politicians tell us, that is not going to change any time soon. We seem to want to just give our uranium to USA, Japan, France, and South Korea so they can make cheap energy, whilst we send our best coal to Japan, China & India. Go figure...

[kllrnohj]

> Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer.

Eh? The entire CPU & GPU wars for the last 30 years consistently rewarded the top performer above all else. Price/performance has always been the consolation prize of the loser of any given generation, and sitting in the price/performance pit for several generations in a row results in being essentially out of money in a fringe position. Like, for example, AMD's GPU division currently but also AMD's CPU division before Athlon 64 and also Phenom up through Ryzen.

[weakened_malloc]

Someone (can't remember who) said it best. US is the best at going from 0 to 1, China is the best at going from 1 to 100.

[dluan]

This has been a meme in Chinese tech/startup world lately, as it's now the main problem they are trying to solve. They largely consider 1 to 100 solved, and have set their sights on the new goal.

[radialstub]

> Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer.

The iphone is the best selling computing device in history and is among the most expensive in its category.

[palata]

Most smartphones being sold are Android, though.

[radialstub]

True, however apple makes the overwhelming majority of the profit in the smartphone market.

[tancop]

profit only matters for investors. if anything its a sign that apple is selling overpriced products and underpaying workers and you should avoid them.

[dietr1ch]

For most people Apple's main selling point is about showing off the cute devices and battery life, but that's not going to play a role when users are free to choose the tool that will call the models.

[swingboy]

You might be vastly overestimating what a majority of phone owners use their phone for.

[rootusrootus]

I’ve never seen anyone show off an iPhone. What a weird take.

[hedora]

It's also one of the better performing. Is the value line (currently, the 17e, I guess) typically much more expensive than an android with comparable battery life, CPU performance, and OS support lifespan?

This year, things look pretty comparable according to this shopping guide. You can get slightly worse or last year's line for about $100 less, or something with comparable specs (some better, some worse) for about the same price:

https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/apple-iphone/4-android...

The thing with price/performance is that it doesn't dictate high end or low end. It just says you need to be competitive at some price points.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't

They're subsidizing this in many ways - Huawei chips, new DDR5 memory fabs, etc.

Ultimately, DeepSeek's architecture is significantly more cost effective than anything from Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic.

Presumably, they'll incorporate DeepSeek's MLA* architecture to get all the benefits for next year's releases (if not this year's upcoming releases) which will bring down their costs...

They need to actually make money, though, so that might still not give them enough room to make enough money.

Ultimately, hardware depreciation is like 80% of total spending. So power is not as big of a deal in cost. The bigger problem is if you can get the power at all, not how expensive it is.

If you want to bring down inference costs, using less hardware is far more effective than getting cheaper electricity.

Google is in a sweet spot, because they aren't paying 80% margins to nVidia for hardware. So they're probably paying half as much deprecation as everyone else is (or maybe 1/4th for inference - which is now the biggest percentage overall).

[nl]

> Huawei chips, new DDR5

The US is subsidizing in exactly the same way through the US Chip Act (as well as state level tax subsidies):

> The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

> Presumably, they'll incorporate DeepSeek's MLA* architecture to get all the benefits for next year's releases (if not this year's upcoming releases) which will bring down their costs.

You can be sure the frontier labs all have similar approaches, but they just don't talk about them. That's why eg Google Flash (the old versions!) were do cheap.

I mean Google published MTP a month or so ago and it has sped up Qwen models by 1.7 times.

If that is what they still publish you get an idea of what they aren't.

[onionisafruit]

What’s the TLA architecture? I haven’t read about that.

[borski]

MLA, not TLA: https://medium.com/data-science/deepseek-v3-explained-1-mult...

[redanddead]

That's competing.

[PearlRiver]

Look up the US deficit- they have been subsidizing everything since the 1980s.

[coldtea]

And the "wars for oil" is part of that.

[toddmorey]

It feels like the US for years has operated under the assumption that homeostasis for the global economy would always be “designed in California, assembled in China.”

Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here.

But China it seems doesn’t need the US to produce great cars, devices, robotics, or AI. We absolutely need China to help us build all of the above.

[fridder]

Might be more far to say: they needed the US until they caught up. The massive straight up IP theft helps a lot here. Though theft might be too strong since a lot of companies knew what they were getting in to

[palata]

> The massive straight up IP theft helps a lot here

I think this is vastly underestimating what "catching up" means. All my life, people have been saying "China copies". Now they are objectively better at many things (including robotics), and... well it seems that we cannot "just copy".

