
China has eclipsed US in AI, robotics and VC funding - tzm
https://gist.github.com/tzmartin/977a05f3902c227c98faa5edfac699e0
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linuxkerneldev
I'm not sure the Y axis in either chart gives any truly meaningful
implication. The first one gives USD$ millions spent and the second gives just
the number of publications. Lets look at the first one. Lots of article state
that the efficiency of capital use (ie: how much return you get for putting in
$1) in China is much lower than that in the US. Googling even shows that
China's capital efficiency, because of the lack of transparency and a command-
control government-economy, is even lower than competitive developing
countries like Vietnam, India and Thailand. [1] , [2] .

The number of publications, I'm going to have to search to find backing
statements but I believe that it is not reflective of true contribution.

[1] [https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-outlook-beyond-
capit...](https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-outlook-beyond-capital-and-
labor-china-productivity-frontier)

[2] [http://foreignpolicy.com/2003/07/01/can-india-overtake-
china...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2003/07/01/can-india-overtake-china/)

~~~
Jommi
Yeah the charts can be quite easily critiqued (what charts don't?). Would be
great to see for example a clearer definition of the dollars spent.

But you also need to remember that the statement here is a comparative one.
Higher ampunt od publications is a fact and npt unreasonable to then deduce
that more research is done in china than in USA.

Now that I think about this, its just a terrible article: Graphs should never
be posted Without a grounded analysis.

------
rahrahrah
Most of HN is still repeating the mantra "china can't innovate" et al. For all
the talk in HN about this idea of the incumbent not seeing the faster startup
until it's too late, you'd imagine you'd wisen up faster.

Below I'm collecting from this thread examples of people just repeating the
"don't worry guys, they still aren't doing that well"-type talking points:

> china can't innovate

> ah, but the best chinese students move to the US

> oh, but their corporate debt is really high!

> they are held back by an authoritarian regime

> they are culturally and linguistically not homogenous

~~~
devoply
It's hubris. It's hubris about democracy. It's hubris about freedom. It's
hubris all inspired by privilege. Built on the back of immigrants. Most people
doing research in America, on backs of which American business prospers are
immigrants. But really Americans are not taught to appreciate what props up
the elite in the country. They simply focus on getting what they feel is their
birthright. That sort of thing works for a while. Then entropy kicks in. Along
with real competition. And that really shows what you are a made of. Get ready
for it. It's coming and coming up fast. A billion hungry Chinese, just itching
to get a piece.

~~~
rahrahrah
Hubris which is kept in place by the strongest propaganda machine the world
has ever seen.

~~~
orf
> strongest propaganda machine the world has ever seen.

I doubt that

------
frisco
Observation from being at NIPS in Barcelona this week: almost half of the
hallway conversations are in Chinese. How many are in Hindi? I've heard maybe
2 groups of people speaking it. English? Sure, everyone speaks English. But
close to 50% of the people here also speak Chinese.

Think about that if you're in the group that only speaks English.

~~~
argonaut
This doesn't mean anything. Most of those (the good ones, at least) are
Chinese grad students at western universities. The cream of the crop are grad
students at American universities (or Montreal). Most would jump at a chance
to work in US academia or at Google/FB.

~~~
aclsid
Don't know man. Lived in China for years and people that made it to the US,
tended to stay there. You just have to look at the lines that form in Shanghai
in West Nanjing Rd for student/tourist visas. Of course there is a lot of
people that also return, but the people I knew, just went into the banking
sector and ended up depending on family connections more than education
itself.

As for the cream of the crop, I can tell you I saw a couple of guys that were
really outstanding in the startup scene, and one was from the Max Planck
institute in Germany and the other was from a Chinese university (and not
precisely Tsinghua, Fudan or Jiao Tong).

~~~
argonaut
It seems we are in agreement? The Chinese grad students (who are presumably
the best students, since the western universities are the best for CS) that
make it to the US stay there.

~~~
aclsid
We agree on the part that they stay there, but they are hardly the best
students. In fact, the vast majority of people that actually do go abroad is
directly connected to the fact that they could not make it in the very
difficult Chinese high school test. And since a privileged kid will have more
resources, they just go abroad and skip the line so to speak. But the level of
social mobility that you see in China is incredible, because that test truly
favors the best to go to the best universities.

