AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over
AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over
I am very skeptical of any article that boldly claims that China is on the rise and the US is in decline. We've been hearing about this decades. People underestimate just how corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent the Chinese system is under the CCP. People think the US is worse only because the US is an open country. China's isolation give it the illusion that it's better, but in reality, it's even worse. Every major Chinese achievement from their mass transit system to their big corporations to their economic growth to them pulling ahead technologically to so many more, all come with big asterisks attached that make them much more questionable.
Wow some real critical thinking on Lemmy for once. Thank you! I swear Lemmy is run by propaganda/tin foil hat wearers spewing so much bs rather than remembering were all suffering together at the expense of a few rich people world wide.
We've been hearing about this decades.
Yes, you've been hearind that for decades, just like climate change: if you wait for an abrupt treshold with a clear before/after cut , you're going to wait for a while.
China has developed an advanced high speed trains network. You have no idea how much US looks backward on that.
China still opens coal burning power plants, jut also a very large number of renewable and nuclear power plants. They're serious about electrification.
They took the lead in scientific publication.
US needs to put up tariffs to protect its car makers from being wiped out by Chinese ones. Western car makers rely more and more on Chinese batteries suppliers.
All the signs are there. You just need to ackowledge them.
People underestimate just how corrupt, dysfunctional, and incompetent the Chinese system is under the CCP.
As compared to what? In the US, corruption is legal, it's called campaign donation and SuperPAC. At this stage, elections pick which pack of oligarchs will rule: GOP donators or Dems donators.
If the system is so much better, where are the high speed trains, advanced power grid, decarbonation plan, school that can get high potentials to the top, decent healthcare system?
Where are the fruits of this less corrupt dysfunctional and incompetent system?
China's isolation give it the illusion that it's better, but in reality, it's even worse.
Alother delusion from local US news. China is not that isolated, they have developed deep relations with a number of countries in Africa and middle east, and they're a privileged trade partner with many more. Worse even: with the current US policy of tariffs, several countries that were reluctant to have deeper ties with China are pushed in their arms.
Every major Chinese achievement from their mass transit system to their big corporations to their economic growth to them pulling ahead technologically to so many more, all come with big asterisks attached that make them much more questionable.
Meaning what? Their high speed trains are absolutely working. In large cities, half of the cars in the street are electric cars, majority from domestic brands and a few Tesla. They have very advanced and very cheap mass transit networks.
As I was saying: it's just like global warming: if you sit and wait claiming it's not really happening and/or not that bad, you're totally unprepared when disasters hit you.
The only thing I will agree with you here is their emonomy is not half as great as they want to claim. The estate market has been in a free fall in all but the big 4 cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guandong, Shenzhen).
But if the US wants to be the first power of the rest of the 21st century world, they need to wake up!
This is the dawn of the new Chinese century. I have no doubt in 20 more years China will be in an even stronger position as the USA continues to decline.
We, the USA, could do all the stuff that would make us competitive. That would require more socialism, more taxing of billionaires, more spending in green energy, education, transportation, healthcare becoming affordable and an actual human right for all in our borders, a real plan to transition off fossil fuels and shore up our domestic energy production and electric grid.
Idk more than that of course but that's the elevator pitch.
We won't do it though because corrupt capitalism and the oligarchy.
Maybe we will if at some point enough of us are struggling but we're pretty fat and have plenty of entertainment to distract us even if we are being fucked. So ... Yeah ... Desperately hoping I'm wrong about most of my predictions, devastated as I keep seeing them come true.
Brother it sounds like you underestimate what industrializing the largest population on earth looks like. It's not just happening, it's kinda inevitable.
The big difference that I see is that they investes in people for a long while now. They did what they can so people can get a decent education. That's also the reason why they don't allow kids to use tiktok and so on - it's hindering the next generation's ability to think. They know that you need many intelligent people to drive whatever other innovation you want to have later. That's why they're pulling ahead so fast while we are collapsing. I am not even living in the US, but even here the education system is crumbling.
The west has trapped itself in the thought of technology without people. The idea that few clever people can design perfect systems that drive everything for us. That we just need to support those few individuals to get maximum return. China is supporting the broad masses. It's like creating a fertile soil.
Who knows what all the asterisks are causing in the future. But at the moment it's just no comparison. We've gone backwards, while they're so far ahead we barely see them.
China leads the world in scientific publication, even when only taking into account reputable journals and high-impact publications. There's no doubt in my mind the US will decline further with the current attacks on science and education, and anti-intellectualism in general.
Chinese infrastructure and manufacturing lead is real. You don't need to believe any propaganda, just travel and observe.
The asterisks are not about their usecase but political.
The US is very much on the decline, and thanks to the poorly thought out One Child policy- China has also likely past it’s apex. But like the US, it too can cause a lot of damage during its downfall.