I saw western companies trying to "copy" superior Chinese technology, talking to brilliant engineers explaining how much they were learning by actually trying to copy.

The lesson I got from that is that China did not "copy"; they learned. And it took time, and now they are better. Now the western world has to learn from them, I guess.

[jubilanti]

Growing up moving around both conservative and liberal parts of the US, from middle school to college, I distinctly remember several US history classes where I was taught the exact same narrative about Samuel Slater. About how he was an American hero and the Father of the American Industrial Revolution because he memorized a bunch of industrial patent blueprints and brought them over to the US.

It got told as: the evil English made it illegal to even import blueprints for factory machinery, to keep the colonies in resource-extractive poverty, so they'd have to send raw materials overseas to get processed, then import the finished goods. (My other history teacher, the Anno / Dawn of Discovery video game series, also cemented this bit about resource extraction in my head at a young age.) But then thanks to heroic ingenuity and cunning, I was told, the US was able to outwit the colonizers and process its own raw materials, eventually gaining full economic, military, and political supremacy.

Sounds familiar.

[aucisson_masque]

It's ip theft when the Chinese do it but when it's the American copying on Chinese it's called learning.

[whatshisface]

Producing great products is a game at which every player wins, because sellers must find willing buyers. It only fails if one participant panics and jumps out of the window, or if a significant number of people are not participating (this is always the case when wealth inequality is involved).

[Projectiboga]

China is out producing us at new scientists and engineers.

[windexh8er]

> The lesson I got from that is that China did not "copy"; they learned. And it took time, and now they are better. Now the western world has to learn from them, I guess.

And Apple played a huge role in teaching them. We should all thank Tim Cook and team for almost single handedly bootstrapping China 2.0, the China that runs circles around the west in terms of production and development.

Peter Zeihann really got it wrong in his latter books.

[windexh8er]

For those who don't like my comment I'd implore you to read [0].

[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Apple-in-China/Patric...

[toddmorey]

Ok, not my favorite narrative, but assume asymmetric application of intellectual property rights was a big factor. Wouldn't the US exploiting asymmetric labor wages, rights, and conditions be the even bigger story? It still feels like a short-sighted own goal. The US abandoned its ability to manufacture. Maybe dark factories and robotics can bring it back, but manufacturing supply chains are just so much more advanced in Asia than in the US.

[smallmancontrov]

> Wouldn't the US exploiting asymmetric labor wages, rights, and conditions be the even bigger story?

Yes, but "the US" is reductive. The exploitation wasn't done by the towns having their tentpole industries shipped overseas, it was done by the people shipping them overseas and pocketing the profit. US capital owners made a deal with the Chinese Communist Party that was good for both of them and bad for the US.

[airstrike]

That's really well said.

The promise was always to get cheaper goods and services in the US, so long as the Chinese firms never competed. Guess what, they compete now.

[tmnvix]

And good for the people of China presumably.

[dangus]

At some point we can’t keep blaming IP theft for obvious innovation and investments being made by China.

We also can’t blame subsidy. All countries subsidize their industries.

This video on the auto industry covers a different industry but has a lot of the same rhymes as far as China’s strategy:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UhhZu0ZHdw4

The gist of it is that China does the following:

1. Treats low margin industries like mining and utilities as areas to focus investment and come up with incremental improvements, making those available to all companies. The West, by contrast, allows private companies to handle those industries, who logically don’t bother investing in them since their investors consider those basic industries to be low-value segments of the production chain. But now we see those advantages in China where investments have been made (e.g., the best battery chemistries and mining/refining, the cheapest power (when was the last time your local utility company focused on reducing pricing?)).

2. Because all companies in China have access to the same excellent infrastructure, they must compete furiously on quality/features/price of their products.

3. China allows foreign competition so long as they operate in China (see: Tesla) further insisting that their domestic products be globally competitive and that foreign products sold in their country benefit their local ecosystem.

[xbmcuser]

Lol it was not ip theft it was American and European companies building factories in China themselves teaching them how to manufacture use their cheap labour. Well they learned and as they were the dong the manufacturing got better at it. I believe the current aerospace industry which the US leads in is also result of IP theft from the British then out innovating them.

[defrost]

> I believe the current aerospace industry which the US leads in is also result of IP theft from the British then out innovating them.

