The meat of the article is behind the paywall.
My theory is that
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China has better integration between academia and industry - I’m mostly basing this off how in the US the academia is chronically underinvested so that the private sector can get it’s plunder of smart graduates, but when it comes to AI development you actually need academic knowledge of intelligence otherwise you’re just approaching it like an engineering problem
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US companies are incentivized to spend more, the more broke they are the smarter they seem, so there isn’t really any incentive to improve in smart ways because you can just rack up a bigger bill with your investors and keep the circular economy going.
Would love to know what the recipe says though.
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Being the pioneer means doing the heavy lifting and making mistakes. So makes sense, China can learn for others mistakes
Weird how the article doesn’t mention a key factor: the Chinese labs have really low headcount compared to their Western competitors, and organizationally they’re much more focused on model building than sidequests. Deepseek had only a couple hundred employees until recently, and accordong to leaks only had one or two people maintaining their consumer facing app.