> 17.7 per cent of GPUs allocated to serve only 1.35 per cent of requests in Alibaba Cloud’s marketplace, the researchers found
Instead of 1192 GPUs they now use 213 for serving those requests.
I guess I’d assumed this sort of thing would be allocated dynamically. Of course, there’s a benefit to minimizing the number of times you load a model. But surely if a GPU+model is idle for more than a couple minutes it could be freed?
(I’m not an AI guy, though—actually I’m used to asking SLURM for new nodes with every run I do!)
If you're using an efficient inference engine like VLLM, you're adding compilation into the mix, and not all of that is fully cached yet.
If that kind of latency isn't acceptable to you, you have to keep the models loaded.
This (along with batching) is why large local models are a dumb and wasteful idea if you're not serving them at enterprise scale.
That's an eternity for a request. I highly doubt they will timeout any model they serve.
> That's an eternity for a request. I highly doubt they will timeout any model they serve.
That's what easing functions are for.Let's say 10 GPUs are in use. You keep another 3 with the model loaded. If demand increases slowly you slowly increase your headroom. If demand increases rapidly, you also increase rapidly.
The correct way to do this is more complicated and you should model based on your usage history, but if you have sufficient headroom then very few should be left idle. Remember that these models do requests in batches.
If they don't timeout models, they're throwing money down the drain. Though that wouldn't be uncommon.
Here's a quote from the paper above:
> Given a list of M models to be served, our goal is to minimize the number of GPU instances N required to meet the SLOs for all models through auto-scaling, thus maximizing resource usage. The strawman strategy, i.e., no auto-scaling at all, reserves at least one dedicated instance for each model, leading to N = O(M)
For example, Qwen2 72b is rarely used these days. And yet it will take up 2 of their H20 gpus (with 96GB VRAM) to serve, at the bare minimum, assuming that they don't quantize the BF16 down to FP8 (and I don't think they would, although other providers probably would). And then there's other older models, like the Qwen 2.5, Qwen 2, Qwen 1.5, and Qwen 1 series models. They all take up VRAM if the endpoint is active!
Alibaba cannot easily just timeout these models from VRAM, even if they only get 1 request per hour.
That's the issue. Their backlog of models take up a large amount of VRAM, and yet get ZERO compute most of the time! You can easily use an easing function to scale up from 2 gpus to 200 gpus, but you cannot ever timeout the last 2 gpus that's serving the model.
If you read the paper linked above, it's actually quite interesting how Alibaba goes and solves this problem.
Meanwhile on the other hand, Deepseek solves the issue by just saying "fuck you, we're serving only our latest model and you can deal with it". They're pretty pragmatic about it at least.
I'd have to play with the configuration and load calcs, but I'm sure there's a low param, neat solution to the request/service problem.
At the scale of a hyperscaler I think Alibaba is the one that would be doing that. AWS, Azure and I assume Alibaba do lease/rent data centers, but someone has to own the servers / GPU racks. I know there are specialized companies like nscale (and more further down the chain) in the mix, but I always assumed they only lease out fixed capacity.
I've assumed that as well. It makes sense to me since loading up a model locally takes a while. I wonder if there is some sort of better way I'm not in the know about. That or too GPU poor to know about.
It's likely that these are small unpopular (non flagship) models, or that they only pack eg one layer of each model.
"A paper presented at SOSP 2025 details how token-level scheduling helped one GPU serve multiple LLMs, reducing demand from 1,192 to 213 H20s."
Which, if you scale it, matches the GPs statement.
14.5% is worth a raise at least. But it’s still misleading.
thanks to the US restrictions on semiconductor industry (Chinese), Chinese engineers are being forced to innovate and find their own ways to overcome challenges like the old school engineers (What Silicon Valley used to be)
That said, I'm not sure what the US policies specifically have to do with this. Countries are always in competition with one another, and if one industry or technology is considered a national security threat they will guard it.
> However, a small handful of models such as Alibaba’s Qwen and DeepSeek are most popular for inference, with most other models only sporadically called upon. This leads to resource inefficiency, with 17.7 per cent of GPUs allocated to serve only 1.35 per cent of requests in Alibaba Cloud’s marketplace, the researchers found.
In many senses there's hubris in the western* view of China accomplishments: most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.
