From the scaling-pilled perspective, or even just centrist AI perspective, this is an insane position: it is taking a L on one of, if not the most, important future technological capabilities, which in the long run may win or lose wars.
Are you suggesting that the sane policy is for Xi to dump in as much subsidies as needed until China catches up in semiconductors with the US and its allies? I haven’t seen anyone else argue this, and it seems implausible to me, given that the latter collectively has much greater financial and scientific/engineering resources. China’s GDP is only $18T vs $58T for OECD, and as you say there’s a lot more corruption/fraud in Chinese R&D, so how can they hope to win an outright tech race (and starting from about a decade behind)?
Are you suggesting that the sane policy is for Xi to dump in as much subsidies as needed until China catches up in semiconductors with the US and its allies? I haven’t seen anyone else argue this
Yes. And perhaps no one else does because they aren’t scaling proponents. But from a scaling perspective, accepting a permanent straitjacket around GPUs & a tightened noose is tantamount to admitting defeat & abandoning the future to other countries; it’d be like expelling all your Jewish scientists in 1935 & banning the mining of uranium. It’s not the beginning of any story that ends in victory & being #1, only of stories that end with you being #10, or #100. Like the Manhattan Project, you pay whatever it costs, and it costs what it costs.
so how can they hope to win an outright tech race (and starting from about a decade behind)?
Well, it’s certainly not easy. It’s not a great situation for China to be in, and yet, it is in fact the one they are in, and they have to deal with it. Reality has no obligation to make anything easy for you, nor should you expect something like ‘dethrone the global hyperpower and create a new world order around the Middle Kingdom’ to be easy. Similarly, it’s not easy to defeat a Russian or Chinese invasion, nor was it easy to develop atomic bombs, etc, but if you don’t, there will be consequences you may find unacceptable—even, existential, one might say—so you don’t get much of a choice. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
China has a lot of resources yet untapped, both financial and otherwise, and is doing many other things like stimulating other sectors of the economy, so clearly it can try more than it is right now—but it appears not to be. If it’s not a capability issue, then it must be a choice. Xi seems to disagree that the consequences of choosing to accept defeat in chips & AI will be all that unacceptable, and my comment here is about thinking through what the strategic logic could be from his perspective which makes that choice an acceptable one because the the chip race game is not worth the candle.
I agree with Rob Bensinger’s response here, plus it’s just a really weird use of “insane”, like saying that Japan would have been insane not to attack Pearl Harbor after the US imposed an oil embargo on them, because “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Thinking that way only makes sense if becoming a world or regional hegemon was your one and only goal, but how did that become the standard for sanity of world leaders around here?
It’s not a weird use. It is a completely normal one: becoming the hegemon is the avowed goal and so making choices which drop the odds of success so drastically raise questions about the thought process, which in this case I find much better explained by simply mistaken beliefs and desires on Xi’s part combined with ordinary sanity. I have already explained at length why I think those beliefs are mistaken, and I also think the desires are bad: do I think China (in the sense of its population as a whole) is better off for Xi’s powerhunger, or that China would be better off for launching a scaling Manhattan Project? Certainly not: in my opinion, Xi’s reign has made the Chinese people substantially worse off than they would have been under a more status quo leader, and Xi has probably single-handedly curtailed their long-term growth prospects & condemned them to permanent middle income status as they begin to enter a Japan-style malaise, in addition to authoritarian disasters like the Uighurs. But many Chinese believe otherwise now, and endorse further questing for hegemony, and they & Xi are in charge, not you, and desire what they desire, not what you desire—you (and Rob) are projecting your own preferences and moralizing here, instead of trying to understand what is going on.
so making choices which drop the odds of success so drastically
I wouldn’t say “drastically” here so maybe this is the crux. I think the chances of success if China does make an all out push for semiconductors is very low given its own resources and likely US and allies’ responses (e.g. they could collectively way outspend China on their own subsidies). I could express this as <1% chance of having a world leading semi fab 10 years from now and <5% chance 20 years from now, no matter what China chooses to do at this point. If hegemony was the only goal then even a 1% chance would be worth it, but “drastically” makes me think maybe that’s not what you’re saying. These are off the cuff numbers so I’m pretty open to changing my mind about them, but seem reasonable given what I know about China’s research capabilities and what it took for the world to reach its current level of semiconductor technology.
Separately from gwern’s argument, I say that maintaining the gap is still of vital national interest. As an example, one of the arguments in favor of nuclear testing bans is that it unilaterally favors American nuclear supremacy, because only the US has the computational resources to conduct simulations good enough to be used in engineering new weapons.
