I agree this one is more of a marketing fluff. But if you think all tech advances in China are Cold War era propaganda then you have not been paying attention to the tech world in the last 20 years.
I state that China advanced immensely but nowhere close to the level of the hype now.
I'm laser-focused on the developing markets (although China is already past that stage). Moreover, I hold investments in mutual funds for emerging markets, including those with stock in Tencent (for instance).
But I can't name anything in China except:
* bigger supercomputers
* bigger bitcoin mining facilities
* clone cryptocurrencies
* bigger number of patents filed by Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu
* hiring of Andrew Ng and then him quitting Baidu
* proliferation of cashless payments
* excellent team work of techies and business people resulting in WeChat, which would not have succeeded elsewhere
* I no longer buy the claims of ML applications (speech recognition, face recognition) surpassing human accuracy - I've been hearing these for years and then reading refutations, but yes, sure, let's assume a few algorithms were tweaked successfully
Does it all work, yes. It's far beyond the China where I was doing business a decade ago wondering whether the developers I was in contact with have a functioning brain. But is it "more advanced than Silicon Valley" - nowhere close to it, it's well-managed cookie-cutter tech. If anything, the credit goes to the Chinese tech-savvy business people not prone to the American corporate waste syndrome and forced to dive deeper into the tech.
Can you name 3 (three) projects where the tech was not licensed or borrowed elsewhere and is indeed so advanced it did not surface elsewhere? I'd be sincerely interested to learn of such.
I don't know if China's advanced, but I do know if you're making electronics, you want to be in China. Everything I order comes with about a month lead-time from Shanghai. They've also started making some really good electronics. Rapid prototyping is really important, and I think becoming more important all the time, since robotics is becoming both cheaper and better.
I haven't heard of anything 'pure tech', but there's a big network effect to having the world's electronics industry on your doorstep. If you're building a microscope, you don't have to wait for months for the parts to arrive. If you're building a new kind of centrifuge, you have a massive pool of great engineers who can do it for you, just a phonecall away.
vadimberman|8 years ago
I'm laser-focused on the developing markets (although China is already past that stage). Moreover, I hold investments in mutual funds for emerging markets, including those with stock in Tencent (for instance).
But I can't name anything in China except:
* bigger supercomputers
* bigger bitcoin mining facilities
* clone cryptocurrencies
* bigger number of patents filed by Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu
* hiring of Andrew Ng and then him quitting Baidu
* proliferation of cashless payments
* excellent team work of techies and business people resulting in WeChat, which would not have succeeded elsewhere
* I no longer buy the claims of ML applications (speech recognition, face recognition) surpassing human accuracy - I've been hearing these for years and then reading refutations, but yes, sure, let's assume a few algorithms were tweaked successfully
Does it all work, yes. It's far beyond the China where I was doing business a decade ago wondering whether the developers I was in contact with have a functioning brain. But is it "more advanced than Silicon Valley" - nowhere close to it, it's well-managed cookie-cutter tech. If anything, the credit goes to the Chinese tech-savvy business people not prone to the American corporate waste syndrome and forced to dive deeper into the tech.
Can you name 3 (three) projects where the tech was not licensed or borrowed elsewhere and is indeed so advanced it did not surface elsewhere? I'd be sincerely interested to learn of such.
pasabagi|8 years ago
I haven't heard of anything 'pure tech', but there's a big network effect to having the world's electronics industry on your doorstep. If you're building a microscope, you don't have to wait for months for the parts to arrive. If you're building a new kind of centrifuge, you have a massive pool of great engineers who can do it for you, just a phonecall away.
ng12|8 years ago