---
* I hate the term "western" because some "westeners" use it to separated what they think are "civilized" from "uncivilized", hence for them LATAM is not "western" even though everything about LATAM countries is western.
While I don't disagree with your overall point, it's important to recognize that this is only a phenomenon of the last ~30 years, and to avoid falling into the trapn of Han racial chauvinism. E.g. there were ~no Chinese scientists in Germany in the 70s but they were heavily innovating nevertheless.
Consequently newer tech is precisely where global cooperation is most required so no country can really do it by themselves. We could even say no country, western or otherwise, has been doing it on their own for the past 500 years or so but alas...
It’s funny - it’s at the point with Chinese manufacturing for niche electronic goods (e.g rooftop van air conditioner) where some Chinese brands are more trustworthy - more value for your money and sometimes even better overall quality. With American brands you gotta make sure you’re not overpaying for dated tech that is inefficient. Maybe the same will happen with LLMs.
Enterprises often prefer having US based support and so can prefer US or European machines that have that supply chain setup.
Dream on ...
Preventing that could have been prevented in the 70s, 80s, 90s by stopping offshoring, blocking student visas, and prosecuting IP theft.
It is not possible to keep core IP secret. HN folks, of all people, should know this. Anything that thousands of people know is de facto public knowledge.
Talent is proportional to population, but that only matters if society and state has the infrastructure to raise that talent up. Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.
The reason why these statements are not true is because of colonization, delayed industrialization, and Western intervention post-independence. Getting out of this “quicksand” is exceedingly difficult.
China did well to industrialize quickly and keep intervention at bay - in fact, you could argue that it making the rest of the world reliant on its industrial capacity helped address the intervention problem.
Imperialism (as a system of extracting wealth from poor countries) continues to exist, but China has a working countermeasure. You can see similar with Vietnam.
Japan pre-45 was a world power, and had industrialized by the early 1900s. WW2 was a mere setback.
Korea is more of a “miracle” than Japan was, but they also did well to industrialize ASAP. They also didn’t face the brunt of European colonialism.
But they faced the brunt of Chinese & Japanese colonialism, and a full-blown civil war after which their GDP per capita was in the same ballpark as Kenya's.
China made the right choice to dump a ton of resources into different industries without the expectation of immediate RoI or any RoI at all. Anyone or anything that got in the way of their goals were dealt with.
>students would have just gone to other countries, written their PhD dissertations there, advanced another country’s tech sector,
which other countries specifically? No other country has a tech sector. It's the US hegemony or the China hegemony.
I do not think they need permission. There is no force that could order country to recognize IP. Do you really expect all world forever pay rent to few giant corps?
You're talking about recognizing IP, I am talking about stealing IP AND selling stolen IP in our markets.
1st: yes force can be used to discourage the theft of IP. This is merely an obstacle, not a total blocker 2nd: yes force can be used to block IP from our markets. This is actually incredibly trivial and would have been very easy 40-years ago.
If country does not recognize IP then "stealing" is not a theft in their eyes.
As for using force to prevent "theft": what force? Military? You might get burned really bad.
That was the original message. My understanding of "our markets" was customers of the US which include the US itself, China and many other countries. Sure the US can prohibit importing of China's goods. It can not control what happens in the rest of the world to the degree that it once could.
The elites thought they'd set up shop in a new, gigantic consumer market and reap the rewards. So they got Clinton to spend his last days in office lobbying very aggressively for China's inclusion into the WTO.
China had different plans. Keeping the plunderers out (this time) was one of the smartest moves any nation has made in recorded history. Then the same elites slowly pivoted against China, post realizing they wouldn't be allowed to own China. If we can own you, you're our friend; if we can't own you, you're our enemy. And this is quite obviously not a defense of China's human rights record or anything else, that's not the point. China only mattered (in the enemy sense) when the elites realized they were going to be locked on the outside of the rise.
So... Seems that's exactly what they are getting.
I would characterize my recommendations as things that could have been done for the US to not fund or encourage the re-rise of China.
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research...
It’s notable that China did not adopt the same policy during the period you are associating with their rise. Indeed, they’ve taken the opposite stance in recent years and (now that they have stolen American IP) have moved to seize control of assets and expel the superfluous foreigners.
There is a lesson to be learned there, but it’s contrary to the argument you are trying to make.
