Thread

Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM

562 points · 458 comments · giuliomagnifico

HarHarVeryFunny · 1789937583 · focus · HN ↗
On a related note, I was reading yesterday that apparently the real bottleneck for Chinese production of AI accelerators is HBM production, not processors or ASML equipment.
The lack of ASML EUV machines certainly hurts, and pushing DUV so hard results in abysmal yields of good chips, but you can compensate by running more wafers or making smaller chips, and the net result is that Huawei's Ascend production volume is limited by CXMT's HBM capacity not processor dies.
The problem is that HBM manufacture requires many steps (die thinning, via drilling, plating, alignment) where the equipment used by everyone else (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) is also blocked by sanctions, so the Chinese are having to develop all of this themselves too, which they have, but yields are currently low, even when using shorter HBM stacks.
1. jacquesm · 1789951954 · focus · HN ↗
  The only thing the West is achieving here is that sooner or later China will be able to compete on their own terms rather than ours. It may buy some time but the end result is very predictable.
  1. stingraycharles · 1789952664 · focus · HN ↗
    It baffles me how shortsighted the policymaking here is. Like, what did they expect to happen?
    mrheosuper · 1789955742 · focus · HN ↗
    they expect the Chinese to bend their knee and beg for the sweet, sweet chip
    adrianN · 1789958003 · focus · HN ↗
    They expect to retire with a decent amount of money before things go down hill.
    qaq · 1789958213 · focus · HN ↗
    they were sold an idea the AGI is right around the corner so even a slight delay might be critical to secure the "win"
    odo1242 · 1789961233 · focus · HN ↗
    They probably weren't expecting AI foundation models / model research to be quite as fungible as they are
    safety1st · 1789965572 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes.
    Over the last 20 years the economy has become dysfunctional. It no longer really resembles a free market; monopolies have established barriers to entry everywhere. And the biggest investors are awash with helicopter money that's been doled out for favors by the political class.
    So those investors have tons of cash to burn and surprisingly few opportunities. Even within Silicon Valley/VC there are surprisingly few who seem to really understand the fundamental economics of software. Or perhaps those economics just aren't that important when you have billions of dollars on hand and cash is obviously not going to get you a return. Any whisper of possible exponential growth is worth throwing money at. Crypto? Why not. AI? Why not. Datacenters? Why not. Tulips? Why not.
    This is by all definitions an empire in decline. Everything is broken or fake. Everyone is afraid to do what needs to be done. Power forbids it. So we're all just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Our secret police aren't as bad as the late stage USSR's yet, but hold Uncle Sam's beer...
    (That's not a recommendation to try and time the nadir, by the way, as it could easily be 50 years away.)
    piva00 · 1789977989 · focus · HN ↗
    It started way before the last 20 years, the past 40 years have created the conditions for this to happen.
    Overfinancialisation of the economy while removing safeguards to keep markets functional, like anti-trust enforcement, are the main forces behind this erosion. Through finance the focus of companies is completely shifted away from producing good products and services, and into how to extract more paper wealth from existing structures to the detriment of products.
    Not enforcing anti-trust and letting behemoths to form which cannot be competed against since with their amount of capital they can either buy their competition outright or just price dump for long enough to make competition non-viable.
    It's the failure of neoliberalism, and that agenda has been pushed into Western countries since the 1980s-1990s, it made enormous wealth for the few at the top while eroding whole societies, economically and socially, it's all dysfunctional.
    odo1242 · 1789986272 · focus · HN ↗
    I feel like my point is being over extrapolated a bit. All I was saying is that people in 2020 believed AI companies had much more of a moat then they actually do - that other companies would struggle to obtain enough data (y’know, downloading the internet to train models wasn’t legal back then) or resources to compete
    piva00 · 1789990661 · focus · HN ↗
    I replied to the extrapolation, not to your comment directly, I think your point might be more fitting under that comment than mine, I just drilled down from the points above mine.
    odo1242 · 1790021594 · focus · HN ↗
    Fair
    user43928 · 1789991387 · focus · HN ↗
    Datacenters and AI obviously work and come with a credible value proposition and path to profitability.
    Comparing this to crypto or turnips makes me doubt the merit of any other opinions your comment offers.
    pixl97 · 1790003890 · focus · HN ↗
    The initial growth of the internet was a boom bust cycle, and as you see the internet is still here. This is more about the economic paradigm that is being used to grow a technology versus the economic paradigm the technologies rate of growth can support over time.
    Just to give some rough numbers in the past 5 years the amount of GPU compute installed in FLOPS is somewhere over 5 times all the CPU flops that have ever existed.
