
Tensions with the West are putting the future of China’s Skynet at stake - rumcajz
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2165372/how-tensions-west-are-putting-future-chinas-skynet-mass
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stephengillie
> _There are other components, such as graphic processing chips used in the
> security cameras, that are not yet banned for sale to China, but soon may
> be. Most of the chips are imported from the US, which still allows them to
> be exported to China._

And here I thought all these components were manufactured and assembled
entirely in China already. What's stopping a Chinese company from developing a
better chip than Ryzen or Tegra? Not enough R&D funding?

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lykr0n
Developing chips is a marathon. AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and company are decades
ahead of everyone else due to the fact that they buy what they want and have
been building them for decades.

Nothing is stopping a Chinese company from making their own GPU/CPUs (which
they are)- it will just take years, if not decades, to reach feature parity.
That's not even considering how much work China needs to do to be able to tap
out chips at 32, 14, and 12nm

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PuffinBlue
This claim seems a little dubious to me.

China seems pretty good at 'obtaining' the info they need to give them a head
start, plus they're a manufacturing powerhouse with a ruthless determination
to 'get stuff done'.

They also don't face commercial pressure to release stuff slowly. Sure it'll
take them _some_ time, but 'decades' seems to me to underestimate their
capabilities.

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seanmcdirmid
> Skynet, as China’s national security network is known, had 170 million
> cameras last year and Beijing plans to have another 400 million units
> installed across the country by 2020.

Oh wow, what an unfortunate name. Did the government choose that name
oblivious to its use in movies, or is this just a nickname ascribed to the
system?

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rxin
This (天网, or "sky net") most likely comes from proverb "天网恢恢疏而不漏" (tian wang
hui hui shu er bu lou), meaning "Justice has long arms."

This saying was from Lao Zi, going back thousands of years.

~~~
monocasa
It might be both. Like here where .gov nerdy projects will be some long name
starting with "Operational" that'll make the pointy hair bosses happy, but
when you look at the title and subtitle it spells out Optimus Prime. I can
imagine similar games being played in Mandarin.

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yhvh
This article gives the impression that sanctions were put in place in response
to humanitarian concerns.