India, thanks to burgeoning population and rapid industrialisation is probably the most notable nation currently ‘on the rise’.
Every major Chinese achievement from their mass transit system to their big corporations to their economic growth to them pulling ahead technologically to so many more
I see.
We think changes happen overnight but rise and fall of a power is typically a slowburn.
Good, fuck the AI industry, we can’t even go to the doctor over here
But you have so many obese guy fart videos to choose from now.
I don't really give a shit about the AI race and I genuinely hope that we lose it, because I feel like being a winner in that "industry" is inherently unsustainable.
The AI hype is so infuriatingly frustrating.
I hope we loose it so we can get humbled. But if we loose, knowing how we are, we'll likely invent a reason to go to war and steal their talent.
I have found one use for generative AI that I have liked. I've thrown it at aggravating searches for me.
Use case example: I stopped traveling across the country and got a job at one location. It's across the city. I'd like to find an electric bike to get there. The location is 12 miles away as the crow flies. Unfortunately my city is absolute crap at any kind of non-car transportation so it needs to get myself up to 40 mph at minimum. Honestly if I'm going that speed, I'd like a scooter like the a burgman. Trouble is "scooter" runs the gambit from competing to motorcycles like the Burgman, to little ones like the Vespa, and stand up ones like you see dumped all over cities downtown. Electric motorcycles start getting into "I might as well buy a new motorcycle" prices.
Alright, I do a search for electric scooter, I get all standing scooters. I've attempted changes and maybe find a sitting one that is made for not getting over 25 mph. Finally getting frustrated I remembered one of my younger coworkers talking about using AI for searches, fine... ten minutes later I had a series of results of bike that fit my criteria as well as small little dealers across the city that DuckDuckGo nor Google bothered to pull up, and that's with me specifically asking for links because I didn't want made up bullshit.
Now if we get to the point of AI becoming overlords, I'm sure I'm going to be among the first against the wall because the first couple searches of it not getting things right involved me calling it a dumbshit so...
So yea... that's my territory of using an AI, it's a better search engine for weird esoteric shit... I kind of wish it wasn't an app or a website because if it was a physical device I'd have it next to a hammer which I guess shows how much I trust it.
Further, fear mongering about China's data center/powergrid infrastructure superiority is also the PERFECT excuse techbros need to rationalize building data centers in parts of the US that are in desperate shortage of water for human beings and with precarious electrical grids that are ready to fail in the middle of the next heatwave.
The US is essentially in a second Civil War and this will be one of the main methods in which people are killed, i.e. purposefully setting up the conditions for people to die in a heat wave and have no water so they are desperate... and the only way people in the US are going to stomach it is if they have been truly convinced they have to accept these brutal conditions "because we are hopelessly behind China and we can't afford to stop building data centers!!".
Oh man I'd love some of what you're smoking or popping
I just want anyone else to win. All the things. I want US Hegemony to end. At any cost. If that's AI then good.
I hate this country the way Saw Gerrera hates the empire.
Sure, but this isn't going to do that, and it's going to harm--no, scratch that, continue harming--a bunch of people in the process.
Blessed be the Temu empire
AI is not the panacea they're making it out to be. This article is attempting to influence readers to support American AI business models to 'complete' with China. Except that AI doesn't make my job easier and is very bad for the environment.
In my case, AI assistants are even confusing and annoying, but since they cannot be turned off, in my case I have to endure it.
Given that part of my job is evaluating applicants' ability to do the job, and given that LLMs are very good at answering the sort of questions many people ask in interviews, AI is making my job significantly harder.
If someone could make a prompt that actually made an LLM write good code, I wouldn't have nearly as much of an issue.
It's only made worse by the people who treat it like the Master Computer from Star Trek, claim that it can solve all the problems, and thus attempt to shove it into anything and everything.
It's baffling why my notepad needs to be hooked up to an LLM in the first place. It's a notepad, for quick scribbling. If people want to write something serious in it, there are far better things for that.
Good, let the Chinese have this demonic technology currently only good for mass surveillance.
So, a few months ago China launched Deepseek and the narrative on US media was all "the fact they didn't have access to the latest Nvidia GPUs forced them to get creative and develop a model that is more efficient and cheaper".
Now the US is getting behind on "AI wars" because China has more energy for huge data centers?
How about the US get creative and develop LLMs that are actually useful and can work without sucking Gigafucks of electricity?
china has also been investing in solar for decades since the us gave up on it and became the leader
Yeah but in defense of the US, solar makes big oil sad
/s
To be fair in 2024, China's electricity supply was primarily based on coal and renewable energy sources, with coal accounting for the largest share at approximately 57.77 percent. Renewable energy, including hydropower, contributed around 20.27 percent. Nuclear energy played a relatively minor role at about 4.47 percent. So it's mostly coal power plants in used for AI in China.
enough talk already i wish the us empire would just hurry up and actually collapse.
