[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?

[victorbjorklund]

Because USAs military literally stole his IP? He had patents for GPS systems that US military took (by making his very expensive US lawyer making a silly ”mistake” and oops he lost against US companies and they suggested ”let’s forget about the money if you just hand us over that patent that the US military wants”

[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.

[zaptheimpaler]

DS4 is open weights so it could even be run free in quantized forms, is 10x cheaper than Opus and performs basically as well in most real world tasks. No one cares about benchmarks. In practical terms, it’s obviously a better option in most cases.

You’re defining “better” is “absolute best at any cost” instead of the more balanced price/performance considerations consumers actually take, so you can declare America #1 again. In a practical sense DS4 is so much cheaper at similar quality that it’s better in most cases. If i can throw 10x the tokens at the same problem at slightly lower quality, i can probably do a better job.

[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...