Despite ample and repeated evidence that they can and, in China’s case, that they’re the best in the world in several areas of manufacturing.
It's worked for a very long time for aircraft.
China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline.
If for no technical reasons and purely political, COMAC may still be decades away from being able to fly to most of the world.
Likewise, in ~5 years, China may be able to build Chips that are as good as Nvidia after Nvidia's 90% profit margin - i.e. they are 1/10th as good for the price - but since they can buy them for cost - they're they same price for performance and good enough.
If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.
While you type this, the rest of the world is already using Chinese cars, something that was unthinkable a year or two ago.
The US has closed the market off from this for its auto industry to survive.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...
Because, as a EU citizen, I have never in my life seen any tests that carmarkers are advertising with that focus on pedestrians. I am regularly seeing tests that focus on occupants though, e.g. the Euro NCAP. But I am by no means an expert.
It would be hard to focus on pedestrian safety from a carmaker standpoint except for adding software features that recognize people in front of you and auto-brake or smth, which definitely is not the focus of the tests here. It may be a requirement though. The more I think about it, the more sure I am that you just made this up, sorry.
https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained...
How can a car focus on the safety of pedestrian? Does it detect a pedestrian and fly away like a drone?
Note that this happens at the same time the US is breaking up its own alliances, so as of this writing, there's no such thing as certainty about politics.
This isn't happening. The US is driving a harder bargain with our allies. No one serious thinks anyone is walking away from alliances with the US.
The question of “can we trust the American government” is now being asked more often. Existing alliances and new potential alliances face that question, whether or not you personally believe that they should trust America.
Even if no concrete actions are being performed with asking that question, the fact that question is even being asked is a major drop from where we were.
From the US perspective, we have been asking ourselves "can we trust Europe's military capacity" for a very long time and the answer (prior to 2025) was: NO.
With Trump on one side and Russia on the other, it seems like the answer has shifted to: MAYBE.
NATO's mutual defense clause has only been activated once: after 9/11, when the United States declared war on the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Out of the 3621 deaths of coalition soldiers, 1160 of them were from nations other than the United States, including 457 from the UK, 159 from Canada, and 90 from France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_casualties_in_Afghan...
2001 was 24 years ago. A lot has changed since then. Europe's militaries are much degraded and the threats are much enhanced.
When the US called its allies to its wars, NATO responded. Now that the rest of NATO is being threatened, the US is playing neutral, trying to see which side will bid highest for their help.
Obviously Wall Street would have preferred purchasing from US-listed/owned arms companies, but from the perspective of a military alliance, having well-armed allies is the main point.
It's really hard to argue with Trump's methods if they led to Europe finally spending on their own defense.
It's "block everything that depends on US clouds", which is a considerable downgrade (because you can't upload all mission parameters to an airplane without going through the cloud, and you can't use self-diagnosis features), but not entirely a kill switch. Close enough, though.
Proof of this happening or even having the capability of happening? There is none.
The EU is pumping money into what they call "digital sovereignty" left and right. Germany just cancelled their Microsoft subscriptions and replaced them with self-funded Open Source for Schleswig-Holstein, which is roughly 5% of all government employees. That's one hell of a trial run. Germany's "OpenDesk" and France’s "La Suite numérique" even made into the new "Franco-German Economic Agenda 2025", which self-describes as "bilateral coordination to full swing for a more sovereign Europe".
I mean, the current administration has repeatedly threatened to invade militarily two of its allies. Also, it has repeatedly threatened to not honor military agreements with most others, and both the current president and vice-president have insulted the leaders of several allied countries to their face.
Oh, and if that weren't sufficient, the current admin has unilaterally broken all trade treaties (alongside most intellectual property treaties) it held with its commercial partners.
The EU is slow at it, but it's no accident that everybody is doing their best to move away from US tech and military dependencies.
If you compromise on safety, you get something that is still suitable for the military. If you don't care about economics you can participate in the space race.
But for commercial air travel, you don't have the luxury to pick just two; a competitive commercial airliner has to perform exceedingly well in all three regards.
If you're an airline using expensive aircraft you will go bankrupt. If your aircraft is too slow then your competitors will eat your lunch, and if you have a reputation of being unsafe then your customers will run away or the government will pull the plug (likely both).