The race to have the magic box that tells you lies that you want to hear while also consuming incredible amounts of resources...why is this a race again?
The telling lies part is not good, but I think the dream of AI is a servant (or slave) with unlimited potential that can solve, until now, unsolvable problems. Cure for cancer, sure that will be $10k a pill. Eternal life? Sure that will be 1 million dollars a years for all eternity. Robot army to protect you? Top of the list.
Question I have is, is the AI we see the same AI the teck bros see? Is there a public interface that is made to appear a little buffoonish so the masses can laugh it off, but the real interface is much much better?
Those things are being solved by other forms of AI, not LLMs. AlphaFold is about the most useful thing AI has done so far and it's not a chatbot.
We get access to entertainment AI, but there could be different forms of AI in use in medical science that have nothing to do with image or text generation.
The only answer I need from an AI is 42.
I really don't understand this perspective. I truly don't.
You see a new technology with flaws and just assume that those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.
Like. Do you honestly think this is the one technology that researchers are just going to say "it's fine as-is, let's just stop improving it"?
You don't understand the first thing about how it works but people like you are SO certain that the way it is now is how it will always be, and that because there are flaws developing it further is pointless.
I just don't get it.
There's a lot of indication that LLMs are peaking. It's taking exponentially more compute and data to get incremental improvements. A lot of people are saying OpenAI's new model is a regression (I don't know, I haven't really played with the new model much). More foundational breakthroughs need to be made, and these kinds of breakthroughs are often the result of "eureka" moments which can't be manifested by just throwing more money at the problem. It's possible it will take decades before someone discovers a major breakthrough (or it could be tomorrow).
Right. You don't get it. You hear people talk about a new technology but actually they haven't talked about anything, they are trying to sell you snake oil, but you convince yourself that you understand what they mean, and that it's somehow meaningful.
We could talk about the history of AI in software development, you know it goes back decades, and there are legitimate areas of research. But the bubble that people are riding right now, they are throwing LLMs at the general public and pretending those LLMs are good enough to replace large swaths of the current workforce, but that's not going to happen because it won't work, because that's not how those models are designed. And then the snake oil salesman, they do classic bait and switch, and they start talking about expert systems and minor improvements to them, as if that is something new.
But even if my prediction is wrong, what that actually means is that people shouldn't need to work full-time jobs anymore.
To be fair, if your argument is that some day AI research will be legitimate and no longer snake oil, then you could easily be right. But there's no good reason to think that day is going to be in the next few years, rather than the next few decades or even the next few centuries.
I've actually worked professionally in the field for a couple of years since it was interesting to me originally. I've built RAG architecture backends for self hosted FOSS LLMs, i've fine tuned LLMs with new data, And I've even took the opposite approach where I embraced the hallucinations as I thought it could be used for more creative tasks. (I think this area still warrants research). I also enjoy TTS and STT use cases and have FOSS models for those on most of my devices.
I'll admit that the term AI is extremly vauge. It's like saying you study medicine, it's a big field. But I keep coming to the conclusion that LLMs and predictive generative models in general simply do not work for the use cases that it's being marketed for to consumers, CEOs, and Governments alike.
This " AI race" happened because Deepseek was able to create a model that was more or less equivalent to OpenAI and Anthropic models. It should have been seen as a race between proprietary and open source since deep seek is one of the more open models at that performance level. But it became this weird nationalist talking point on both countries instead.
There are a lot of things the US is actually in a race with China in. Many of which are things that would have immediate impact. Like renewable energy, international respect, healthcare advances, military sufficiency, human rights, food supplies, and afordible housing, just to name a few.
The promise of AI is that it can somehow help in the above categories eventually, and that's cool. But we don't need AI to make improvements to them right now.
I think AI is a giant distraction, while the the talk of nationalistic races is just being used for investor buy in.
Feelings don't care about logic. It's that easy.
Because it was a race for simulating more deadly nukes till now. But that got silly, so they need something new to compare their pp.
Have you considered that if the worlds two superpowers are dead certain on this being an important area that they are willing to throw coutless billions of investment into, that they might know more than you do?
Governments fail to implement incredibly obvious, easy, and proven solutions all the time so yeh they can be pretty dumb. Not to mention historical examples of governments (paricularly the UK when it was a world superpower) investing their entire economies in nigerian prince tier scams.
Yeah. But then i remembered some history facts and how lobbying and vulture capital works and decided it unlikely.
Don’t worry. They’ll just ask AI about the grid and it will tell them how great it is.
Edit: or it’ll say FEED ME MORE!
"good catch! That's a very astute observation. Here's a bunch of paragraphs explaining (incorrectly) how you're wrong!"
