This is frequently stated as a goal of the 5D chess but it is ridiculous if you think about it. China is not buying oil and gas from Russia at discount rates (and had been for quite a while). They haven't performed blood rites with Venezuela that force them to only get oil from Venezuela. They can buy it from anybody who is willing to sell. Even if you sink the Middle East into the ocean they will still be able to buy oil from others, albeit at much higher prices.
So no, this is not a strategic target, unless you actually want to attrition them to bankruptcy with oil prices. But this path is and should be very unpopular with regular citizens.
A common thing is to lump things together like a tech tree. Is it possible to conceive of a world where nuclear power is invented but not nuclear weapons? Combustion engines but not let everyone have a car and then cause cities to be planned around cars?
I don't think so? It's very common in both large companies and small startups where pragmatism has a higher priority than so called elegance or whatever you call it the "artisan" feel. It's varying shades of "perfect is the enemy of good", where different cultures and business environments dictate how much a manager is going to tolerate your proposed refactoring. At least that's what I got from the parent lost.
Also quite common for me is like someone says X is good (usually a PM) but common sense says it's crap, and when you actually ask the user they also say it's crap. If only LLMs could email a bunch of people for second opinions.
That's actually kind of very similar to a passage in Zhuang Zi (ancient Chinese philosopher). He recounts this tale about a king and a wheel maker. The wheel maker asks what the king is doing, and the king proclaims he is reading. The wheel maker then goes on to inform the king how those books are just the trash of the ancients, and how he could not teach his son how to make a proper wheel, and the art "comes from the hand and is met by the heart". So anything that can be put down in books is certainly not true wisdom.
It also coincides with the Taoist philosophy (and actually somewhat Buddhist) of learning through actions and not speech. The most famous (if I recall the story correctly) of the Buddha teaching his disciples by smiling and twirling around a flower.
Kind of fascinating that these faraway places kind of arrived at the same ideas. Independently or not I think nobody would know but it does not matter.
It's just too much 5D chess to be possible. Government spending billions into AI companies and pressuring them to open source at a hope at denting openAI and co? Why not just pour the cash into electric cars or steel where there's a guaranteed return? It's just absurd.
He was definitely duped by Benny. Him underestimating was part of the dupe. He did not just come up with this shit on his own. Someone fed it to him, and it's most likely Benny. And he slurped it all up. And yes, he made the decision, this is well documented. You can't just push the blame onto advisors. In that case Hitler would be innocent, he could just shove everything on his mad advisors.
I have no source for this but I feel like the environment thing is too frequently repeated (also without any evidence). They're pumping out solar like mad and places like the Xinjiang deserts actually have nowhere to put their excess electricity from what I've read previously.
They also have a "cancel" culture pointed at the right place, in that whenever there is some exposé of some xyz it usually does get some reaction from the authorities. Even if in the end no real punishment is meted out due to corruption or politics or cover ups the very least is that the perps gave to change a hiding spot. Which is very much unlike the datacenter gas turbines running in people's backyards in the US right now.
Furthermore if you take a look at the Politburo meetings and political documents etc it is clear that Xi is actively trying to solve the environmental problem. In the latest people's meeting it was also a talking point. It is a matter of "face" for them at this point. Contrast with "drill baby drill"?
It is easy to talk about the "environmental" problems in China but I think it is very last decade.
As a disclaimer I live in Asia and I frequently visit China but I'm not Chinese nor do I get any so called "social credits" which actually don't exist in China. The information gap between what the west thinks they know about China and what it actually is is sometimes kind of just a huge joke.
The more you evolve I guess there's more surface area to evolve on. Similarly cavemen could only do so much. But today you can take a degree in physics, art, history, etc. and it's probably impossible for one person to know all that ever was and is. But it's possible for a caveman shaman to know everything the tribe knew up to that point. Probably. So while it's harder to make progress there's also a lot more places you can progress.
I've actually heard it quite a few times from different people who want to climb the greasy pole to get heard or resources. Idk it just seems rather soulless and slightly psycho to me. It also seems like that kind of system is rather broken and unstable, if the only way you get impact is to climb up the ladder and whatever that entails.
Change this from humans to companies and I still think it feels slightly wrong.
This is just silly. Deepseek has published so much regarding speeding up and making cheaper inference and people are still harping on the government subsidies thing.
So what's all the project Stargate stuff? Subsidies only work when China is doing it?
Deepseek is actively sacrificing performance for cost, which is very clear in their latest model releases. They are not attempting to get to number 1 in benchmarks, and they say it clearly in their own publications.
Furthermore, being open weight, anyone can sell qwen and deepseek compute, not just Ali and deepseek themselves.