comment on yesterday's video
tl;dr China is normal, it turns out
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As a Chinese I have seen a lot of non Chinese fake anti-AI ppl said “China has better regulation of AI, their AI is not bubble, their open weight models is THE FUTURE, we should learn from them to let AI coexist with us better”. Well, another smoke grenade they thrown.
Chinese AI is also a bubble, though it looks better than US only in terms of numbers. Chinese government does not punishes these bubble companies (at least not yet, it may punish them after the bubble popped), instead it boosts them. Many companies pivoted to AI because the government provides companies that doing so with huge subsidies.
On the one hand, the Chinese gov needs an excuse to cover up the slowing down in economic growth, and the "AI is too powerful, it took everyone's job" narrative is a good one. On the other hand, the humanoid robot bubble is a desperate response to the severe decline in birth rates.
Tech bros in China also see tech oligarchs like Musk and Zuckerberg as god. Working in tech industry, I’ve seen a lot of clown show. One of the companies we cooperated with went “AI native”, fired almost all human programmers, and shipped unusable slop software full of bugs, their boss claimed they increased 100x efficiency; One bought huge amount of programmable humanoid robot, but can’t found any use case of them, these expensive robots just end up gathering dust in their warehouse… I’m not just surrounded by tech bros with severe AI psychosis, there is even a stupid humanoid robot shop (they also sell LLM stuff, the stupidest product is a LLM photo frame linked to a diffusion model which you can chat with it and let it generate some AI slop photo to show on the frame) nearby my favorite shopping mall, which frequently hold robot performance.
Last time I visited this shopping mall, I found this stupid shop closed down. I hope this is a good sign that the bubble is about to pop.