Jet engines, proximity fuzes, radar, how to make a nuclear weapon, etc. are all examples of British / Commonwealth technology "gifted" or "traded" to the USofA during the WWII years in exchange for production.

So, not IP theft .. but absolutely foreign ideas taken in by the US and built upon.

[expedition32]

HN hates non competition clauses in contracts unless it involves Chinese workers.

But I think we underestimate the Chinese diaspora. They had been running factories, shops and banks from Singapore to Suriname for generations and answered the call from the PRC to share that knowledge base.

[api]

The US committed massive IP theft in the 19th century when we industrialized.

[gedy]

Sure but I think what people are actually concerned with today is China copying a product and dumping cheaply back in the country it was taken from. That scale and speed is not what was happening in the 19th century.

I personally have little issue with countries doing that for domestic use (I hate using term "IP theft"), but to re-export so quickly you can't run a viable business in your own country is not fine.

[ceejayoz]

As did the big AI providers.

[falcor84]

I would appreciate some reading pointers about this.

[nl]

> Samuel Slater ... known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution", a phrase coined by Andrew Jackson, and the "Father of the American Factory System". In the United Kingdom, he was called "Slater the Traitor" and "Sam the Slate" because he brought British textile technology to the United States, modifying it for American use.

> He learned of the American interest in developing similar machines, and he was also aware of British law against exporting the designs. He memorized as much as he could, and departed for New York City in 1789. Some people of Belper called him "Slater the Traitor", as they considered his move a betrayal of the town where many earned their living at Strutt's mills

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater#Early_life_and_e...

[victorbjorklund]

dig into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Håkan_Lans for example

[falcor84]

What? How is someone born in 1947 relevant to ip theft in the 19th century?

[imjonse]

'usa ip theft 19th century' in your fav search engine

[falcor84]

Well, I did, and to save others the time, the most relevant resource I found appears to be the book "Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America” (2013) by Peter Andreas

[swasheck]

IP theft may only be part of the story though. it’s a question of priorities. US optimizes for profit which can place limits reinvestment. China seems to optimize for ubiquity and dominance, and has the capital to throw at those goals. when you’re beholden to the shareholder/ceo/investor, you make concessions to stay within their will. when you’re beholden to the state, you do the same.

[gmerc]

Talking about IP theft with a straight face in context of AI. lol. Not that kind of IP theft, that doesn’t count.

[yogthos]

this is a great read on the whole dynamic incidentally https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-value-of-noth...

[anigbrowl]

Wait until you hear about the history of US industrialization. This trope of 'they stole our ideas' needs to fade away, it's a coping mechanism based on the assumption of inherent superiority of American society rather than the natural wax and wane of civilizations due to varying structural factors.

[lejalv]

This so much. You can also read up about when Germany sent industrial spies to Great Britain. And the first documented case of industrial spionage was against... China.

It plays this way: you're behind, you ignore IP rules. You're ahead: you create them to defend your newly-gained status.

Also please no moralizing here on IP when the entire OpenAI/Anthropic playbook has been "massive straight up IP theft". The irony.

[FpUser]

>"IP theft"

Can we stop this crying baby already. Every country has stolen from the other. Did you really expect countries to settle on sewing closes and ship all profits to foreign companies for eternity? The IP is just an artificial concept that participants follow for so long as it benefits all parties.

[HerbManic]

The one major area they are still behind in is CPU tech, but they are hungry and thus moving quick.

Looking at Loongsons processors for instance. About 15 years ago they coudl barely compete with a Pentium 2. Now they are about 4-5 years behind Intel/AMD. Further behind on some more specific work loads (SSL decoding for example) Not great but that is a decent jump. The jumps between generations are pretty decent.

LA446 was a decent enough processor core but had an awful memory controller that held it back as soon as it needed to reach outside of cache. As such it was SLOW.

But they learned the lesson and now the LA664 almost entirely fixed that issue. I think a big part of performance issues is that they are working domestic 5 to 7nm processes, so a good 5-7 years behind.

They are launching the LA864 later this year and are touting some decent performance gains. That is just marketing so far but something to keep an eye on.

Considering that these chips are using their own ISA, own designs, domestic manufacturing and they aren't terrible is a big thing.

I suspect in the next 5 years they have the chance of completely closing the gap. But it can also go the other way that they end up stalling as smaller nodes get much more difficult to attain.

[kllrnohj]

> Now they are about 4-5 years behind Intel/AMD. [..] the LA664 almost entirely fixed that issue. I think a big part of performance issues is that they are working domestic 5 to 7nm processes, so a good 5-7 years behind.