IMHO affordable commercial air travel is one of the biggest marvels of 20th century engineering.
This doesn't matter so much for military purposes: they can easily eat the cost of a higher maintenance and replacement schedule on a smaller number of military jets with fewer hours on them.
This gives them more iteration cycles, speeding their building up of experience. They're catching up. Industrial espionage will help them along too, but not as much as the experience from engineering their own designs.
See what I did there?
And both those planes have a strong dependency on "western" components that won't be overcome before the 2030s, and even then, they're around a generation behind.
Wait, really? I thought "international community" meant all countries.
Sometimes it's used in the expected way, but (more?) often, "international community" euphemistically refers to whomever is currently one of, or an ally of the above mentioned countries.
How is this hard to understand?
Broadly speaking coast de ivory and the like is not a participant in the international community.
I think it's ostensibly supposed to be more about shared cultural values, but even that is a pretty weak way to divide countries. Perhaps "an ally of the United States" is a little more accurate?
Any societal dividing line like this is bound to hit on problems once subjected to the real world.
Why would I do that tho? If we look at the names of scientists/researchers/engineers/businessmen, the conclusion would be that the US has contributed nothing to the world. Europeans did all the hard work!
Historically, top scientists/researchers/engineers/businessmen migrate from rest of the world to the US rather than to Europe or China.
Imagine if Europe or China were a bit more open with immigration and equally attractive, we would see the same pattern there too.
Also, isn't this the usual path to better computer science? Reducing computation needs by making better/more efficient algorithms? The whole "trillions of dollars of brute force GPU strength" proposed by Altman, Nadella, Musk et al just seems to reinforce that these are business people at heart, not engineers/computer scientists...
Mexico is a modern country, an industrialized country, a country that is exactly as "western" as the US or Canada. They have the same religious beliefs, speak a dialect of a European language. They have European style cities, a long history of cultural contributions. Yet they're not white enough to be part of "The West".
I think at this point we should be honest with ourselves in it's usage. 90% of the time it's a racist dog whistle.
The stuff you bring up ignore the power dynamics which are arguably the most important part.
You do realize that antagonizing people with nuclear weapons and the largest economies in the world rarely results in positive results, right?
Your first statement is not likely unique to China though, even though they have demonstrated that in about the last 40 years, which I don't really think qualifies as "history". What it does demonstrate is that societies that have a certain kind of ethnic self-respect and can cast off the detrimental influences of foreign, hostile, and even enemy elements to pursue their own self-interest and survival will succeed, regardless of hurdles placed before them.
It's really just a story of personal development and either escaping, evading, and avoiding detrimental, toxic people and their behaviors. All of humanity that all has to currently still share a single planet with ZERO save spots, would be better off if we all not just allowed each other to be ourselves in our won places without others subverting, subjugating, infiltrating, dominating, poisoning, or polluting any other people on the planet. Then everyone can decide if we want to be friends or not friends with each other, collaborate and be friendly or simply avoid each other. We do not have to like each other to get along if everyone agrees on a base understanding that no people can parasitize and abuse and manipulate any others.
China for sure will catch up, the question is what they will do with it. They're not ambitious like the US/West. The US wanted influence all over the world as an extension of the cold war and to keep economic interests safeguarded. But China just doesn't operate that way. They're more hands-off. They could be opening up alibaba cloud datacenters all over the US, offering it as an AWS/Azure alternative, funding tons of startups all over europe, the US,etc... to exert their influence, but they won't. They have a more long-term low-and-slow approach to global domination. The "100 year marathon" as they called it, which they'll win for sure.
China's greatest weakness is not just their lack of ambition,but their command-economy. They're doing capitalism but with central control of the economy. It intertwines government policy with corporate policy, making it harder to do business overseas (like with bytedance/tiktok).
Westernism is broadly an extension of the academic notion of classicism, starting in Egypt and then Greece Rome and into Europe and the Americas.
I don't think you can really produce a definite counterfactual that they would or wouldn't have taken longer or shorter without it, but certainly they were pushing for self sufficiency long before technology restrictions. But we're not going to be handing our technologies to our competitors on a silver platter, and it's also best for businesses to start weaning themselves off the Chiinese market. Virtually every market reliant on them today is in big trouble.