    This has nothing to do with AI being good or bad or being able to produce things and economic value. It is by far the largest and fastest growth of any technology ever and we have zero clue about the economic stability of this grand experiment we're performing.
    user43928 · 1790005023 · focus · HN ↗
    The internet is a much more appropriate comparison than crypto or tulips, which bring no or negligible value.
    Some differences to the market at that time seems to be that during the dotcom bubble, many of the companies had little to no revenue.
    Leading AI labs already generate enormous revenue. The investments into capacity are needed to address the current demand.
    The situation seems somewhat less speculative.
    That said, I cannot predict how AI capabilities will develop and how demand will respond.
    Should capabilities plateau hard and soon, maybe the demand will not be there for the compute investments.
    If it does not, and instead AI applications in robotics, science, and self driving expand, chances seem reasonably good that the demand will be there, no?
    And as for the economic stability, much of the investment comes from existing giants like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, who have the necessary cash flow.
    These companies are less likely to collapse than some of the ones during the dotcom bubble.
    pixl97 · 1790005756 · focus · HN ↗
    Eh, I'd say it's closer to something like internet + tulips.
    It's the total amount of money in the economy that's been invested toward a potential outcome. AI represents the largest amount of money, and largest fractional part of the economy invested ever.
    Because of this AI could be the biggest economic boon ever, yet still not recover the full amount invested. This will have deep economic impacts that affect everyone and everything. At this point AI must achieve all its stated economic impacts or there will still be a huge economic crash that kills off any company that is over invested and cannot make a profit.
    Worse, the many of the perceived economic impacts of AI are not for humans like you or I, but the huge companies you listed. Even if they economically win, everyone else made out of meat could still lose.
    They say history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. This, at least to me, sounds like a mixtape of "internet" + "tulips" + "1920s financial world leading to global political instability".
    Every potential outcome I see occurring pushes us closer to further instability, even if the economics on it work out on paper.
    user43928 · 1790008914 · focus · HN ↗
    > At this point AI must achieve all its stated economic impacts or there will still be a huge economic crash
    I had a look at the numbers.
    The investment into data centers is estimated around $800B/year currently.
    OpenAI + Anthropic combined had ARR of >$100B in July.
    Global labor income is around $65T/year, the US GDP $32T, the global one $126T.
    Global software spending: $1.4T/year.
    I am no financial analyst, but I don't think all the stated AI impacts have to be met just to recover the investments.
    A 1% productivity gain on global labor income represents $660B/year. At 5% we would look at $3.3T/year.
    They don't need to cure cancer to justify the investment, even though Amodei hopes to cure most major disease in the next 5-10 years.
    pixl97 · 1790012154 · focus · HN ↗
    Lets take this number for example
    >Global software spending: $1.4T/year.
    Out of this number how much of this goes to payroll that goes to humans versus how much of this goes to non-human infrastructure costs. The numbers suggest this is anywhere from 60 to 90%, with 70% being a reasonable average figure. Just under a trillion dollars paid directly to humans would disappear if AI somehow captured all of this market.
    Moreso the AI industry needs to capture these gains very fast or they will be crushed by interest payments on the massive debts they've accrued.
    >ven though Amodei hopes to cure most major disease in the next 5-10 years
    The average development time for medicine is 10 to 15 years before a single dollar is earned from said medicine. AI will shave very little off that as human testing and our stupidly complex bodies introduce all kinds of problems. Furthermore running head long into blindly using AI medicine is how you produce X risks from super intelligence AI.
    The speed at which AI has to develop in which to get profitability is the biggest risk, a potentially catastrophic risk at that.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790017618 · focus · HN ↗
    You can theorize all you like, and many people like yourself are expecting to see GDP growth pick up as a result of AI, maybe if only because of the boom in datacenter construction etc (regardless of whether AI ends up actually boosting the economy), BUT ...
    The reality is that so far there has been no sign of GDP growth picking up. It is basically flat at 2.5% +/- over the last few years.
    In a similar vein one might have expected that the internet (think of all the e-commerce and efficiencies!) might have shifted GDP growth into a higher gear, but it did not, although in that case there was at least a significant boost in the 1996-2000 "dot com" era when the build out was happening (then to be followed by the crash and all the unused dark fiber etc).
    So, maybe the hoped-for AI boom will be just as much of a dud (as it appears to be so far) as the internet boom. New day, different tools, same growth.
    It's perhaps odd that we're not even seeing datacenter/etc build out register on GDP, but perhaps the scale of it is not as large as the internet build out?
    user43928 · 1790019167 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not really odd when you look at the numbers in my comment, where the datacenter investments are 0.8T vs 126T GDP.
    That's 0.6%. Subtract last year's investment and then we're talking yearly growth.
    Turns out it's not the earth shattering capital investment the comment before mine was making it out to be.
    And about productivity gains, AI became good at software development in spring this year.
