“Letter from Shanghai: Reflections on China in 2024—#73 § Culture of Science in China & AI Arms Races”, 2024-11-21 (; backlinks; similar):
[commentary] …I’m recording this episode from my hotel room in Shanghai, overlooking People’s Square. And for those of you who follow me on Twitter or who heard the last episode of Manifold, you know that I’ve been on a fairly lengthy trip in China. The last episode I recorded was entitled, “Letter from Beijing”.
…In talking to the Chinese professors, Chinese academia has gone through a big expansion as the country’s gotten richer in the last decades. And so it’s gone from being sort of behind the rest of the world, trying to catch up quickly, able to train in the past the situations they could train students to a sort of bachelor’s, master’s level so that they could then come out, say, to the United States or the West and finish their PhDs. But they couldn’t really train students to the actual frontier of, research frontier of knowledge here in China, or at least maybe in most of China except just a couple of exceptional universities.
[Reaching frontiers] That’s all changed now. So if you go to a reasonably good Chinese university, you’ll meet people in physics, for example, I can tell, and definitely in other fields like engineering and more applied sciences… You’ll find many, many research groups that are at the frontier, that are following all the publications of you know, researchers all over the world, and they understand them, and they’re pushing, they’re making their contributions. They may not be the best university in the world, like the research group there might not be as good as the one at MIT or Caltech or ETH Zurich, but they’re not that far behind. And so that gap closing is very important, and it’s becoming much, much more common for top students in China to just stay in China and do their PhDs here. And so I think that’s an important thing people need to understand. That transition has happened over the last 20 years.
[Goodharting] One of the bad parts, though, that I’ve learned in my own field of theoretical physics is that, the internal culture within China, which is pretty typical of East Asian countries, is, is to be very metrics-driven about like your promotion, your salary bonus or raise depends on numerical things computed, like how many papers did you publish? What journals were they published in? Exactly how many citations did you get?
[careerism] So there’s a kind of rigid system which isn’t really able to judge quality in a nuanced way, the way the best universities in the United States or West are able to do. It’s more of like a ‘mafia’ system where, first of all, there’s a bureaucracy which is controlling a big part of, like the incentive structure. And then there’s a lot of, like, you know, ‘this big professor tries to promote his former postdocs and students ahead of everybody else’. And the devotion toward the higher goal of advancing the field is sometimes subordinated to this mafia-like behavior, where people are really worried about their internal, their individual careers and, and advancement.
Now, if what I just said to you sounds like, “wait, wait a minute, Steve, you’re describing American academia or, or European academia as well!” Yes, I’m aware that this mafia-like tendency is also becoming more and more prevalent in academia in the West. And so it’s a sad thing.
[Unoriginal] I was lucky to live through a more kind of golden age of theoretical physics when, you know, the field still was a very kind of high trust, idealistic field. People are really trying to push the frontier forward. This kind of mafia gamesmanship was less common. It’s become more common in the West. But I think it is definitely still an impediment. At least the professors who were talking to me on, during this trip, described it as an impediment for China making that jump to the absolute top level of innovation in really fundamental science.
[Big Science] I don’t think it’s a problem for them in getting for example, big scientific experiments built. They’re able to build huge neutrino experiments, astrophysics experiments, high energy physics experiments, etc.
They don’t really have a problem in applied sciences, but for this really deep, creative coming up with new concepts, kind of science, I think this, this mafia-like and sort of like mechanistic incentive structure here, is not good for that. And so I had a fair number of conversations with professors about that.
[no arms race] …And in particular, a lot of conversation was about AI and the chip war. And there’s a sense of quiet confidence here that China’s going to get the AI training done that it needs to do. It’s not going to fall way behind in the race for AGI or ASI. There are government national level plans in place to build the data centers, to produce domestically the chips necessary to run those data centers, to power those data centers, and to stay abreast of developments in AI and also in frontier chip manufacturing.
[apathy/lying-flat] Let’s just say that there’s quiet confidence here. That, you know, they may not fully catch up. They may not get their EUV machine for some number of years, but they’re not really worried. And so, and many people have said to me that the very stupid Joe Biden/Jake Sullivan chip war against China has only helped Chinese companies. This is something I’ve discussed in other podcasts, when the U. S. cuts off access for Chinese companies to key products and technologies used in the semiconductor supply chain from the U. S. and say Dutch companies like ASML—Japanese companies as well—when the U. S. starts to threaten that, it only causes a coalescence of effort here in China. It creates a necessary coordination of effort here that then lets the Chinese supply chain ecosystem for semiconductors advance very rapidly. And so it was, it was a stupid policy by the Biden administration.
[fast-follower] [Twitter comment] Re: China, I was told that there is a national-level plan involving the govt and leading companies to ensure sufficient power, data center compute, etc. to stay at or near the frontier in foundation model work. In the scenario where pure hyperscaling is not working, or requires more time for ‘thinking & tinkering’, the Chinese side seems very confident in their capabilities to keep up. See, eg. DeepSeek papers and models for examples of innovative work done in China.
[long timelines] And it was also based on a miscalibrated estimate of how fast we were going to get to AGI. They thought, “Oh, if we just, if we just kneecap the Chinese right now, since we’re sure AGI is right around the corner, this will let America get to super-AGI and the Chinese will be behind and then they’ll be screwed.” And it doesn’t look like it’s playing out that way. Let’s just put it that way.
I can’t say much more about the details of what I learned on this trip.
But I think quiet confidence and a sense of inevitability in that sector, but across all sectors here. No, people here are just confident that like, oh, if there’s some product that needs to be produced, batteries, photovoltaics, cars, robotics, factory automation, 5G, 6G, whatever it is, even leading edge CPUs, leading edge semiconductor nodes. There’s just a quiet confidence that China’s going to get there or is already there.
And actually, in many of these things, they just don’t feel like Westerners can compete. They just don’t feel like it, if it’s something that has to be made in a factory, it’s eventually going to be made by Chinese companies, not by Western companies that the Westerners just can’t compete with.
I mean, literally that, that may sound very jarring for you to hear that, but between two Chinese people who are technologists and know their stuff, it’s a very common sentiment. You know, it’s just a very common sentiment. Once China figures out how to produce it, they can generally produce it much more efficiently than Western companies.
[ie. bet—as Chinese governments have so many times in the past (usually wrongly)—that technological progress is unimportant and anything the barbarians come up with is a toy. Let the Yankees make the history books; and the Chinese will make the huge bucks.]