Why America Is Losing the Tech War with China
Why America Is Losing the Tech War with China
It is simply too late to try to suppress China. The United States must either spend seriously on research and development, along with industrial policy, or it will lose the race for twenty-first-century technological supremacy.
archived https://archive.ph/jDFLa
Before sanctions, Huawei was the world's largest telecom equipment vendor.
After sanctions, Huawei is still the largest except they barely have any US chips in their products.
The CHIPS act has always been incredibly questionable. It seemingly goes against market forces. The US are alienating what were potentially the largest customers for all the chips they plan on making. Customers are especially scarce at the higher end processes that the US are targeting.
Global Foundries abandoned 7nm since they believed that most of their clients wouldn't be able to afford migrating to leading edge nodes. UMC barely had any clients for their 14nm process. Not even Global Foundries' contractual obligations to AMD / IBM, UMC's connection to Mediatek, and access to the latest ASML EUV machines were enough incentive for them to transition to 7nm and beyond.
The US essentially made Huawei a guaranteed customer to SMIC. EUV isn't even necessary for 7nm and 7nm isn't necessary for 5G. Intel 7 and TSMC N7, N7P are made with DUV. TSMC's 12nm was used for UNISOC's Makalu 5G modem and one of their 5G SOCs. The delay in making 5G phones might just be Huawei needing EDA tools to design a modem using SMIC's existing processes.
The way the sanctions are so gradual it's almost as if the US wants China's chip sector to undergo import substitution industrialization. It really resembles the slow ramp up of import restrictions that established the automobile industry in many countries. It's also kind of amusing that in practice it's the US that are cutting themselves off from advanced tech while China can still by the latest chips. Nvidia made the A800, and H800 just for China.. Nvidia probably lobbied to make the restriction easy to implement and based on the specification that affects performance the least.
US bans Huawei so there stuck with 4.5G marketed at 5G.
US bans DJI drones in government so they use terrible Skydio drones for search and rescue.
I'm still undecided if the hype for the 5G AI driven "Fourth Industrial Revolution" is warranted though.
I’m still undecided if the hype for the 5G AI driven “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is warranted though.
Fuck no it isn't. It's a useful tool, but it's not anywhere near the level of being able to truly change the world like electricity (or any other equivalently huge invention) imo. Biggest problem is how good visual and audio faking has gotten, we already have a big problem with people falling for facebook minion memes, seeing videos of government officials say they eat babies is going to break people's brains to a never before seen degree
Commitment to efficiency is at the heart of communism. Here's why I love China, taken from the article.
The United States and China approach AI differently. The trillion-dollar valuations of the great American technology companies mainly come from consumer entertainment. China, as Huawei’s Zhang said, has no time for poetry. Rather than guess when the machines will become sentient or when AI will replace human beings, China has focused on the automation of drudge work: inspecting parts on a factory conveyor belt, checking the bins near the coal face for foreign objects, detecting anomalies in machines, picking containers out of ships and placing them on autonomous trucks, and so forth.
My dream would be to live in China, it has such a different culture from the west. While I know I'll never live there, visiting the country someday would be lovely.
Seeing china construct the first automated port in tianjin really surprised me as a westerner, you'll and I'll never see these type of innovation in the west. AI's and robots will be used for some cool and 'narly' way instead of actually being useful. And thing is that I'm glad this is the case, as capitalist countries would put that type of innovation as union-busting or maybe even re-vitalising industry, yet the sheer corruption and incompetence of these CEOs and industry gurus make it so even the most recent 'innovation' breakthroughs are either 'meh' or some broken down, watered product that'll never be useful.