alt Hacker NewsThere are huge evidence of copying.
Some day China can pioneer in science or technology but the current claim about Chinese companies leading AI development is ridiculous given the evidence of distillation and the fact that like 95 percent of science that lead to the current state of AI happened in either North America or Europe.
To be honest if you want to list academic papers that lead to the current AI models the majority is either done by Google Research or sponsored by Google.
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From the Hoover Institution’s analysis of the team behind DeepSeek:
“We find striking evidence that China has developed a robust pipeline of homegrown talent. Nearly all of the researchers behind DeepSeek’s five papers were educated or trained in China. More than half of them never left China for schooling or work, demonstrating the country’s growing capacity to develop world-class AI talent through an entirely domestic pipeline. And while nearly a quarter of DeepSeek researchers gained some experience at US institutions during their careers, most returned to China, creating a one-way knowledge transfer that benefits China’s AI ecosystem.”
That was from a year ago.
Consider that on top of this the country was starved of access to Nvidia chips - and therefore accelerated its development of Ascend chips, and it’s clear they are undeniably leaders in AI research and development. Not the only ones, but the achievements are crystal clear.
Okay but I cannot stress this enough: no one cares.
It's international politics. The rules are optional, and written on the back of whoever agrees to enforce them.
If you're going to run around declaring AI is a strategic advantage vital to national security, then guess what? Stealing it is a great idea. That you stole it is only a problem if it means you're not developing the ability to support that work locally as well, and China seems to be doing very well at building it's local talent and support network.
If you ever listen to Russian propaganda, there's a similar theme: every big idea, everything good, all of it was definitely first developed in Russia - only Russians could ever have thought of it. Of course, Russia isn't actually a world leader in any of those things, or able to execute on them.
Which is what America is sounding like more and more these days.
What about EVs, solar, or batteries? They are leading these fields for some time.
In 2017 maybe. This chart shows last year’s Neurips accepted papers by country and institution (top 50). What is missing here is that the papers from American institutions also have mostly Chinese authors. Europe is sliding and Singapore has more papers than Canada.
There is a clear trend.
https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1pi64q0/papers_...
US is still winning because of their hardware dominance. Also they have astronomical budgets and much better financing. They throw money at an industry until they win. Whereas China throws lots of (educated) people at it. 38% of top AI researchers today have Chinese education and origin^. And hardware dominance will change in the upcoming years.
^ https://archivemacropolo.org/interactive/digital-projects/th...