I'm not finding many benchmarks but looking at this https://chipsandcheese.com/p/loongson-3a6000-a-star-among-ch...

it looks like it's right around Zen 1 class performance. Which I hate to tell you is 10 years old already...

[TedDoesntTalk]

How much does corporate espionage help them?

[shimman]

Probably the same amount it helped the US in the late 1800s/1900s, a substantial amount.

[HerbManic]

Who knows but any 'answer' anyone could give is pure speculation.

You could be right! But I do see this claim come up every time Chinese tech comes up. It might be a valid concern but it might also just be folks attempts to try and undermine the technology gains of the nation.

The ISA they have developed with based off years of with with MIPS and RISC V, so it isn't entirely new but they are definitely pushing it forwards. I have no idea if any of their developments could be back ported down the RISC V.

[expedition32]

There are 1.4 billion Chinese. When they got their education system up and running again by the late 1970s it was simply a matter of statistics.

[delfinom]

Propaganda. We americans ate that shit up.

There's nothing special about anything we design in the US other than time and money commitment to create it. China did have some espionage of course going on, but the vast majority of shit isn't some secret. And with the US shitting on China with restrictions, we increasingly caused them to invest time and money into things they otherwise would have passively accepted as coming from the west. ASML sees the writing on the wall for themselves in particular.

[jdcasale]

It's both.

The US has generally resorted to propaganda rather than addressing the self-inflicted structural conditions responsible for the erosion of our dominance. China also conducted a broad, sustained, large-scale campaign of IP theft across almost every industry.

Obviously there is no natural law preventing China from innovating (We have treated political liberalism as a prerequisite to innovation in a way that was always partly self-congratulatory), but it's also obviously true that the speed of the gap closure is due in significant part to theft.

That doesn't change the fact that they are now a legitimate competitor who has gotten a lot of things right (and among these, some things that we get very wrong) and probably actually leads in some areas.

[infecto]

I like this take a lot and agree with it. The US for too long has been asleep at the wheel on many areas, power generation one of them. China with no doubt has conducted very deep and sustained espionage campaigns and even with LLMs there is enough evidence that most of the initial gains was training off of western models. Again no complaints here but I think it’s important to acknowledge both which can be true at the same time.

[FpUser]

>"Again no complaints here but I think it’s important to acknowledge both which can be true at the same time."

and this acknowledgement will pay your bills

[infecto]

Huh?

[encrypted_bird]

> Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China

In most Americans' eyes, unfortunately, there was. It was just known by the name "American Exceptionalism". Yes, it's nonsense, but unfortunately it is nonsense that has historically been used by most empires throughout history, and believed just as fervently by said empires' populi since it's one of the central elements of imperialism as a whole.

[TurdF3rguson]

The US models are still better though, let's not get carried away. Ours are better, theirs are cheaper. That's how it's always been.

[TurdF3rguson]

Downvoters are being silly. If you want to make a case for American Exceptionalism being a hoax, that's fine. But don't use deepseek 4 pro (which is at 100 ELO or so below top models) to make that case. You have stronger arguments elsewhere.

Capishe?

[Kbelicius]

Downvoters aren't being silly, it's about you not considering the context of the discussion when writing your first reply. Deepseek wasn't mentioned once in this thread before your second post and AI was mentioned once in a list of different industries. Those should have been a clue to why your first post was downvoted. Basically, you wrote a non sequitur post and are surprised that it is being downvoted.

[TurdF3rguson]

Um, take a break between bong hits to read the thread title pal: "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent". I don't know what you thought we were discussing, puff the magic dragons perhaps? Lol.

Seriously though, take a hike if you can't be bothered to read things.

[trick-or-treat]

imagine if being liberal meant pretending weaker Chinese models are better than US models as a form of virtue signaling?

We failed you somehow, kids. I'm not sure where, but we failed you.

[roncesvalles]

>Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here.

There is (was): attracting the best minds around the world to a free and stable society. Trump voters threw it all away because they couldn't stand non-whites coming to America and doing better than old stock Americans.

[DaSHacka]

> attracting the best minds around the world to a free and stable society.

China is comprised of ~91.5% ethnically Chinese citizens. [0]

> Tump voters threw it all away because they couldn't stand non-whites coming to America and doing better than old stock Americans.

The U.S. is more diverse than it's ever been [1], and under Trump we're still below the deportations of Obama's terms.

