alt Hacker NewsThe current administration's immigration policy isn't helping. This wouldn't have happened 10 years ago because the US was this city on the hill that everyone wanted to immigrate to. Talented Asian researchers would have immigrated to the US and China would be deprived of talent.
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China never allow US AI in China, so they HAVE to build Chinese equivalents...
US immigration policy isn't a big factor.
China's got 1.8B people. If you don't think they've got the talent to pull this off, even if a lot of it leaves to live elsewhere, you're naive.
No one uses Baidu, but they built their own Google, and it's good.
They built their own Facebooks and Instagrams.
The US isn't the only place in the world where people can build software...
The visa that would correlate to this is the O-1 visa
20k O-1 visas were issued last FY which was mostly under the Trump admin, up from 19.5k the previous FY under the Biden admin
- thats not a sustainable strategy
- china’s homegrown tech industries already achieved escape velocity from it a long time ago, after China fenced off its market for Alibaba and Baidu in the ‘00s. some of their AI innovation at the edges was already top class 10 years ago
Your comment feels like an outdated brain drain model where talented Chinese researchers naturally want to leave China and the only question is whether the US lets them in.
That may have been closer to reality 10-20 years ago, China is a different country now, what I mean by that is they offer research funding, they have huge digital behemoths (alibaba, tencent, huawei, bytedance etc), large scale deployment opportunities and prestigious careers. Many graduates return because the opportunity set is attractive and they want to return, it's not just because US immigration policy pushed them out. Some also want to contribute to their own country's technological progress (which is a normal motivation btw), like probably you are also a patriot and want your country to succeed.
So, really, China's AI progress is not mainly the result of America failing to absorb every talented Chinese researcher. China has built a domestic ecosystem capable of producing and keeping top talent itself. I feel like a lot of Americans do not understand this.