alt Hacker NewsI wonder about Japan and Europe these days. Back in the 80s, when Japan was pursuing the "Fifth-Generation Computers", EU and US scrambled to compete with Japan. Like, it was a big deal for strategists and decision-making high-level politicians of that era.
Now in 2020s, it seems only China is tailing US and in turn, US is wary of China. What gives?
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Do you think Japan and the EU would be better off if our/their economies were centred around trillion dollar companies that make a product that is 20% better than the Chinese models at 1000x the cost?
The reality is LLMs are just tools, and not even close to as revolutionary of tools as computers themselves. Even Chinese companies understand that. It is the US alone that is in machine god mania, gambling their economy on this idea that the next model will let them rule the world if only we give it three more months.
> in the 80s, when Japan was pursuing the "Fifth-Generation Computers"
“The Fifth Generation Computer Systems…was a 10-year initiative launched in 1982 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to develop computers based on massively parallel computing and logic programming” [1].
That sounds an awful lot like GPUs and HBM.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...