Sounds like open-borders immigration was never necessary in the first place, given that we're being beat by a country with a similar demographic skew that we had like 80 years ago. Coincidentally, when we arguably had our best economic opportunities for citizens. Who'da thunk.

Clearly, the only solution to our fading relevance is opening the border again and importing 500 million more ""doctors and engineers"" all the while China is investing in their *actual* doctors and engineers, and has extremely strict immigration policies [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_China

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China#Population_policies

[roncesvalles]

You're conflating Mexican border hoppers with skilled immigrants.

I'm absolutely opposed to illegal immigration and have a more extreme position on how to deal with it than most Americans.

What I'm irked by are Trump's attacks on legal immigration and the general worsening of the environment. ICE's kidnappings, the 100k H-1B fee, and the recent Green Card thing have deeply eroded America's attractiveness to legal immigrants.

I think when MAGA came after H-1Bs, it became pretty clear that it's not about law and order, it's just a race thing.

And if you want to go gloves off, I'll just say it: the main problem in America is that its 3 major ethnic groups are infected by anti-intellectualism and slothfulness, whereas the Chinese and various other cultures are not. The direct benefit from skilled immigration is so that we can increase the ratio of people who actually value education and hard work vs the failing old stock Americans whose broccoli-headed kids dream of becoming YouTube influencers instead of astronauts.

[CuriouslyC]

H1-Bs are the most egregious example, because they're 100% used as a way to undercut/replace American talent. The irony is that the typical border hopper is working jobs Americans don't want, for wages Americans wouldn't take, and they keep a low profile to avoid getting deported.

The desire to be influencers isn't as boneheaded as you think, in a future where AI is solving the hardest technical challenges, the ability to get attention and create community is the last frontier. Influencers and salesmen will be eating good when scientists and engineers are derelict.

[SmirkingRevenge]

> The U.S. is more diverse than it's ever been [1], and under Trump we're still below the deportations of Obama's terms.

Ethnic diversity is neither really here nor there in terms of the measurable needs that immigration fulfills. Immigration keeps economic and population growth rates trending up. Having high skilled immigration to bolster science and research is nice, but it's still mainly about the growth.

Yea, Obama deported lots of people, but even then we still had net positive migration. Now under Trump, we have net negative migration for the first time in decades. The very public terror campaign waged by the Trump admin was in part to deter immigration in the first place.

> Sounds like open-borders immigration was never necessary in the first place, given that we're being beat by a country with a similar demographic skew that we had like 80 years ago.

1) Economic growth is possible with stagnating/declining population levels if you overcome those deficits with commensurate increases in productivity per capita. Otherwise, you're cooked.

2) The US is actually far more productive per capita than China - in fact, the US is one of the best in the world, as far as that goes.

With those points in mind, we can begin to see why China has an easier time growing economically with little immigration. The US has a much harder time doing the same. We need more population, since it's just harder to squeeze more productivity out of our already very productive workforce.

Once China achieves similar productivity levels, they will need to rely more on growing the population.

We were actually on track to catch up to China's population levels in a few of decades (thanks to immigration). So unless China successfully pivoted to mass immigration or expansionism, the US was likely to remain dominant - easily so - for the foreseeable future.

That's why the MAGA anti-immigration push is so tragically stupid and suicidal (if it persists). They're killing America's golden goose.

As an aside: I wish the "open borders" canard would die. We've never had open-borders immigration in recent history. Definitely not since 9/11. Not even under Biden. Border laws were enforced. Biden has the same apprehension rate at the border as both Trump and Obama.

[avadodin]

That's such a gross misrepresentation of reality.

First of all, the only group of immigrants targeted by the admin are those critical of certain middle eastern regime.

Republican racists mainly care about the immigrants that do not take their middle-class jobs anyways.

Anti-Indian hate is restricted to a minority of software engineers and anti-Chinese hate is virtually non-existent.

I do believe it is idiotic to have your universities full of Chinese, your manufacturing in China and, at the same time, treat China as a geopolitical enemy.

[dzonga]

people might not wanna admit it because it feels politically incorrect - but that belief is massively due the idea of "western (white) supremacy".

cz if you're smart & pragmatic - then you will know innovation can come from anywhere - but western elites choose to continually bury their heads in the sand.

[sandworm101]

As john oliver said on conan many years ago: "an inflatable barbecue!".

China can certainly design an inflatable barbecue. China can certainly biuld an inlfatable barbecue. But will the chinese people ever want and buy an inflatable barbecue? ... never. That is why the US will remain the premier consumer economy.