That logic was applied to Russia, but the same logic applies to China: advanced simulations are useful for almost every dimension of military competition. If they let advanced compute go, that means that the US will be multiple qualitative generations ahead in terms of our ability to simulate, predict, and test-without-risk.
This is a terrible position to be in, geopolitically.
Are you suggesting that the sane policy is for Xi to dump in as much subsidies as needed until China catches up in semiconductors with the US and its allies? I haven’t seen anyone else argue this, and it seems implausible to me, given that the latter collectively has much greater financial and scientific/engineering resources. China’s GDP is only $18T vs $58T for OECD, and as you say there’s a lot more corruption/fraud in Chinese R&D, so how can they hope to win an outright tech race (and starting from about a decade behind)?
Yes. And perhaps no one else does because they aren’t scaling proponents. But from a scaling perspective, accepting a permanent straitjacket around GPUs & a tightened noose is tantamount to admitting defeat & abandoning the future to other countries; it’d be like expelling all your Jewish scientists in 1935 & banning the mining of uranium. It’s not the beginning of any story that ends in victory & being #1, only of stories that end with you being #10, or #100. Like the Manhattan Project, you pay whatever it costs, and it costs what it costs.
Well, it’s certainly not easy. It’s not a great situation for China to be in, and yet, it is in fact the one they are in, and they have to deal with it. Reality has no obligation to make anything easy for you, nor should you expect something like ‘dethrone the global hyperpower and create a new world order around the Middle Kingdom’ to be easy. Similarly, it’s not easy to defeat a Russian or Chinese invasion, nor was it easy to develop atomic bombs, etc, but if you don’t, there will be consequences you may find unacceptable—even, existential, one might say—so you don’t get much of a choice. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
China has a lot of resources yet untapped, both financial and otherwise, and is doing many other things like stimulating other sectors of the economy, so clearly it can try more than it is right now—but it appears not to be. If it’s not a capability issue, then it must be a choice. Xi seems to disagree that the consequences of choosing to accept defeat in chips & AI will be all that unacceptable, and my comment here is about thinking through what the strategic logic could be from his perspective which makes that choice an acceptable one because the the chip race game is not worth the candle.
I agree with Rob Bensinger’s response here, plus it’s just a really weird use of “insane”, like saying that Japan would have been insane not to attack Pearl Harbor after the US imposed an oil embargo on them, because “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Thinking that way only makes sense if becoming a world or regional hegemon was your one and only goal, but how did that become the standard for sanity of world leaders around here?
It’s not a weird use. It is a completely normal one: becoming the hegemon is the avowed goal and so making choices which drop the odds of success so drastically raise questions about the thought process, which in this case I find much better explained by simply mistaken beliefs and desires on Xi’s part combined with ordinary sanity. I have already explained at length why I think those beliefs are mistaken, and I also think the desires are bad: do I think China (in the sense of its population as a whole) is better off for Xi’s powerhunger, or that China would be better off for launching a scaling Manhattan Project? Certainly not: in my opinion, Xi’s reign has made the Chinese people substantially worse off than they would have been under a more status quo leader, and Xi has probably single-handedly curtailed their long-term growth prospects & condemned them to permanent middle income status as they begin to enter a Japan-style malaise, in addition to authoritarian disasters like the Uighurs. But many Chinese believe otherwise now, and endorse further questing for hegemony, and they & Xi are in charge, not you, and desire what they desire, not what you desire—you (and Rob) are projecting your own preferences and moralizing here, instead of trying to understand what is going on.
I wouldn’t say “drastically” here so maybe this is the crux. I think the chances of success if China does make an all out push for semiconductors is very low given its own resources and likely US and allies’ responses (e.g. they could collectively way outspend China on their own subsidies). I could express this as <1% chance of having a world leading semi fab 10 years from now and <5% chance 20 years from now, no matter what China chooses to do at this point. If hegemony was the only goal then even a 1% chance would be worth it, but “drastically” makes me think maybe that’s not what you’re saying. These are off the cuff numbers so I’m pretty open to changing my mind about them, but seem reasonable given what I know about China’s research capabilities and what it took for the world to reach its current level of semiconductor technology.
Separately from gwern’s argument, I say that maintaining the gap is still of vital national interest. As an example, one of the arguments in favor of nuclear testing bans is that it unilaterally favors American nuclear supremacy, because only the US has the computational resources to conduct simulations good enough to be used in engineering new weapons.
That logic was applied to Russia, but the same logic applies to China: advanced simulations are useful for almost every dimension of military competition. If they let advanced compute go, that means that the US will be multiple qualitative generations ahead in terms of our ability to simulate, predict, and test-without-risk.
This is a terrible position to be in, geopolitically.