PRC just announced mass producing 28nm litho that cost 1/30 ASML hardware. Easy to extrapolate where this goes especially mature nodes like 28nm still accounts fo over 70% of global wafer use.
I'm increasingly believing that the West has turned their dream of free trade for comparative advantage into a massive deindustrialization. The end result is unfolding in front of everyone and the sentiment I see, even on HN, is we can't outcompete China any more. This is sad. Really sad. And this fits exactly what Liu Cixin said in Three Body Problem: Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.
We thought we won, and we thought we could "control" what other markets do, and we thought we could focus on only the "high-value add". Now where are we?
IMO not so much as "where are we" as "where are they", west was always going to have reckon with competing with PRC who is on trend to add more STEM than OECD combined or US adds new people. And eventually this will apply to India as well. Arrogance doesn't help, but at some point reality of high value regressing to mean because magnitude more smart brains is involuting the margins out of everything. PRC competitors likely also getting creamed by deepseek as well. The running joke in China is when China does something advanced, that thing is no longer considered advanced since China very good at driving costs to nothing and commodizing advanced into common which ironically hurts PRC from getting into the true high value game.
This is the kind of overly dramatic thinking that leads to stock market plunges.
China is an enormous country. It has over 4x the population of the USA. Unless you assume Chinese people are fundamentally different, it should be producing 4x the output in every field vs America. Yet the impact and legacy of communism is dire: China clearly isn't even close to 4x the productivity of the USA. How many companies on the leading edge of AI does the USA have? Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, Cerebras, X.ai to pick just a handful of thousands.
Meanwhile Europe has produced one, Mistral (or two if you count DeepMind), and China has produced one. DeepSeek meanwhile, despite being impressive, has been doing the usual thing Chinese firms focus on of rapidly driving down the cost of tech already proven out by companies elsewhere. They have a long history of doing this and it's something they take cultural pride in, but at the same time, Chinese tech executives do worry about their relative lack of leading edge innovation. The head of DeepSeek has given interviews where he talks about that specifically and their desire to change attitudes and ideas about what Chinese firms can do, because there's a widespread cultural belief there that the Americans go from 0-1 and the Chinese can go from 1-10.
It's also worth remembering that prices in China are artificial. It's a somewhat planned economy still. Sectors of the economy with military relevance are heavily subsidized and they play games with their exchange rates, indeed perhaps in an attempt to forcibly deindustrialize the west. Just because something is made cheaper there doesn't necessarily mean they're doing it better. It can also be that they're just subsidized all the way to do that, and the average Chinese citizen is the loser (because they can't afford to buy things that would otherwise be affordable to them).
This is missing the historical context completely. One cannot expect China to be 4x productive ehole its socio-economic development level is like 50s-60s of USA. Their population is still mostly peasants. This applies even more to India.
No it isn't, that's the whole point of my post. If you ignore socio-economic history then you'd expect China to be 4x the productivity, but it isn't because of the history and structure of its society. Which hasn't changed that much, if anything it's regressing back to how it was before Deng Xiaoping. Hence why the tone here is too downbeat.
Is R1-Zero more than optimized textbook learning/distillation? I'll check out the paper.
I covered the Jamaica disparity by "unless you think there's something fundamentally different about the Chinese". In the case of people from some parts of the world being faster runners there is something different about them genetically, that translates directly into superior athletic performance. Is that the case for Americans vs Chinese? I don't know but haven't seen much evidence of it. The gaps are probably more due to culture and government i.e. artificial and quickly fixable, if they want to.