[nl]

The US is the richest consumer market in the world.

And yet BYD is likely to outsell Ford worldwide this year (despite being banned in the US)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture...

[bcrosby95]

Put another way: if the average US citizen doesn't subsidize the costs of these trillion dollar companies, China is gonna come get you. Funny that you talk about being afraid of your own shadow.

I have some exposure to utility regulation and from what I can tell some of the AI companies are "good actors" and willing to shoulder some of the burden. But others are pretty adversarial and want a free lunch.

[bryanlarsen]

Power is foundational to pretty much everything. Cheap power is going to give China a massive advantage in everything; AI is just incidental.

[seviu]

Cheap power at what cost for our planet?

Not long ago we were crying death to bitcoin, it’s going to destroy the planet.

Come AI, with unlimited power demand. Everybody screaming we need more power.

We need infrastructure, clean energy, even nuclear. We are doing all in the wrong order.

[FabCH]

China added 315GW of solar in 2025.

For context, EU added 65 and US 43.

In one year, China _added_ almost the total capacity EU has.

China is the one place where AI actually can use clean energy…

[DennisP]

China also has 1,271 GW of coal capacity, and is planning 500GW more.

[bryanlarsen]

And their coal capacity factor (ie the percentage of time they use their coal) is dropping at about the same rate.

[tedd4u]

Possibly France, too.

- 70% nuclear

- 26% renewables

- 4% gas/coal

[stubish]

That power is already being used, and excess exported to neighboring countries.

[usrnm]

France cannot really add more of it. Not fast and cheap enough, anyway

[lejalv]

...and China manufactured almost the totality of the EU and US solar capacity.

[bix6]

China is the leader in solar?

[seviu]

For a while already

[margalabargala]

> Put another way: if the average US citizen doesn't subsidize the costs of these trillion dollar companies, China is gonna come get you.

The future is blatantly going to be electric. Between cars, heat pumps, ranges, etc, the quantity of kilowatt hours consumed will rise dramatically per capita because they are replacing burned fossil fuels.

We don't need to subsidize the trillion dollar companies, we can settle for just not cancelling wind and solar projects, and generally updating the grid infrastructure.

A rising tide lifts all boats. If the subsidies go to common infrastructure, that's good for everyone. There's no need to complain about a road being paved because it will benefit FedEx in addition to everyone else.

[skeledrew]

> not cancelling wind and solar projects

Tell it to the guy doing just that, as much as possible.

[swasheck]

windmills cause cancer and kill bald eagles so we can’t do wind. /s

[jm_l]

All public infrastructure benefits the public but the role of our governance is to correctly prioritize. $100 billion spent on nuclear power plants is $100 billion being withheld from other critical social services.

[manyatoms]

The US could very causally spend a couple $100B less on their military and not have a real reduction in capability.

[coliveira]

No, the money is not coming from a fixed box. When the US wants to do something (typically starting a new war), they never ask where the money is coming from. This tells you everything about how the decisions are made, if it is a priority for them, they will spend the money first and ask questions later. If green infrastructure was a real priority they would invest the money and later find ways to pay for it.

[lobocinza]

But those wars are typically fought to maintain the US status, to preserve its ability to debase the national currency effectively siphoning wealth from the world economy. Self-preservations comes first. I'm just describing the system.

[airstrike]

Which of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran were fought to maintain US status?

[margalabargala]

> $100 billion spent on nuclear power plants is $100 billion being withheld from other critical social services.

What? No it isn't.

There are many places the government could use to appropriate funds, not just social services. The military, for example. Other subsidies. Tax credits. Simply increasing the debt.

[gmerc]

Remember kids, in the west it’s “investment”, in China “subsidy”

[Aboutplants]

I believe you are right. These models are at worst a 6 month lag to the costly frontier models, but the ability to scale energy production is years ahead of where the US is. That advantage is often under appreciated

Their cost of energy is what matters vs the US as much as speed buildout.

[mxschumacher]

I'm still not entirely clear on the problem <-> capability matching. E.g. it seems like Kimi K2.6 with good context would already be able to solve a huge chunk of problems. What share of prompts require frontier models?

[themafia]

> then it will no longer require subsidy from them

Is there actually a huge Chinese consumer market for these products? If not then I'm not sure how you ever actually achieve this endpoint. Chinese wages and American wages are not nearly the same thing yet.

> It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China.