But we disagree that in a conference like the one mentioned, most of the
Chinese people you would encounter are going to be US educated.

------
tener
China has spent billions on lots of different things, some of which made a
spectacular flops. From the Fortune article quoted as a source:

    
    
        > The government is riding on the hope that entrepreneurship will help boost the market, but not 
        > everyone agrees the plan will work.
    
        > “They have a fantasy that if they give everyone money they’ll create entrepreneurs,” Gary 
        > Rieschel, the founder of Qiming Venture Partners told Bloomberg. “What it will result in is 
        > catastrophic losses for the government.”
    
        > Rieschel’s comments could have some merit: the funds are experimental and China has no 
        > standardized method for its 780 funds to be managed or funded.

~~~
Noseshine
Just an aside: I too use this method to insert quotes as monospaced font text
for contrast - but then I take the time to insert manual line breaks. You
don't want readers to have to do manual horizontal scrolling, and here it even
has to be done three times, for each sentence.

It can be done quickly:

\- If you use Chrome you can resize the text field. Set it to a width that
seems just right for where you want to insert line breaks.

\- Insert the initial " > " (I put a ">" in front of each line but that's just
me), select it, copy it.

\- Now just using keys END, DOWN-ARROW, RETURN, CTRL-V insert all necessary
line-breaks. Setting the text field width causes the END key to go to exactly
the right position automatically, no need to navigate the words manually. then
RETURN and CTRL-V to insert the line-break and the quote-start. Repeat.

This way you can manually format even long quotes very quickly.

~~~
throwanem
This still requires horizontal scrolling on mobile and other narrow displays.

Don't overload monospace formatting for block quotes. It is bad at them
because they are not what it is for. Just quote with a leading > and let the
user agent reflow text as it needs to. Everyone will know what you mean.

~~~
Noseshine
The actual solution would be for HN to introduce a way to add quotes. Just
having > in front of regular lines sucks - the many attempts at making quotes
stand out more show that this is not just a single opinion. I "overload"
monospaced because there is no proper option.

~~~
throwanem
If you want quotes to stand out, italicize them. Again, everyone will know
what you mean, and you won't break UX in a way that makes some readers more
likely to ignore your comment because it's such a pain to read.

~~~
Noseshine
Italicizing is not a good solution for quotes IMHO.

I don't add the following links because that's where I got my opinion from,
it's only in support. I came to my own opinion by reading a lot on the web :-)

In addition, only very few people in this forum use that method for large
quotes, so without consulting a style guide, it seems to me most people feel
that way.

[https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100502220045A...](https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100502220045AA9OuXG)

[http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/punctuation/when/when-
to-i...](http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/punctuation/when/when-to-
italicize.html)

~~~
throwanem
Your options are to italicize, to introduce with a leading >, or to abuse
monospace formatting in a way that breaks the user experience. Either of the
former two is better than the latter, and my experience of several years on HN
is that leading > is by far most common for quoting, but if abusing monospace
formatting is the way you want to do it, then by all means abuse monospace
formatting to your heart's content.

------
HelloYouPerson
I mean China has 1.3 billion people. It's just a matter of time.

~~~
holydude
But not really...They are culturally and linguistically not that similar. They
are held together by an authoritarian regime.

USA is successful because of other reasons.

~~~
dajohnson89
China is far more homogeneous than most western countries.

~~~
Jack000
its arguable either way. imo China is less ethnically diverse but more
culturally diverse. eg. a large portion of the country speaks in a language
unintelligible to the rest.

regional differences are more pronounced in China. I'd be hard pressed to
figure out where I am if dropped into a random city in the US, compared to
China

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tormeh
Demography is destiny. Almost. You can fight it like India does, but China
surpassing the US in absolute numbers (which numbers? All of them) was
inevitable.

~~~
devoply
“Let China sleep; when she wakes she will shake the world.”

\- Napoleon

~~~
stevendaniels
The West didn't listen. It poked the giant a lot. During the 19th and 20th
centuries, many European countries initiated wars in China, carving it into
foreign spheres of influence.