    I'm not sure what productivity miracles reflecting in GDP growth you already expect to see by now.
    pixl97 · 1790020939 · focus · HN ↗
    >but perhaps the scale of it is not as large as the internet build out?
    In the past 5 years 5 times as much GPU compute capacity has been installed as total CPU capacity that has ever existed. When it comes to capital intensity the growth of AI has been one of, if not the largest capital expenditure for a class of project in this short of time frame. Things like the Manhattan project which was absolutely monstrous expense at the time is dwarfed by this.
    Of course measuring GDP growth is difficult when you have an idiot in chief trying to destroy the global economy with the dumbest set of actions contrived by a human ever. Disentangling this factors will take a lot of work on someones part.
    odo1242 · 1790021620 · focus · HN ↗
    I feel like my point is being over extrapolated a bit. All I was saying is that people in 2020 believed AI companies had much more of a moat then they actually do - that other companies would struggle to obtain enough data (y’know, downloading the internet to train models wasn’t legal back then) or resources to compete
    ekianjo · 1789961852 · focus · HN ↗
    if you sell them ASML equipment your market gets destroyed tomorrow instead of 10 years later so what options do they have?
    DeepSeaTortoise · 1789974518 · focus · HN ↗
    No longer strangling their own economy would be a good start. Take a look at the magnificance that was the ESRS. A 300 A4 pages long list of yearly reporting duties. And the best thing is: Just because they're no longer nicely summarized in one place, doesn't mean the underlying duties went away.
    georgemcbay · 1789969516 · focus · HN ↗
    > It baffles me how shortsighted the policymaking here is. Like, what did they expect to happen?
    As someone who is myself 'old af' by tech standards (I'll be 53 very soon) the main problem is that the policymakers are all 70+ years old.
    Their concept of what China even is is forever stuck in pre-2004 thinking from back when they still had significant neuroplasticity.
    Vote these fucking fossils out, kids, before it is entirely too late.
    (And, yeah, before someone inevitably brings it up, some exceptions-that-prove-the-rule older policymakers/politicians do avoid this trap of getting stuck in the past, but most don't)
  2. skeptic_ai · 1789956404 · focus · HN ↗
    I think eventually The west will want to kneecap China, so I guess this is the best time to do so.
  3. nonethewiser · 1789958365 · focus · HN ↗
    They always had the option to do that
    nixon_why69 · 1789958984 · focus · HN ↗
    But not the necessity, so it wasn't getting funded with the same urgency as now.
    nonethewiser · 1790007051 · focus · HN ↗
    But if it was always an option and they didnt do it then they didnt think it was in their best interest
  4. bigcat12345678 · 1789960301 · focus · HN ↗
    As other comments pointed out, that was always China's plan, the value here is really that when the Chinese overlord annillate the world's industrial competition, they'll have the moral high ground of being out of self-reliance and hostility by western monopolists.
    Edit:
    And, that, my fellow keyboard high-minded thinker but powerless corp peons, was also part of the China's plan all along.
    fangspire · 1789965791 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    vkou · 1789973334 · focus · HN ↗
    > Was it also the Chinese plan all along to annihilate their own birh rate?
    No, that's generally what happens when countries stop being poor. Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, all have similar fertility rates.
    rmunn · 1789976036 · focus · HN ↗
    But none of them had a government-mandated one-child policy (maximum, not minimum) for over three decades. That's a pretty major difference between China and neighboring countries.
    vkou · 1789982694 · focus · HN ↗
    And yet all of them have an even lower fertility rate than China.
    On the one hand, you're proving my point. On the other hand, if you think that China's headed for a demographic disaster, so are all of those countries, and your thesis of blaming the CCP for everything... Falls a bit flat.
    badpun · 1789989627 · focus · HN ↗
    China has extremely low fertitily rate given that they haven't yet reached the status of a developed country (which Taiwan, SK and Singapore have reached).
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790016283 · focus · HN ↗
    Huh?
    Developed countries tend to have lower fertility rates (i.e. less kids per family) than undeveloped ones. Comfortably off, well educated people tend to put thought into whether to have kids or not. In poor countries people tend to have large families so they can send the kids out to work.
    Having a high fertility rate isn't "high status" and a sign of a country's progress, but rather the exact opposite.
    Of course this is separate from this issue of having a shrinking population, which is a sign that your citizens are not optimistic about the future, not a positive thing.
    ricardobayes · 1789989786 · focus · HN ↗
    China is headed for a demographic disaster, though. High schools are incredibly packed, middle schools, not so much and primary schools and kindergartens are kind of empty.
    lazide · 1789994481 · focus · HN ↗
    Everyone is, not just China.
    belowavgiq · 1789996422 · focus · HN ↗
    Everyone stupid enough to let that happen is.