It will simply create more pollution and environmental destruction too.

> China is building for the future

That's the plan. Whether that's true requires an honest analysis.

> while Western Democracies are afraid of the future

Developed nations take fewer risks than undeveloped ones. Do you assume this pitched dichotomy will naturally sustain itself?

> and of their own shadow.

Yea, it's funny what having open and fair elections can do for a country.

[lejalv]

You got me with fair. Gerrymandering, PACs, two-party system, electoral college.

Where do we start...

[themafia]

We start logically. Do you presume your handful of cases exemplify the entire Democratic system? Do you assume that "China" is best understood as a single centralized entity?

You completely walked past the argument to pick at a meaningless nit.

[lejalv]

Handing out lessons in democracy from the record-holder country in foreign intervention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...) had equal civil rights only in the 1960s, pardoned the perpetrators of Jan 6, has its supreme court in entirely political hands, and has the awesomest repressive force in the world, together with the incarcerated population to go with.

Maybe I picked like 4 meaningless nits as in: US politicians respect so much democracy that they constantly reweight "one person, one vote" to suit the interest of the incumbent, they do not have their outrageously expensive campaigns financed (legally) by private interest groups, the popular vote is represented, and elections are uncontested (unless the wrong candidate wins, where the Supreme Court promptly fixes the issue), and it has room for more than two (quite similar I may say) viewpoints in representation.

Maybe.

But please don't call “Yea, it's funny what having open and fair elections can do for a country.” an argument.

[themafia]

Please don't take one sentence out of a larger context and pretend it represents the argument.

Which, again, you've managed to completely ignore.

The argument, ironically in black and white, so you can sense it, "this isn't a black and white scenario and seeing it as China vs USA blinds you to the complex differences and global geopolitical forces involved."

I get that you don't personally like America, for whatever reason, but you've blinded yourself to sense in your rush to convey your rather negative and absolutely common sensibilities.

[lejalv]

Yes, I don't like the US'* self-congratulation we're the good guys-beacon-of democracy bullshit

(The USA, I am fine with the continent of America).

And it's for a reason: I am from one of those countries where US-american meddling buttressed a dictatorship that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

[dartharva]

> while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

Trillions of Dollars being invested against AI infra would indicate otherwise. US is in fact betting a lot of its economic future on AI.

[sfifs]

Benchmarking the kind of cost savings I'm seeing moving from sonnet and gemini flash to local models, inference runs at least 90-95% gross margins. So they are probably still gross margin profitable.

BTW form my benchmarking, open weigh models are good enough for many agentic tasks starting with Qwen 3.5/6 family and Deepseek v4 family, so it's likely we'll see displacement of api usage from the premium priced providers. Yes trainingis expensive, this isn't training

[readthenotes1]

"China is building for the future, "

Meanwhile, the USA is paying for its past excesses, with interest on its debt being the number two most expensive line item in the budget.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[DennisP]

If you look at total debt instead of just national government debt, then China is even worse off than the US.

Article in Fortune: https://archive.is/53Vu0

[quantum_state]

In the last 40 years, China has been building while the US has been wasting money and lives fighting wars. Can we learn to really put America first for once?

[readthenotes1]

40?? America has been messing with other countries during most of its life.

Sure, taking out the Tunisian pirates was a good thing for most of the world, but it's a bad precedent...

[delfinom]

Yea, I really don't see how much longer the US economy can hold on. The baby boomers are working overtime to rob multiple future generations of opportunity to feed their profits now.

The formerly "fiscal conservatives" that I know are working overtime explaining how the debt isn't a bad thing and we can just move numbers.

[xienze]

> The formerly "fiscal conservatives" that I know are working overtime explaining how the debt isn't a bad thing and we can just move numbers.

Sounds like they're just catching up to what Democrats always used to say whenever a Democrat was in the White House and some Republican would complain about the national debt. "A government isn't a household, debt doesn't work the same way, you don't get it."

[59nadir]

That's interesting, because I thought it was common knowledge that Republican presidents actually add more on average to national debt...?

[energy123]

It's not really a bottleneck. US capital is building data centers in South Asia, MENA and SEA. Many of these countries offer tax breaks because they want US data centers, and they have abundant equatorial land for solar.

You might say that US would prefer sovereignty but that's a separate argument vis-a-vis strategic competition with China in particular.

[delfinom]

Wonder if they are finally exploring installing anti air defenses on these datacenters given they are massively expensive and devastating targets of extreme opportunities.