Just like next quarter's finance numbers for USA will coincidentally just all the great stuff Trump has achieved!
Gotta hand it to the fossil fuels industry, they got what they wanted and their propaganda worked.
And now Americans have a janky grid, slower / more expensive transportation, and bigger power bills.
Capitalism doesn't solve for society, it solves for capital.
There is no profit in making the world a better place.
It turns out that there is a lot of profit in making the world a worse place.
And likely those statements will not change anytime soon in the foreseeable future.
renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, [Rui Ma]
Is the person they’re talking about who is “stunned” at how super double awesome China is at powering AI.
Ffffffffffffffuck this.
Eastern European born American guy who is living at eastern Europe right now.
I don't know about china, but a lot of things in the country of my birth are a lot better than USA. Energy grid and energy pricing is one of those.
I got back to country of my birth because my parent got dementia. I'm seriously considering permanently staying here. It has its drawbacks. But a lot of things are also a lot better.
I like how Americans propaganda themselves - china doesnt even have to anything as Americans will gladly put them on a pedestal to spite themselves.
Crazy how apparent this is on TikTok especially. People with LGTBQ flags are salivating about China while their flags are literally censored there
Anything's possible when you make shit up kiddo
Turns out stubborn contrarianism and anti-science bias are not viable philosophical foundations for progress; what a surprise.
But for a few fleeting moments we did create a lot of value for the shareholders. Totally worth it to flush it all down the drain.
Maybe Trump can Make Ampères Great Again.
Yeah. Kind of amazing that for all of their America first bullshit rhetoric, Republicans have consistently and routinely neglected our infrastructure to focus time and money on gays, immigrants, and giving out blowies to billionaires
Look at other corrupt governments and you can see some even more startlingly disfunctional infrastructure.
to purposefully distract with gays, immigrants so they could keep giving out blowies to billionaires
Conservatism is collapsing into irrelevance as a long term commitment.
Close. Conservatism is collapsing the United States of America into irrelevance.
the race to the bottom may already be over
That level of cushion is unthinkable in the United States, where regional grids
Yeah, capitalism will resolve everything by being greedy. Electricity is not and will never be a merchandise. It's a basic human need and a natural state monopoly.
Need?
can't use power to make everyone use electric cars need power for "AI"
Nice job you jabroonies you did it you lost everything. This is the slow descent of America and it the boomers fault.
My father in law is convinced theres some guy in a garage that's gonna invent the next big invention, but hey guess what it takes MONEY that regular joe schmoes dont have!!
Anyone who is working on the next big project in his garage is just signing his own death certificate. That’s the truth about the American energy industry and capitalism’s free markets make “healthy competition economy” myth. Traditional American capitalism is long dead.
I'm not fully disagreeing with you, but blaming past generations is quite precisely how the boomers goofed as severely as they did. They played the blame game to the same tune we are currently, the only difference is they didn't LARP and play pretend about it as shallowly as we do. If we want to be truly better we must first ensure that we don't become exactly like the selfish demons we must vanquish. Otherwise evil persists merely in a different form.
It's got to stop here with us--we are the last generation, all of us. Identifying core issues is critical--but the secrets of the Egyptians were secrets even to themselves.
We grow as a society when the old plant trees for shade they won't see
Give up, all is lost, all is lost.
AFAIK in USA it is pretty common to build the power infra structure as part of the AI data-centers that need it.
This has already been pretty common for normal data-centers for years.
USA never really had good public service infra structure for it. While for instance in Denmark many companies build data-centers because Denmark both has good infrastructure, and also can supply data-centers with relatively cheap energy from renewable sources, without the company having to foot a giant bill to invest in that too.
The American model is of course inferior, but it's not like it doesn't work at all, it just makes it more expensive.
On the other hand, in USA they can bribe White House, and do almost whatever the fuck they want. That is NOT an option in China, where it can result in a literal death penalty for the CEO if tried!
For some. But Alabama power has raised rates AGAIN to build another 2 gas plants because of data centers. My power bill has increased by 50% in the last 6 years.
Everything China has us cooked in every sector
Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs.
For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.
Aha. I see the angle they're going for. "we need more energy to compete against the baddies undercut the working class"
I guess burning coal as fast as possible means energy is a "solved problem" for China?
You dont know a thing about infrastructure, do you?
The first country to adopt LLMs for everything is the one that will collapse first. This is a race where the winners never start and at best stop before they reach the end.
AI will move past LLMs
Maybe. Could also be that humans never invent anything that comes close to a biological brain. Either because we simply aren't smart enough, or because civilization regresses before we get there. And there's several trends going on currently which could cause civilization to regress. For example, climate change and declining birth rates (While we could set up an economic system that can deal with a shrinking and aging population, our current one cannot).