    There is a handful of developed countries where this is not an issue.
    lazide · 1789997590 · focus · HN ↗
    Population collapse? Who, besides Zimbabwe?
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1789999278 · focus · HN ↗
    It's hard to say that it's stupidity (at least not country-specific stupidity) - it seems that globally, presumably due to the state of the world along many axis, many people are choosing to have fewer children, and it's happening on a large enough scale to have major consequences for things like the size of your tax base, trying to keep your economy growing, demographic concerns over an aging population with no-one to look after or pay for them etc, etc.
    Different countries are handling this in different ways, with encouraging immigration being the major one. Japan is facing a major lack of workers, with many businesses having to shut down as a result, but have decided to tackle it in a different way relying on advanced robotics as an alternative to immigration.
    There are very few developed countries NOT having this problem. Most of the population growth is in poorer parts of the world like Africa.
    belowavgiq · 1790000446 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, if there are >0 developed countries that have solved this (Israel, the GCC, dare I say fairly well-off MENA countries like Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, etc., and to a minor degree Botswana) then this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse.
    Going purely by the evolution theory and natural selection, having so few children that there is a serious risk a population will disappear in a century or two, means losing. Needless to say, this is stupid. From the entire American continent, to Europe, India more recently, Thailand, China, the Koreas, Japan.
    Africans, Arabs, and some non-Arab Muslim populations will carry the torch. Much respect for not falling into the trap.
    pixl97 · 1790003132 · focus · HN ↗
    > then this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse.
    Honestly you're reading the data completely wrong. You cannot look at it at the country level. In Israel for example the populations that are producing the most population are highly religious and less educated than those that are producing less population.
    It's more about memes. Religion is a meme driven breeding cult. This is why said religions tend to have very long term staying power. The particular problem here is these religions come at a cost of having to ignore a lot of reality to get to that point. Because they are faith based anything that presents a direct challenge to that faith must be setup as an enemy or it may risk the religion. Yes, religions can incorporate new information but it tends to be a slow process as it needs to involve slowly changing peoples mind to avoid instability.
    What this looks like in the long term is large populations of highly religious that have a fundamental disconnect from the technology that's keeping them alive. A new Late Bronze Age collapse.
    belowavgiq · 1790006479 · focus · HN ↗
    So? How does the population being religious disprove the fact that they are developed and having children? Not to mention that I have listed around ~10 countries after Israel.
    Uh... Meme-based? This is such an unserious argument I don't even know what I can possibly say to that.
    How are they disconnected with the technology keeping them alive? All people, in GCC countries especially, are working to make 1st world development happen.
    Implying that religious Jews or Muslims are stuck in the Bronze Age is ignoring reality. Most European development itself came from men of science who were Christian, I thought this apparent conflict of ideas was something taught in schools.
    pixl97 · 1790009000 · focus · HN ↗
    First, you seems to think a meme is something unserious. Read Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene so you know what meme actually stands for rather than the thing you see on Reddit.
    GCC countries are resource economies mostly. They must weave a very narrow path to success to non-oil based means of income or the entire region collapses. I will say they do realize this is a problem and are using oil money to diversify, but resource curses are very hard to break and collapse can happen very quickly.
    "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son's son will ride a camel." --Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum
    >Most European development itself came from men of science who were Christian
    This is just stating that that in 1700 you were a Christian or you got hung (hell, pre-independence America was founded by people that thought that too few people were being hung). As we see when you take out the hanging or social shame part of the religion people tend to flee them as they are oppressive structures. You could say them being men of science either had no bearing to their religion, or was in spite of their religion.
    I am saying, for example, that the Abrahamic religions are bronze age (ok, sorry, Iron age) social structures. I don't think studied scholars are going to disagree on that point very much. People saw how people worked and could be sheppereded in societies without formal education and turned it into a series of stories that were effective in modifying peoples behaviors. Kings later came along and added their stories so they could further control the population. Over time a semi-coherent story about how people worked was formed below a set of rather incoherent stories regarding things that didn't happen that people are supposed to accept with faith.
    lazide · 1790054620 · focus · HN ↗
    Notably, it is hilarious how ‘modern western society’ seems to believe that people somehow work differently than they always have, while clearly mimicking the same rough structures they are deriding.
    (Comic book superheros, cough cough. The references to Canon in what are essentially liturgical disagreements - I mean power scaling arguments - are particularly hilarious.)
    Not me of course, I’m different and unique. Just like everyone else.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790006624 · focus · HN ↗
    Don't worry, we've got Elon Musk trying to single-handedly repopulate America.