As for hubris, I think that's more a projection of your part if you want to start bringing up race cards with regards to contributions, that kind of argument would be applicable to everyone. And AI research is highly diverse and international, Chinese names don't dominate the list more than Turks, Greeks, Malaysians, etc.
Really? How long has China been attempting to build their own jet engines? How long have they been attempting to build competitive CPUs?
History has shown withholding tech successfully keeps them at least a generation behind the west.
In some fields like CPUs they “make up for it” by just building larger clusters, but ultimately history does not show what you’re claiming. The only thing it shows is that we need to be even more diligent in protecting IP because a large portion of their catching up is a direct result of stealing the tech they were cut off from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACAE_CJ-1000A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Manufacturing_In...
Huh? Did you read your own link? The jet engine that was shown at an aviation show as a non-functioning prototype in 2011, with hopes they'd have a functioning version by 2016, and in service by 2020 (it wasn't in service in 2020). Notice at the very top of your own article it says "still in development".
>CPU since 2000
That isn't remotely competitive, and at least a full generation behind.
Literally anyone can make a prototype jet engine. The metallurgy and process to make a functioning one is several orders of magnitude more difficult. Which is why... China still buys the vast, vast majority of their jet engines from Russia for military use. And their commercial passenger jets use engines from CFM.
Concepts that enable the individual should empower a chosen configuration of society not the other way around.
Contrast this with non westernism where either education of the individual is not valued or the state is the primary goal over the individual.
I’ve worked with states governments and individuals around the world for 20 years and find this very useful definition. What’s confusing is the nations who have half adopted westernism but don’t fully due to either caste systems or government dominated thinking.
It’s an arrow towards rationalism over tradition, individualism over collectivism, flatness over hierarchy, and future over past. But only the limit of the resources any given society has.
Aside from geography, attracting talent from all over the world is the one edge the US has a nation over countries like China. But now the US is trying to be xenophobic like China, restrict tech import/export like China but compete against 10x population and lack of similar levels of internal strife and fissures.
The world, even Europe is looking for a new country to take on a leader/superpower role. China isn't there yet, but it might get there in a few years after their next-gen fighter jets and catching up to ASML.
But, China's greatest weakness is their lack of ambition and focus on regional matters like Taiwan and south china sea, instead of winning over western europe and india.
That's a strength. Them not having interest in global domination and regime change other than their backyard is what allows them to easily make partners in Africa and LATAM, the most important regions for raw materials.
"while the CCP accuses the West of predatory interest rates, the average Chinese rescue loan carries an interest rate of about 5 percent, more than double the IMF’s standard 2 percent. As of Oct. 1, 2025, despite higher U.S. interest rates, the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights lending rate stands at only 3.41 percent, still significantly lower than what China charges struggling nations for so-called relief."
These countries paying these loans are the ones least able to pay them back, and at more than double IMF loans, they are really putting them in a vise.
You did the equivalent of showing some stat showing black and brown people do violence and crimes and saying “see how uncivilized they are” ignoring everything else.
I don't even know where to begin with that one.
It is a strength, if their goal is to have a stable and prosperous country long term, and that seems to be what they want. good for them. But nature abhors a vacuum, so there will always be an empire at the top of the food chain. Such empires want to maximize wealth for their people and secure them against threats, that's why invasions and exploitation of weaker countries happens. That game hasn't changed. Friendly relations work, until you need a lot of resources from a country that doesn't want to give it up. Or, like with the US, when they're opening up military bases next to your borders and you need a buffer state. Or, when naval blockades and sanctions are being enforced against your country for not complying with extra-sovereign demands.
History shows that countries content with what they have collapse or weaken very quickly.
China will have a population crisis in a few decades for example, and it won't have the large manufacturing base and its people will be too used to luxuries to go back to slaving for western countries for pennies. Keep in mind that the current china itself is so great and prosperous because of all the invasions it did against western china and satellite states like Vietnam and north Korea (the US isn't special in this regard).
The world has been bipolar and multipolar before in history, and it can be again. The unipolar period of American dominance is ending.
Without immigration, the US would have faced the same problems.
I can’t tell whether you think the anti-immigration stance is a good thing or bad thing.
