alt Hacker Newsand yet the oversupply of investment funds looking for projects created the current AI boom here in America, not China.
China “leads” but only in iterating on things already invented.
but we never ask what’s wrong with china that they spend so much on r&d but fail to invent novel things.
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What is "wrong" is that they have a culture of being conversative when it comes to 0-1 innovation. Everything is set up to reward concrete results. With 0-1 innovation you have no idea whether it's viable, so few people have the risk appetite and would rather pursue proven venues.
But westerners also underestimate the importance of 1-10 innovation. Scaling manufacturing and iterating on existing concepts are not at all trivial, and are also very valuable.
0-1 and 1-10 are complementary. Unfortunately, many people deliberately turn this into a pissing contest by accusing the Chinese of "only being able to steal" while ignoring how their own country is unable to produce basic goods like masks on a large a cheap scale, and can't fix a brige for less than xx million.
You go to a chinese city today it looks like the future short of flying cars. All the novel things we invent here and cities look the same as they did 30 years ago, only more people in tarps on the side of the road.