    And if that fails, we've got "Idiocracy" to save the human species as the dumb-asses pump out babies as fast as you like.
    reeredfdfdf · 1790010663 · focus · HN ↗
    Algeria and Morocco hardly seem "fairly well-off" countries, considering how many of their citizens prefer moving to the low-birth rate European countries you loathe. High birth rate of Israel is also unsustainable from economic perspective, as it relies mostly on orthodox Jews who on average are much poorer, less educated, and contribute less to the Israeli economy.
    I'm not saying fast fall in birth rates isn't a problem, it obviously is. However, nearly all countries that don't have this problem offer much worse quality of life than those which do.
    belowavgiq · 1790023132 · focus · HN ↗
    Young southern europeans are in turn migrating north. Are Spain, Italy, Portugal not well off?
    There is a saying. More is better. Morocco has issues with tourists and diaspora pricing out locals from houses to food even, but Algeria is an honestly good country all around. With its issues of course. But there is more to life than earning $$$.
    Westerners forget the tiny detail that these countries are extremely young unlike them, hence why it feels like there are so "many" people.
    Edit: oops, I glossed over the part about Israel. Trust me, it's still a billion times better than nothing, which is the case for the entire West.
    Edit 2: Oh my oh my, I missed this too. I "loathe" European countries? Do I? I mildly not respect European populations for wiping themselves out. I cannot loathe land.
    fangspire · 1790054770 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    ricardobayes · 1790069259 · focus · HN ↗
    > this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse
    I don't know the exact correlation but even in Morocco, total fertility rate is declining very rapidly, down from 6 children in 1980s to now around 1.7 in urban areas. UAE (Dubai) has similar TFR to Belgium or Portugal.
    inglor_cz · 1789993018 · focus · HN ↗
    Still, a stupid governmental policy cost them at least 100 million people compared to the expected spontaneous development. Probably more. That is the sort of punishment that omnipotent governments sometimes visit upon their folk.
    I don't believe that even the CCP itself, in hindsight, considers the one-child policy to have been a good decision. At the very least it should have been ended some 15 years earlier.
    reeredfdfdf · 1790010975 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, I've been reading on The Economist how China is seriously struggling with youth unemployment right now. Lots of fresh university graduates are sitting unemployed, or doing manual labor. In my home country (Finland) we have had way below replacement birth rates for a long while now, yet youth unemployment is at all time high.
    The problem with low birth rates is assumed to be that there are less workers to take care of the pensioners. But right now it seems like even the few young workers available often aren't needed anymore, thanks to increasing automation of industries. I predict youth unemployment will be made even worse by AI soon enough. So, why do we need children, if capitalist economies don't need workers? Unemployed people do not pay much taxes to sustain the non-working age population.
    I believe low birth rates might become a blessing soon enough. It just means less people for governments to take care of when robots and AI take away most jobs.
    maxglute · 1790011848 · focus · HN ↗
    No, a remarkably farsighted policy that prevented PRC from having to deal with additional 200m-400m subsistent farmers. If anything it wasn't done sooner/aggressive enough. Like you can literally wipe away 200-400m from PRC button quantile and PRC would be net better off due to increase per capita resources and wealth. This hindsight will be historically obvious in 20-30 years when you see the outcome of India with 1.6B people with 1.2B poor, vs PRC with 1.4B people with 400m poor. The drag of having disproportionate, bluntly, worthless bodies is not linear for governance, and it's not because India hasn't tried aggressive family planning of their own, they simply failed unlike PRC. Who very much regards family planning as largely successful demographic management system that enabled proper allocation of resources away from generating peasants to building industry and the largest pool of high end human talent in recorded history, where frankly any tertiary dividend is worth 50 farmers in terms of productivity.
    lazide · 1789983065 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, they literally named it the ‘one child policy’. It was just overly successful.
    peterfirefly · 1789984973 · focus · HN ↗
    The official one child policy didn't actually have much of an impact. Birth rates had already fallen a lot, despite the official "lots-a-children" policy.
    The one child policy is gone now but birth rates haven't really moved upwards.
    nixon_why69 · 1789985543 · focus · HN ↗
    It's debatable and impossible to disentangle from living standards going up, but a lot of the economy is built on assumptions of one child, from apartment sizes to personal transit (ebike can do 2 adults + 1 small child).
    ricardobayes · 1789991559 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course it had an impact, if nothing else, a cultural one. It basically eradicated the concept of large families.
    pixl97 · 1790003463 · focus · HN ↗
    So China has similar family sizes as the US that had no one child policy.
    It's difficult to near impossible here to determine which counterfactuals would actually hold true. Based on other world wide trends it's very likely that Chinese family sizes now would only be slightly higher than if the policy didn't exist. In the modern world there are just a huge number of different factors working together to decrease family sizes.
    lazide · 1789994523 · focus · HN ↗
    Not what I heard from friends who were subjected to it, and their parents.