You still can’t become a Chinese citizen. You can come to USA or Europe and build a life for yourself. While some people go to China to make some money for a few years you can’t really build a life. So I think US and Europe will still attract talent long term, and I don’t think you can discount that. China used to have the benefit of low cost labor, but that’s going away. What do they have to offer when that’s gone?
Chinas population isn’t 10x. It’s 4x. If you believe the numbers (the idea that local governments over report is not a fringe theory).
But it’s really only the wealthy coastal regions that matters in this comparison, and in that regard the population sizes are much closer. Yeah they can exploit cheap labor from the poor interior. But the US is doing something similar in some ways with central/southern America. The Hukou system means that China does act like a bunch of separate states in many regards, rather than one truly unified country.
My point was, the non-immigrant birth-rate is very low, so arguably the US should have arrived at the same demographic crisis as japan, china and south korea. Not only that, immigrants attend college at a much higher rate than native-born too.
Also, the U.S. has a fertility edge over China, which skilled immigrants do not contribute to. The birth rate of the groups comprising most skilled immigrants (Asians) is very low, much lower than for other Americans.
Skilled immigrants may not contribute to birth rate much, but immigrants as a whole contribute to the workforce across the spectrum. More working age people means less demand for unskilled labor, more demand for skilled labor and more competition for higher achievements to qualify for skilled work.
There are millions of phd's and super-talented engineers, but it is a small percentage of those that actually innovate and invent new things. And for them to do that, you need a corporate/commercial sector funding it. Even someone flipping burgers at mcdonalds is a consumer contributing to economic activity, which in turn contributes to funding competitive R&D and risk taking.
Simply having lots of people and free schools won't do much on its own. You need R&D funded, you need companies and the government itself to invest in risky scientific endeavors. Highly skilled jobs need to pay well. For example, there is a metric crapton of talent in Europe that flocks to the US for the pay alone, even though most of them hate it here. Even Candian pay across the border is dismal. That's why Europe doesn't have Nvidias, Intels, Googles,etc..
This very site alone belongs to US venture capitalists which are a product of capital available, a pipeline of educated labor domestically as well as immigrants. The products and services companies sell is mostly funded by consumers buying things, they can buy those things because they have jobs that pay well. The guy who flips burgers at mcdonalds buys a nintendo switch, the help desk worker nvidia gpus,etc... if your population is too old, those things don't happen, old people conserve money and their economic activity doesn't go as far.
Have you heard of the vitality curve? It's how in virtually everything involving human contribution, 10-20% carry the "thing" 10-20% are detrimental to it and everyone in between is needed to keep it from crumbling. I believe that's why performance reviews are always in quintiles. Either way, I don't know if the top 10% that give the US an advantage are immigrants, but some of them for sure. and a lot of the papers I'm seeing from the US in recent years have not been from US sounding names. But the middle 60% or so, it doesn't matter where they're from, you need enough people that are skilled and competent to keep the ship afloat.
If all the variables are the same, China has more people so it wins by default. The US however can attract talent from all over the world for the top 10% talent and have them compete. I don't know the stats but let's say 95% of educated people are native born. That still doesn't mean the competition for top jobs is adequate. To compete with China, the US's top 10% talent must have more quality to make up for the lack of quantity. Quality isn't measured by numbers and it isn't a product of random lack you can improve by increasing quantity. it's a product of competition and the incentives and rewards at the end, which includes compensation but more than that - the quality of life money affords.
In other words, whether immigrants are smarter or not, they can either contribute to the economy by being good and reliable consumers and laborers that create more economic activity and drive the demand and opportunities for skilled work, or, they can drive up the compeition for skilled work, driving up quality.
What you have in the US, is a lot of educated people are into things like health care these days, because that's where the demand is. Even immigrants. But in east asia, it's much worse, they do needs lots more health care workers and care givers for the elderly, which even there, they're using more and more immigrants.
The bulk importing of immigrants only serves to stabilize the economy. The importing of educated immigrants and workers (Most of YC would collapse without H-1B lol) drives competition and increases quality (innovation,inventiveness,etc..).
You can have more americans, even have more americans attend more college. But you can't kick out americans that refuse to pursue education or are content with mediocrity. You can filter out immigrants by telling them they don't have enough education or money (we've been doing this for a long time in the US), but you can't do that with natural born americans.
If you work in tech, this should be of no surprise to you.
