[jwally]

Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide.

China gets sanctions and stale chips - fine, they just DIY the algorithms through CPU instead of GPU and open source it.

American warships have the latest, coolest, highest-tech tactical weaponry imaginable - which is great until you have to fend off 10,000 consumer/wal-mart/IED grade drones at $2mm/clip.

Money is amazing, but if you lean on it too heavily in lieu of _practical_ innovation, it'll bite you in the ass. The apocryphal story of the Soviet Rocket scientist who suggested using a pencil instead of investing 100k in a space pen that worked in 0g's.

[robocat]

  NASA wanted to avoid pencils because the lead could easily break off and float away, creating a hazard to astronauts and sensitive electronics on the spacecraft In fact, a pencil is such an impractical alternative in space that cosmonauts also have been using Space Pens since 1969

https://spinoff.nasa.gov/space-pens

You don't want conductive graphite particles shorting out electronics nor do you want flammable dust or wood flakes.

Good engineers learn to smell out simple but wrong answers.

[lr1970]

> You don't want conductive graphite particles shorting out electronics nor do you want flammable dust or wood flakes.

For decades mechanical pencils use non-conducting polymer based refills that eliminate the problem you mention.

[robocat]

Polymer leads were invented by the Japanese late 50's.

Pentel use manga (漫画 whimsical/informal drawings) to write the history of a burnt rice ball being the inspiration: https://pentel.ca/docs/e_manga.pdf (page 7 with the title "Pentel's Sharp Pencil Refills").

Previously there were clutch pencils using the historical fired clay and graphite https://www.bl.uk/stories/blogs/posts/the-history-of-the-pen...

As usual Germans claim inventing it first https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/the-european-t... ). Why are there no teutonic Space Pencil jokes?

[JeremyNT]

> Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide.

I think it's easy for China to be more open right now (and Western governments to essentially not worry about it yet) because they're playing catchup.

If we reach some endpoint where American models stop improving for the general public and only party apparatchiks and sycophantic oligarchs can access them, the situation is different. Chinese models could exceed the publicly available SOTA, and surely they would close off their own models in the same way.