I… agree but isn’t then contradicting your previous point that innovation will come from large companies if they only try to secure monopolies rather than genuinely innovate? I don’t understand from that perspective who is left to innovate if it’s neither research (focusing on publishing, even though having the actual novel insight and verifying that it does work), not the large companies… and startups don’t get the funding either. Sorry if you mentioned it but I’m now confused as what is left.

They just provide the data. They can question the methodology or even provide another report with a different methodology but if the data is correct (namely no fabricated) then it’s not up to them to see how it’s being used. The user can decide how they define startup, i.e which minimum size, funding types, funding rounds, etc. Sharing their opinion on the startup landscape is unprofessional IMHO. They are of course free to do so but to me it doesn’t question the validity of the original report.

Please clarify, as I asked in https://lemmy.ml/post/20245112/13688624 I don’t see how that’s relevant. They are sharing opinions from startup CEO or numbers that are about large “old” (much earlier than the boom, e.g Ant, Shein, ByteDance). That’s certainly interesting but does not contradict figures from the article.

Research happens through university, absolutely, and selling products at scale through large companies, but that’s not innovation. Innovation is bringing new products, that is often the result of research yes, to market. Large companies tends to be innovative by buying startups. If there are no startups coming from research coming from universities to buy, I don’t see how large companies, often stuck in the “innovator dilemma”, will be able to innovate.

Thanks for linking to criticism but can you highlight which numbers are off? I can see things about ByteDance, Ant group, Shein but that’s irrelevant as it’s not about the number of past success, solely about the number of new funded startups. Same as the CEO of ITJUZI sharing his opinion, that’s not a number.

Edit: looks totally off, e.g “restaurants, in a single location, such as one city, you could immediately tell that there were large numbers of new companies.” as the article is about funding, not a loan from the bank at the corner of the street.

OK… unable to argue, blocked.

Thanks for the in depth clarification and sharing your perspective.

this is a good development

Keeping finance in check is indeed important so I also think it’s good.

What about the number of funded startups though and the innovative products they would normally provide customers? Do you believe the measures taken will only weed out bad financiers or will it also have, as a side effect, to bring less products and solutions out? Does it mean research will remain academic but won’t necessarily be commercialized or even scaled? If you believe it will still happen, how? Through state or regional funding and if so can you please share such examples that grew for the last 5 years?

Founded in 2019, right after the peak according to the very graph I highlighted.

Neither I nor the article is saying there are no more startups nor innovation from China. What the article is saying is that it’s radically less than 7 years ago. You can still list few amazing Chinese startup from 2023 or 2024 and it would still not make the article “nonsense”.

I believe that’s precisely the point of the article, that there will be no new BYD which was funded 29 years ago.

Care to unfold a bit more what’s hilarious? Which metrics from the article are wrong or irrelevant for example? You might disagree with the conclusion, and maybe rightly so, but are you saying the data itself, e.g number of companies funded is false? Or it does not matter and something else could help better understand the situation?

Google

Out of curiosity, why? They have their own TPU which they claim to be quite efficient. Is it because they can’t produce enough? Or because they have to resell NVIDIA for their own cloud, Google Cloud, to customers because they prefer to stick to CUDA? Or something else?

I love how you just assumed that I’m Chinese

I bet most people reading “I live in Canada, my family moved here back when I was still in school. I’d like to move to China one day” would assume the same, especially “back” as I understood, but my English isn’t perfect, return FROM China. It has nothing to do with “race”, culture, politics or economy.

Anyway, this makes it even more interesting, have you already been to China at all then? Worked there? Because I did but I don’t want to make assumptions so again feel free to clarify.

PS: also want to make it clear, I didn’t say nor assumed that you were Chinese, but of Chinese heritage, a bit different.

I was going to ask how come you (OP) posts regularly such posts on the “Chip War” with recurrent arguments claiming that China is catching and will surpass the “West” soon, e.g https://lemmy.ml/post/19683899/13322374 . It seems from reading your post history https://lemmy.ml/post/19683748/13336881 that you are Canadian but would like to go back to China to live and work there.

So to be direct, are you sharing those articles in the hope of adjusting a biased perspective from the West on its control of the semiconductor industry? Are you yourself hoping to, maybe if your personal circumstances were different, work in that industry with a Chinese patriotic motivation? Feel free to expand a bit more on your motivations more broadly if you feel like it could help myself and others understand your viewpoint and goals.