[epolanski]

> China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

Yes, countries where compromise is not required, where social, capital and human costs are non-factors and where regulations are bendable at will by who's in power can be more effective at achieving some goals.

[coldtea]

Wasn't it also focused on efficiency way more than the "throw VC money at the issue" Anthropic/OpenAI designs?

Don't follow AI close, but I remember DeepSeek being a "much cheaper" to deploy model for close performance.

[protocolture]

I feel like the chinese government see this in terms of the space race.

Not that, there's a cool new frontier to explore.

But that its a great opportunity to subsidise an industry and watch their slower fatter competitor go bankrupt trying to keep up.

>But the US did it first

What is sputnik.

[dominotw]

> China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future

who are the decision makers in china?

[tmnvix]

The 96 million members of the CCP and the entrepreneurs incentivised to make decisions based on the policies they introduce?

Who are the decision makers in western democracies?

I'm being slightly facetious - there are many answers to these questions.

The one that actually matters to me though is "do the people that are making the decisions do so in the interests of society?" Not in my 'democracy', that's for sure.

[dominotw]

i mean why are 96 million ppl not afraid of future like western countries.

[bdangubic]

yup - good read: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-efficiency-moat-why-c...

[lenerdenator]

> while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

Well, yeah. This is a technology that has the potential to make large chunks of the population unemployed.

Chunks of the population that took on debts prior to late 2022 with the understanding that there would be a way to pay those debts back with their labor.

[blowscum]

> Chunks of the population that took on debts prior to late 2022 with the understanding that there would be a way to pay those debts back with their labor.

I’m calling it now, the future is indentured servitude.

[redanddead]

Yeah. What we have here is simply poor governance.

[zrtac]

That is the talking point of OpenAI and a16z's super PAC:

https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...

"Build American AI, a nonprofit linked to a super PAC bankrolled by executives at OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz, is funding a campaign to spread pro-AI messaging and stoke fears about China."

In reality Xi has warned of AI bubbles. If China was really pushing it they'd be equal or ahead because so many researchers are Chinese anyway. Instead, China is building real stuff instead of focusing on hot air like a16z ("crypto", "AI", you name it). Maybe China should sponsor that PAC to accelerate the demise of the West.

[aurareturn]

They wouldn’t be ahead because they can’t buy Nvidia compute racks anymore and they don’t have EUV machines.

Blackwell is 10-20x more efficient than H200. Vera Rubin is expected to be several times more efficient than Blackwell.

The US has way more compute installed in Gigawatts because China can’t get enough chips. https://epoch.ai/blog/trends-in-ai-supercomputers

I do wonder how most Chinese employees at OpenAI and Anthropic feel about their employer constantly spreading anti China propaganda to decrease competition. Perhaps money solves almost all things so they go along with it.

[coliveira]

This is the next phase of the OpenAI deception: give us as much money as we want or you'll be labeled anti-US and pro-China (guaranteed by the propaganda arm of openAI).

[itemize123]

they are doing it through state investment vehicles - so it's in the same way US companies can (but won't)

[watwut]

American companies are selling tokens on a loss for years now. Where is that alternative universe in which America is not subsidizing this?

Selling under price to capture market was American playbook for last 20 or more years.

[windexh8er]

It's not western democracies. It's western capitalism, and more poignantly, western billionaires. They're feeding the narratives. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg - they're the ones with bunkers and exit strategies. They are the lunatics buying seats at the political table and spreading FUD and meddling in our elections. They are the ones destroying the west's chances at a competitive future, instead: "capitalism".

They wanted the division, they're getting it and one side is raping and pillaging the masses.

[ufish235]

What the fuck are you talking about - have you seen what data centres are doing in the West? Do you want more of that?

[infecto]

I have not fully seen or appreciated most of the negativity. Obviously there are exceptions to that but in my eyes it has largely exposed how vulnerable the west is due to poor infrastructure constructs and a lack of building out generation and transmission.

[stavros]

What are data centers doing? I'd never heard of anybody having had a problem with them until about two months ago.

[Nifty3929]

Yes, and yes!

[arjie]

To be honest, I’m sort of annoyed that the datacenter around the corner from my home closed. It was a five minute walk on 3rd street and I know of it because we used to have so many cages there 15 years ago. Now I have to drive to Fremont.

[bryanlarsen]

Yes, I want cheap clean power.

[stuaxo]

Nope.

We have exported production to China in many things, we forget that we had dark satanic mills of our own.