    It was insanely disruptive.
    peterfirefly · 1790010418 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course it was devasting for some families. That is never the same thing as saying that it affected China's birth rate much (which it didn't).
    There were forced abortions (sometimes very late), there was forced contraception, forced sterilization (I think), and lots of punishments for people who broke the policy.
    There were also others who got around it fairly easily by paying a bribe and by not registering their "surplus" child/children (especially if they were girls). That of course caused some problems down the road.
    That still doesn't mean that it affected China's birth rate much. It was already low (and had fallen steadily) when the policy was instituted. It also had plenty of exceptions for rural China and ethnic minorities.
    lazide · 1790032200 · focus · HN ↗
    Uh huh [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy]
    nixon_why69 · 1789966816 · focus · HN ↗
    Eh. Industrial policy in a big country is always the output of politics between stakeholders, anthropomorphizing it to a "guy with a plan", especially an "overlord" looking to "annihilate" is probably getting it wrong.
    A friend of a friend is married to a member of the national academy of sciences in China. I heard at dinner a few years ago that he had been lobbying for more onshoring of chip production for years before the Nvidia restrictions, and always heard "you're right, maybe next year we'll be able to fund that". Then the restrictions came in and everything changed.
    [deleted] · 1789969638 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    lazide · 1789983036 · focus · HN ↗
    There are literal 5 year plans, eh?
    peterfirefly · 1789984871 · focus · HN ↗
    And they are more about sounding good than about reality. They also affect a much smaller share of the economy than they used to -- which is very good! The original five year plans caused nothing but misery and starvation.
    lazide · 1789994422 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m pointing out it’s disenguous to say ‘it’s not like there was a plan’, when there was explicitly a plan with that title on it. Especially if the plan didn’t work out well.
    nixon_why69 · 1789997615 · focus · HN ↗
    It's disingenuous to characterize "don't anthropomorphize the political process" as saying no planning documents exist as part of that process.
    And, to the point I was responding to originally, we can check those documents! They don't speak of "annihilating" other countries' industrial capacities.
    pixl97 · 1790002384 · focus · HN ↗
    >They don't speak of "annihilating" other countries' industrial capacities.
    Why would they have to?
    When China talked about their 5 and 10 year plans on solar panels there was no need to talk about putting the rest of the competitors out of business. That was a highly probable end goal of what they were doing, no need to state it.
    It would be like Walmart stating "We're going to put out massive loss leaders in sporting goods to put X out of business". Instead they'll talk about growing market share and long term customer loyalty.
    [deleted] · 1790004176 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    nixon_why69 · 1790004395 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm sorry, I'm not following. Is the problem here that China is too capitalist or too communist?
    pixl97 · 1790004717 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes.
    More of, China is smart enough to use the benefits of both capitalism and authoritarianism to grow their country while western governments are busy stealing the furniture and fixtures off the walls.
    nixon_why69 · 1790005157 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree with 100% of that comment but I'm struggling to understand the beef?
    Of course they're trying to take care of themselves while the US implodes, how can you blame them for that? The whole world has a serious oil problem right now, because of US actions, and of course each country is dealing with it in their own way. Why is that a problem?
    pixl97 · 1790005920 · focus · HN ↗
    You do realize that a lot of people have had problems with America after WWII and using their economic and military power to dictate what the rest of the world does, right?
    "Problem" is a relative term for those dealing with the consequences of it. It is one if you are America means a whole lot less economic freedom than you had in the past. If this is a good thing or not depends on your position.
    nixon_why69 · 1790006333 · focus · HN ↗
    If your beef is that they are succeeding or at least failing less while America steps on it's dick repeatedly, maybe this isn't their problem?
    If you're fired up by nationalism but your nation is sucking, getting mad at the Chinese isn't the answer. And that's before we even get into relative levels of activism, Chinese political ideology is much more biased towards "neutral, just trade" than American politics.
    lazide · 1790054252 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh boy, how to get a bunch of seething haters more seething.
    Near as I can tell, they fundamentally believe that the US actually can’t do better (despite protestations to the contrary), at least not with them there doing there thing, which is why they get so manipulative and shitty. They are unwilling to make other decisions than the ones leading to these outcomes.
    Yes people, it is actually possible to do better. It requires making better choices, however.
    fragmede · 1790006232 · focus · HN ↗
    False dichotomy. the problem is far deeper than that, and wanting to simplify the problem to those two extremes belies a belief that the world could and should be able to be simplified into two power dynamic. It is not. The world, and the powers that fight within in, are far more dynamic than a simple communist or capitalist spectrum, and attempts to simplify the world along those lines is only going to hurt you.
    nixon_why69 · 1789986695 · focus · HN ↗
    That just means your stakeholders argue twice: once when drafting the five year plan and then again, later, saying their policy position is more aligned with the spirit of the plan.