~~~
douche
And became fabulously wealthy doing so. Part of the reason there was excess
capital in England to fund the industrial revolution was because of the Canton
trade.

------
holydude
The US should care more about Europe. There are nations in Europe that do not
want to be so tightly integrated with EU are very much open to cooperate more
with the Americans and Commonwealth. But they are weak and need assistance
first. Help them and they can help you.

China is going to remain to be a world within a world. Too few people will be
willing to learn Chinese anyway.

There are literally millions of Europeans that are culturally more compatible
with the US than with the germans / french.

~~~
pipio21
I don't think so. Europeans that do not want to be integrated with Europe,
because they want to be take their own decisions, don't want to be integrated
with the US either.

The problem is not the culture, but decisions taken for them without their
consent, for example Hungary or Austria being told by external powers(Germany)
that they need to accept millions of Muslims. Not different from the US
external power telling them that Russia is their new enemy and they have to go
to nuclear war because the US tells them so.

I have traveled and know most European countries and I don't understand what
you say about being more culturally compatible with the US than with Germans
or French.

Europeans are very similar in culture. For me the difference is mainly in
language or in having lived communism or not. I have lived in China and I know
what a difference in culture it is.

It is not just the culture, but even the mountains are different in China, the
trees are different.

~~~
aclsid
I don't think European countries are compatible with anything but their own
country's culture. Overall, I see way more homogeneity in Latin America or the
US/Canada than in a United Europe. Germans tend to stick with Germans, French
with French (and Parisians with Parisians while we are at that), maybe some
Dutch and Germans, but I've been to Dutch parties where I was probably one of
the few foreigners (and no I was not in the Netherlands).

I mean don't get me wrong, on the individual level and once you know a person,
it does not matter where they are from, but nationalism/language differences
is what allows for a place that is relatively small to have so many countries
to remain separate entities and it's the driving force behind the
euroskeptics. Exacerbating those feelings is what led to the World Wars.

------
krona
Given corporate debt in China is roughly 250% of GDP, this doesn't surprise
me.

~~~
sho
3 minutes of research shows that in the USA it's over 300%. What was your
point?

Edit: I was totally, utterly wrong. I looked at _global_ corporate debt. Mea
culpa!

~~~
krona
You need to do more research. Corporate debt in the USA peaked in 2008-2009 at
~200%.

~~~
sho
The most recent figure I could find for US corporate debt is $51 trillion:
[http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/20/crexit-warning-as-
corporate-d...](http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/20/crexit-warning-as-corporate-
debt-seen-ballooning-to-75-trillion.html)

The USA's most recent GDP is $16.7T, so slightly over 300%.

Do you have some other figure?

~~~
krona
That's global corporate debt. Half that article is about China's ballooning
corporate debt load.

~~~
rahrahrah
Regardless of what the numbers are, I'd still like to hear what your point
was. You said you weren't surprised given that corporate debt to dbp = 250%.
Is that some special number at which you can predict these kind of things
happen?

~~~
krona
In most economies this is indicative of a looming credit crisis. The best
(almost up to date) summary I've read was
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/09/18/bis-
flashes-r...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/09/18/bis-flashes-red-
alert-for-a-banking-crisis-in-china/) .

~~~
krona
@rahrahrah;

The title of the submission is "China has eclipsed US in AI, robotics and VC
funding". The author of the article is using levels of investment to further
his/her point about the relative superiority of two countries in AI, while
completely ignoring the macroeconomic backdrop that are largely the drivers of
these statistics in the first place.

Oh, and I think you're assuming I'm an American, which I'm not.

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kgdinesh
So we're using a gist now to share news?

~~~
hellofunk
It's a great idea. Aside from the ease of doing so with markdown, you get:

1) Instant ability to see all past revisions. 2) Commenting platform 3) Ease
to share with one-click embed link 4) Ease to download the news article 5)
Link to author's profile or other "news" items 6) Opportunity to see profiles
of others who liked the news

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valarauca1
What happened to no politics week?

~~~
tzm
I don't classify this as politics. It's data. People turn it into politics.

