The leads buried pretty deep:
It was in summer 2020, in the early months of Covid, Zhu says, that he made the decision to leave the US. He cited his disaffection with the direction of the AI community and the hothouse of American politics – both its leftwing brand of campus progressivism and the Trump-era national security crusades. There was also a personal factor. His younger daughter, Zhu Yi, is a figure skater who was recruited in 2018 to compete for China in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics
In general he seems more angry at the direction silicon valley ai is going rather then how US politics are going. He thinks larger more traditional explainable statistical models are the way forward as opposed to the black box neural networks and transformers that power llms and most other models in this recent wave.
China is giving him hundreds of millions in grants to pursue those theories, whereas silicon valley vcs probably won’t give him a dime unless it’s got an llm in it and US research grants are drying up in general but especially to Chinese professors.
“Left the US” could also have been written as “Returned to his country of birth”, but that doesn’t play to the fake arms race vibes.
Good article. Will finish it later but it seems pretty neutral and relevant painting both the US and China’s history and recent actions. Many interesting parts, guy knows LLMs are not the way to AGI, wonder how much more the American LLM bubble can hold. From what I read, he seems like a real, brilliant scientist, driven by wanting to understand consciousness, but also an Oppenheimer type.
Man, I would, too, if I could.
If you don’t like USA under Trump, you’re not going to like China.
I’m actually not so sure they’re noticeably worse. It’s two sides of a shitcake.
They are creating an amazing national park system over there.
“Housing is for living, not speculative investment” is a policy the CCP adopted in 2016. They are leading the globe in renewable and clean energy production. It really seems like they’re building a society for the people and creating the infrastructure to make that happen.
I’m sure it’s not some perfect utopia, but where is? And it does seem like they’re headed to better places than we are here in the West.
Sure, if you’re ethnically Han Chinese and toe the party line.
This comment reads like straight Chinese propaganda lol
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Housing bubble. China screwed up so bad speculating investments in housing that they literally created ghost towns. Not a ghost town, multiple ones - domestic and foreign.
They had no choice but to say that because their attempt at it failed horribly.
Yeah and I get paid per reply, so keep it up
Definitely, by
SorosXi!people can talk propaganda even without being paid if they were made to believe it. and you know this is not specific to any country.
“Housing is for living, not speculative investment” is a policy the CCP adopted in 2016.
Absolutely laughable statement to anybody who has actually been to China. Have you?
No, I haven’t. Have you? To live or to work? Can you share your experiences that make you feel it’s laughable?
Yes, I have, although my experience is mostly limited to Beijing with a bit of time spent elsewhere. Housing is at least as expensive (relative to wages) as it is in a typical western city, despite there being graveyards of unfinished apartment blocks everywhere just outside the 5th ring road. This isn’t getting into the brutal working hours and mediocre wages, lack of free healthcare, etc etc. It isn’t really any better than the US (not that the US are good, they’re just bad in somewhat different ways)
Oh and I somehow failed to mention Evergrande! This is a far better example than any of my anecdotal data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_sector_crisis_(2020–present)
Thanks for sharing, it’s great to hear different perspectives on these things as it feels like they aren’t so often discussed by normal people.
It’s hard even for people in China to discuss this amongst themselves, so that’s understandable. I do recommend visiting though - it’s still a beautiful country, and the people are far friendlier and more welcoming than I had expected (I thought they’d be very reserved)
Lmao China? Out of the frying pan and into the wok.
It’s a ‘choose your evil’ situation.
