Comment by alephnerd

Comment by alephnerd 13 hours ago

Even Chinese leadership is somewhat skeptical about AI maximalism [0] with worries about "AI Washing" by enthusiastic cadre trying to climb rungs [1], and evoking Solow's Paradox [2].

There is still significant value in AI/ML Applications from a NatSec perspective, but no one is actually seriously thinking about AGI in the near future. In a lot of cases, AI from a NatSec perspective is around labor augmentation (how do I reduce toil in analysis), pattern recognition (how do I better differentiate bird from FPV drone), or Tiny/Edge ML (how do I distill models such that I can embed them into commodity hardware to scale out production).

It's the same reason why during the Chips War zeitgeist, while the media was harping about sub-7nm, much of the funding was actually targeted towards legacy nodes (14/28nm), chip packaging (largely offshored to China in the 2010s because it was viewed as low margins/low value work), and compound semiconductors (heavily utilized in avionics).

[0] - https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/china/story20250829-7432514

[1] - https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2025-09-30/doc-infsfmit7787...

[2] - https://m.huxiu.com/article/4780003.html

johncolanduoni 6 hours ago

Pointing to Solow’s Paradox is kind of weird to me. Productivity growth accelerated in the 90s and 2000s, so it’s easy to tell a story where the computer age simply didn’t accelerate things until it had sufficiently penetrated the economy. If AI follows the same pattern, betting big on it still makes sense: China would probably be the predominant superpower if the computing developments of the 70s and 80s were centered there instead of the US.

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alephnerd 6 hours ago

The point is that just like in the US, Chinese decision-makers are increasingly voicing concerns about unrealistic assumptions, valuations, and expectations around the capabilities of AI/ML.
You can be optimistic about the value of agentic workflows or domain specific applications of LLMs but at the same time recognize that something like AGI is horseshit techno-millenarianism. I myself have made a pretty successful career so far following this train of logic.
The point about Solow's Paradox is that the gains of certain high productivity technologies do not provide society-wide economic benefit, and in a country like China where the median household income is in the $300-400/mo range and the vast majority of citizens are not tech adjacent, it can lead to potential discontent.
The Chinese government is increasingly sensitive to these kinds of capital misallocations after the Evergrande Crisis and the ongoing domestic EV Price War between SoEs, because vast amounts of government capital is being burnt with little to show for it from an outcomes perspective (eg. a private company like BYD has completely trounced every other domestic EV competitor in China - the majority of whom are state owned and burnt billions investing in SoEs that never had a comparative advantage against BYD or an experienced automotive SoE like SAIC).

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