    Woodi · 1789966954 · focus · HN ↗
    > [...] that was always China's plan, [...] they'll have the moral high ground
    It's a possibility. It is also possible that they will steal yesterday's technology and still pretend to have moral high ground.
    I do not wish China and Chinees wrong but most probably communism will work as it always do - by faking thing and bringing self-harm to their own citizens.
    eecc · 1789968624 · focus · HN ↗
    Oef, still kicking the “communism” horse. It’s dead Jim, especially in China it’s dead and buried
    [deleted] · 1790200388 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    mitxela · 1789981872 · focus · HN ↗
    In free markets, everyone steals everything they can, and stops everyone else stealing from them as much as they can. This is normal and expected. The ideology says that it will even out and converge to a fair situation.
    lazide · 1789994431 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s the same in communism/socialism except people are prevented from stopping everyone else from stealing their stuff, in the name of the ‘greater good’, and if they try to get more than everyone else get guilt tripped into giving it up under the ‘to everyone what they need, from everyone what they can’.
    Which incentivizes pretending you need a ton, and can give nothing. You think being useful at work in Capitalism is bad? Wait until you are accidentally useful in a communist/socialist economy.
    There is usually less pretending under capitalism, but people are people, so it all the same stories still play out.
    People are shitty, if given the chance and influenced in specific ways. Capitalism or not. We’re dealing with the current bullshit in the west because somehow people bought the line that everyone is a good person - and we totally can’t actually see or do anything if we see someone doing something bad! - and we need to always follow ‘the rules’ even when someone bad clearly isn’t.
    Until we find our balls, good luck.
    mitxela · 1790030029 · focus · HN ↗
    communism derangement syndrome - rent free (ironically)
    lazide · 1790032156 · focus · HN ↗
    Ask anyone who lived in the Soviet Union how that was like
    [deleted] · 1789998416 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    philipallstar · 1789998436 · focus · HN ↗
    > In free markets, everyone steals everything they can, and stops everyone else stealing from them as much as they can. This is normal and expected. The ideology says that it will even out and converge to a fair situation.
    This is all nonsense. Capitalism isn't an ideology, it's just a slight formalisation of what naturally arises. People are free to choose; they can own things; they can make agreements; they must honour the agreements or pay a penalty. Capitalism in no way is about stealing.
    andrekandre · 1790006862 · focus · HN ↗
    > Capitalism isn't an ideology
    your confusing trading/markets with capitalism; they aren’t the same thing, and it definitely has ideology(ies)
    <a href="https://www.britannica.com/money/capitalism" rel="nofollow">https://www.britannica.com/money/capitalism
    philipallstar · 1790208170 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorry, I'm not sure where in that link you're getting that from. Do you have a quote from there?
    hobo123 · 1789999904 · focus · HN ↗
    And by stealing you mean exchange? Or I somehow misunderstood what you consider a market to be - a place for pickpockets?
    theeyescanner · 1790012637 · focus · HN ↗
    Our LLMs were trained on the widespread theft of copyright content, with clearly defined and well tested law. But they made capitalists too much money so it became defacto legal.
    Next you'll be telling me fairy tales like "laws are real".
    mitxela · 1790029971 · focus · HN ↗
    If you're paying money for something you could get for free, you're a sucker. Ordinarily the person who is selling it makes sure you can't get it for free.
    cumshitpiss · 1789992121 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    FooBarWidget · 1789993021 · focus · HN ↗
    China's plan to be self-sufficient in semiconductors was a failure before western sanctions, because all the Chinese chipmakers found it too easy to buy western chipmaking equipment or to fab through TSCM. No Chinese company wanted to buy from other Chinese companies. Nobody was incentivized to develop self-sufficiency. "Because the government wants it" was not enough incentive.
    Western sanctions have succeeded in achieving China's self-sufficiency goals where their own government failed.
  5. ekianjo · 1789961774 · focus · HN ↗
    people have been claiming Nvidia will get competition too for years but you guys seem to be forgetting that the current leaders are not asleep at the wheel in the meantime.
  6. SadErn · 1789962230 · focus · HN ↗
    When China eventually catches up on conventional lithography, the goalposts will shift to silicon photonics and optical logic, a transition DARPA laid the publicly visible groundwork for decades ago through programs like POEM and PIPES while keeping the mature implementations strictly classified until needed.
  7. deepsun · 1789968908 · focus · HN ↗
    Well Soviet Union tried to be self-sufficient, but the truth is such strategy loses to global free trade. Whether we want it or not, global trade is what keeps the world from WW3 for now, not the nuclear MAD.
    klrefg · 1789970169 · focus · HN ↗
    Few countries rely more economically on global trade than China though.
    hiddencost · 1789974745 · focus · HN ↗
    You understand that the US has alienated almost all of its trading partners and is aggressively attempting to kill free global trade, right?