Also interesting to note “The focus on mature nodes also positions Chinese companies to dominate markets where advanced nodes are not necessary, such as in automotive and industrial applications.” which is indeed very viable. Namely they focus on “old” processors used in “simpler” situations. The machinery from ASML to make such chips is actually purchasable (unlike the latest ones). China is already positioned on the lower end of the market.

Still, even though going from the production of older chips is a step to higher end one, it is not the same, especially when machinery to do so can’t be purchased.

“Increased Spending on Equipment” is not evidence of progress. In fact there are numerous examples in the past of fraud, e.g https://www.ft.com/content/1e3fe107-1b6e-43dd-8f04-e3c88502c36b (cf ““Big Fund”, which raised $51bn in its last two funding rounds.” 2 years ago, setup 10 years ago)

China is indeed pouring money on the problem and they are making significant progress. Yet it’s not competitive in terms of performance and, much harder to evaluate, it seems not to be competitive in terms of economics. To make a processor a lot of low quality ones are discarded, leading to the idea of “yield” (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication#Device_yield ). So, even if one CPU/GPU/TPU is genuinely produced, in “full autonomy” (so without e.g ASML unique machinery) and it actually on independent benchmarks comparable in terms of performance to the state of the art produced outside, it’s still impossible to evaluate how viable the production process is. Maybe there yield is very high and thus producing those chips is efficient and thus cheap, maybe the chip used in the benchmark is the single existing one and thus is prohibitively expensive.

I recommend the 2022 Chip War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_War:_The_Fight_for_the_World's_Most_Critical_Technologyon the topic, it is quite interesting.

Tinkered with a https://www.banana-pi.org/en/banana-pi-sbcs/175.html recently and… it’s really cool to have that at home, like, it works! In itself that’s quite a feat. Yet… to become actually usable due to “just” raw power but also to be economically comparable to mass produced other architectures from other manufacturers is indeed quite some road ahead.

Because it’s a race I wish such articles would bring forward comparison points :

• benchmark allowing to pinpoint past equivalents
• when was the first equivalent actually put on sale (and where)
• what’s the volume produced, even if only an order of magnitude
• inflation adjusted (as it might be several year gap) price comparison

otherwise it mostly feels like tech-propaganda pieces.

Why is anyone surprised that the country […] that has historically dominated the Top500 list, has the fastest supercomputers?

Because since then bans have been issued, specifically preventing the purchase of the “best” hardware, and that said country does not produce such hardware internally (e.g NVIDIA and AMD top of the line, and upstream with ASML). That’s what why it is surprising, precisely because the situation has changed, cf e.g https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/limits-china-chip-ban leading to possibly counter intuitive effects.

I imagine most people would like to better understand what hardware is being used, especially chips and to know where they come from, i.e

• are they still somehow top of the line the country can’t have through normal channels
• somehow an order of magnitude of older chips they can legally purchase, so wasting quite a bit of energy but still similar results
• the most unexpected using own hardware that is believed not to be available at scale

So yes it’s arguably surprising because the situation is not as it was just a couple of years ago.

I don’t get the hype around LLM, it is a terrible way to search

I’ll be playing devil’s advocate here just for a moment (despite the huge ecological, moral, political and economical costs) :

• what LLM does provide is a looser linguistic interface. That means instead of searching for exact words, one can approximately search for the “idea”. That means instead of hitting just the right keywords that an expert might know, one can describe a partial solution, a very rough guess of what the problem might be, and possibly get a realistic sounding answer. It might be wrong yet it might still be a step in the right direction.

So… yes I also don’t think the hype is justified but IMHO it’s quite clear that providing a solution that makes an interface easier to get some OK-looking result would appeal to masses. That means a LOT of people get their hopes up about potential empowerment and a few people ride that bubble making money on promises.

PS: for people interested in the topic but wanting to avoid the generative aspect I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_search is a good starting point.

“brute force is brute force” what a strange thing to say, it precisely is NOT.

If you have a lot of processors but they are poorly linked together, i.e low bandwidth, then they are NOT more powerful. That’s why e.g NVIDIA is selling InfiniBand and other very expensive solutions to datacenter.

Sure a supercomputer might have more CPU/GPU/etc than another but it doesn’t make it automatically more powerful, in term of what can actually be computed in comparable time (and arguably energy consumption).

That being said, China might be secretly #1 on TOP500 but until evidence of it is provided, I’m not sure what’s the point of such speculation is.