Do I infer correctly that you believe that China has less internal strife and fissures than the US has?
How can they have international hegemony before they clear their regional order? China is more interested in aligning Taiwan than invading; though it’ll probably invade if it can’t align it diplomatically.
China is probably not interested in continuing the current Western-style order but to implement their own sino-stuff. At least with the CCP at the helm.
They're all over Africa and south Asia. But unlike the US/West they don't exert political influence. When they build infrastructure for example, they set up worker camps, isolated from the local population. they only employ their own imported people and clean up and leave quietly afterwards.
They're acting like good business partners, instead of a superpower wielding it's might and extending its influence. it's good for business for all involved parties for sure, and smart too. But not having strong influence means for example, the US can come in, outbid them, bail out african loans to China and they lose that source of commerce.
But, the value illegal immigrants bring to the US economy cannot be understated. Purely from a economic standpoint, illegal immigrants are a huge asset. There are other portions of the population that are largely a liability.
It's not like illegal immigrants are taking skilled work americans could be doing. And let's be honest, even without illegal immigrants, a lot of unskilled work will be replaced by AI/automation.
I personally, have no problem against humane and lawful enforcement of immigration laws. But given that it is a determent to the economy, perhaps more serious and concerning crimes should be enforced? Perhaps the targets should be employers of illegal immigrants? Perhaps zip tying children and locking them in cages and denying them basic hygiene is not the right approach? I think the details is where it gets controversial, most sane people would agree that laws should be enforced.
China has an import ban on chips [1] so its irrelevant what the US does.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/17/nvidia-ceo-disappointed-afte...
Only in response to the US banning the export of the high-end GPUs China wanted. The import ban is the Chinese government burning the the landing ships, it clearly communicates to everyone that there is no going back, and total commitment is expected.
The point still stands that the US instigated the split.
The streets are flooded with cheap Chinese cars and I see more BYD than American cars. If the car wasn't made in Japan or Korea which probably account for most of the cars, it was likely made in China. Moreover, I haven't been in countries with the closest ties to China.
This isn't surprising in any way, American "cars" (quotes because the vast majority of what American manufacturers pump out isn't cars, it's trucks) haven't been competitive in decades. The only globally competitive vehicles were developed in Europe by GM Europe (Opel, since sold to PSA now Stellantis) or Ford Europe (which axed all models bar the Puma). The rest is too big, expensive and inefficient from the vast majority of uses. Tariffs and good marketing keep American car manufacturers in business in the US, but those don't work in most other markets.
The more appropriate comparison is with European automakers such as VW Group, Stellantis (Peugeot, Citroën, DS, Fiat, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram), Renault. And there too BYD is winning as well in mosy countries, but at least there's a comparison possible.
It's like trying to level your MMORPG character to 100 by only farming in lvl 30-40 mob areas. It's really not worth it and mostly forced.
Take Renault for example, their Renault 5 and 4 EVs are good looking, not luxury but definitely premium, and the 5 sedan starts at 30k€; the 4 crossover starts at 29k€. This is before a 5k€ government subsidy. Their boring, fewer bells and whistles, low cost model, the Dacia Spring, starts at 17k€. The Renault 5 and 4 are made almost entirely in France, while the Dacia is made in Romania - a lower cost country, but still an EU member state.
The comparable in size and autonomy BYD Dolphin starts at 20k€. Both for cheapness and quality/design, Renault are competitive.
They really nailed the modern-with-subtle-calls-to-retro look.
Bit of an absurd car, but the modern (non-turbo) 5's slight bumps over the rear wheels are such a good callback to the Turbo (the original Renault 5 were basically all flat).
Really fine design stuff IMO.
Japan eventually stopped that role and their products improved greatly.
go to 2024, western labs were crushing it.
it's now 2025, and from china, we have deepseek, qwen, kimi, glm, ernie and many more capable models keeping up with western labs. there are actually now more chinese labs releasing sota models than western labs.
They are lauded for the ability to cost ratio, or their ability to parameter ratio, but virtually everyone using LLMs for productive work are using ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude.
They are kind of like Huffy bicycles. Good value, work well, but if you go to any serious event, no one will be riding one.
This aligns with the benchmarks as well; they benchmark great for what they are, but still bottom of the barrel when competing for "state of the art."
