Alibaba Cloud says it cut Nvidia AI GPU use by 82% with new pooling system

The US attempt to slow down China's technological development succeeds on the basis of preventing China from directly following the same path, but may backfire in the sense it forces innovation by China in a different direction. The overall outcome for us all may be increase efficiency as a result of this forced innovation, especially if Chinese companies continue to open source their advances, so we may in the end have reason to thank the US for their civilisational gate keeping

History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

In many senses there's hubris in the western* view of China accomplishments: most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.

---

* I hate the term "western" because some "westeners" use it to separated what they think are "civilized" from "uncivilized", hence for them LATAM is not "western" even though everything about LATAM countries is western.

Ironically, the best way America could have prevented China’s rise in tech was by stapling green cards to diplomas of Chinese citizens who completed their higher education in the U.S. like the plan in the early 2010s.

Is that the best way? China's rise had already happened by the 2010s

Preventing that could have been prevented in the 70s, 80s, 90s by stopping offshoring, blocking student visas, and prosecuting IP theft.

Those students would have just gone to other countries, written their PhD dissertations there, advanced another country’s tech sector, and the US would have found the pain of isolationism that much sooner.

It is not possible to keep core IP secret. HN folks, of all people, should know this. Anything that thousands of people know is de facto public knowledge.

How are you going to gain core IP research if you don't have experience or access to leading edge researchers to pass you knowledge in the first place?

Talent is proportional to population, but that only matters if society and state has the infrastructure to raise that talent up. Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.

> Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.

The reason why these statements are not true is because of colonization, delayed industrialization, and Western intervention post-independence. Getting out of this “quicksand” is exceedingly difficult.

China did well to industrialize quickly and keep intervention at bay - in fact, you could argue that it making the rest of the world reliant on its industrial capacity helped address the intervention problem.