    Whereas China is developing a powerful network of rapidly developing trading partners like Africa and the Middle East?
    deepsun · 1790099009 · focus · HN ↗
    Yep, exactly. US is in the active process of shooting itself in the foot. My point is that China is very dependent on resources imports, so there's no way for them (and any other country) to be self-sufficient or they will stagnate.
    jacquesm · 1789975809 · focus · HN ↗
    The Soviet Union never was the manufacturing power behind a very significant fraction of the worlds products.
    deepsun · 1790098827 · focus · HN ↗
    And China is very dependent on imports of almost everything. Maybe some rare elements, but e.g. oil is a big part of it (they agressively diversify off it, but it's still a large piece). Global interdependency is a good thing.
  8. KurSix · 1789970013 · focus · HN ↗
    Sanctions can absolutely create the incentive to build a domestic supply chain, but incentive doesn't automatically translate into catching up on the same timeline
  9. audunw · 1789971327 · focus · HN ↗
    What the West is doing is forcing China into a situation which is impossible to sustain when their economic dividend runs out. Especially considering these investments are fuelled by an extremely high level of debt.
    And it’s not a given that they’ll catch up. I think it’s fair to say that their development of jet engines is on track to be obsolete before they’re competitive.
    They may in principle have established the technologies to be self sustained but that’s only relevant and sustainable if they develop an economy based on domestic consumption rather than exports. Which they are struggling with as well.
    pinkmuffinere · 1789971742 · focus · HN ↗
    > They may in principle have established the technologies to be self sustained but that’s only relevant and sustainable if they develop an economy based on domestic consumption rather than exports. Which they are struggling with as well.
    Is this really true? Can't they just keep exporting "forever"? What requires them to find a domestic audience? I can think of some other countries that have done quite well mostly without finding a domestic audience (eg, Switzerland comes to mind, and frankly Europe might largely be in the same bucket).
    T-A · 1789973205 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2023/06/superpowers-are-forsaking-free-trade-ngaire-woods" rel="nofollow">https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2023/06/sup...
    jacquesm · 1789975567 · focus · HN ↗
    Totally non-biased of course.
    pixl97 · 1790003558 · focus · HN ↗
    Nothing exists in the world that is not biased. The key to knowledge is understanding what those biases are.
    yxhuvud · 1789975641 · focus · HN ↗
    Europe (by which I assume you mean EU or possibly Euro area) has a fairly balanced balance of trade overall.
    And a teeny-tiny country like Switzerland can't be usefully compared to something as big as China - the rest of the world can easily consume whatever the Swiss produce, but there are limits to how much Chinese can produce until consumption will have to shift to domestic consumption because the world doesn't have infinite ability to pay for its demand.
    That said don't expect any big change anytime soon - there are very strong political incentives to keep the status quo with China focusing a bit too much on exports.
    chii · 1789972808 · focus · HN ↗
    > their economic dividend runs out
    i dont think it will - they still have a chokehold on battery production (which implies dominance in the EV sector), and they also control the vast majority of all rare earths. The chinese gov't can subsidize chip research/development with these other sectors that are dominating.
    The west is the one that need to watch out for their own economic dividend running out from the past century.
    sysguest · 1789980332 · focus · HN ↗
    another thing: chinese gov can just some of its wipe its populace easily (the gov controls media 100%)
    but... not the western govs
    Sammi · 1790079510 · focus · HN ↗
    "Economic dividend" really means "Demographic dividend". It's when your fertility rate decreases but your total population isn't decreasing yet, so you get more people to work more as they spend less time as parents. This of course is a self perpetuating cycle and ends in demographic collapse. China's population is now decreasing. The West's population is still growing. China is in the most literal sense dying. It's what you get for having a one child policy for 50 years. But hey, for a beautiful moment in time they really created a lot of shareholder value.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1789997624 · focus · HN ↗
    What makes you think they don't have a domestic market?
    The Chinese domestic EV market is the largest in the world.
    Chinese factories are full of Chinese robotics.
    Companies like Huawei are struggling to meet the domestic demand for AI accelerators, while growing volume very fast year over year.
    The Chinese domestic AI market is massive, but we just don't hear much about it outside of the models that are also sold here. Can you even name the models that ByteDance (China's Meta) makes?
    As far as exports go, China is a low cost producer for many things. If the US doesn't want to buy high quality EV's costing 1/2 the price of a Tesla, then there are plenty of other countries happy to do so. The US is only 5% of the global population - there are lots of other consumers out there.
  10. iwontberude · 1789973077 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.