And yes, it's great you daily Chinese models, but the vast majority of people try them, say "impressive", then go back to the most performant models.
while qwen, deepseek and kimi are opensourced and good, they are preferred because of their insane token ratio, they use a lot less for more, but a by product is that they are less accurate it is amazing progress by the chinese companies, but they definitely can improve a lot more
does it really feel like they have a chance to recover all the expenses in the future?
crypto grifters pivoted to ai and, same as last time, normal people don’t want to have anything to do with them.
considering the amount of money burned on this garbage, i think we can at least declare a looser.
What exactly is Huawei's flagship series anyway? Because their PanGu line is open-weight, but Huawei is as of yet not in the LLM making business, their models are only meant to signal that it's possible to do training and inference on their hardware, that's all. No one actually uses those models.
China has plenty of R&D and science now.
1. https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...
2. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/06/12/...
Frankly I'm not surprised that this is done, probably if US was so behind it would have done the same to reduce the gap. Everyone is trying to survive and outsmart and outwit the other, instead of collaborating.
Also during World War I the American government seized German chemical patents thereby launching the American chemical industry. So that is an example of theft by the state apparatus.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/the-spies-who-...
https://yawboadu.substack.com/p/stealing-success-how-ip-thef...
https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/07/05/americas-industrial-revolu...
I used to follow the ones from Western companies, but honestly, after some point in time, I would like to see some cases from what I consider is a good benchmark for everyone that does not work in FAANG in terms of engineering.
I would also assume there's a lot of content in the native Chinese forums, which unfortunately, as an English-speaking person, I wouldn't be able to easily refer to :(
[1] https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/how-does-alibaba-ensure-th...
> Our current deployment runs in a cross-region cluster comprising 213 H20 GPUs, serving twenty-eight 1.8–7B models (TP=1) and nineteen 32–72B models (TP=4).
So, definitely not state media, probably not lying on the fundamentals. Of course, still presumably viewed favorably by the CCP, I'd imagine.
Can anybody independently verify any of this?
I think I was more referring to general abundance of credulity that is thrown at all AI stories at HN. There are a lot of skeptics when an Ed Zitron blog is shared. But every time a "ChatGPT was worried about being shut down" story is shared, it gets hundreds of upvotes. This story is just as ridiculous. AliBaba claims to reduce usage of equipment from a business that is being banned by their government. Magically. And during a trade war.
The fact that your comment appears to defend the US position, by virtue of attacking a press release from a major non-US competitor by questioning its source.
> This story is just as ridiculous. AliBaba claims to reduce usage of equipment from a business that is being banned by their government. Magically. And during a trade war.
When you have a nuanced argument, it is good to speak plainly (without snark) and proactively bring that evidence. That is, start out with "I doubt the veracity of this story because XYZ involved people have ABC motivation to fabricate it", and actively try to make a case that would convince someone who doesn't already see things your way.
It only appears that way because you see the world through a simplistic bipolar lens.
> Everything they do must either be a lie or just stolen American technology
as an aviation enthusiast for 30+ years this claim , while deliberately blunt, is not far from the truth -- the truth being that half of their hardware was stolen Russian design, too.
Let's consider : The KJ-600, the J-31, J-10, H-6, Z-20, J-7, J-15, J-11.
If it isn't a direct shape-to-shape knockoff like the J-31 it's either a licensed reproduction from Russia or something derived from a reverse engineering effort like the Su-33 prototype they got from Ukraine. Similar story with their Ghost Bat knockoffs.
There are very few novel designs. I'm not faulting the methodology -- the shape of the thing w.r.t. aircraft is half (if not more) of the struggle.
It's a tremendous advantage to start from a known good shape and go from there. If I were the boss I would do exactly the same thing when trying to bootstrap an aerospace industry.
>as if there's something inherently special about Americans that no one else has.
the US has proven numerous times that this is exactly the case.
Of course China has copied foreign technologies, I didn't say they haven't. My point is that you guys love to hang on to that as an excuse to dismiss everything from China even when they're obviously plenty capable of doing R&D in many fields, even with it having gotten its start off "stolen" IP.
America "stole" plenty of rocket technology from Germany, yet it's well understood that they eventually innovated on it and made it their own. But somehow whenever China's involved, you guys come out with your unsubtle bigotry.