I worked in a university research spinout US-China multinational AI hardware startup, and (without getting into confidential information, but only speaking of general engineering practice) I can mention that both nations' government concerns could be barriers.
And some rules can be counterproductive for the one making the rule, even from a competitive perspective -- not even turning a win-win into a lose-lose, but turning it into a lose-win where you are the "side" who loses.
Another thing I'd like like to say, as a US person, who interfaced throughout the org chart at the multinational startup, is that my colleagues in China, as well as those who were recent immigrants, were generally very smart and knowledgeable, and also very nice people.
It's especially tragic when nations feel they have to act adversarily on tensions, because (as seen in this case) the respective individual citizens are not natural enemies, but rather, they are natural friends. They are also valuable fellow contributors, to the shared wealth of our shared world.
In recent weeks, the world is fortunate that DeepSeek has shared some of its AI advancements, even in the context of themselves being denied the latest hardware with which to work. I hope that this sharing will continue and increase, in all directions.
December, flying out of Thailand I spent one night in Bangkok. Looking for a bar late for one or two drinks after I settled into my hotel I saw two guys, one Chinese and other Russian, stumbling out of a building a few doors down from my hotel. I asked, "Is that a bar or a brothel? I'm looking for a bar." They laughed saying they were looking for a bar too and it was a brothel which is why they were leaving. The Chinese guy said he knows where to find some bars and they invited me to join them. The Russian stopped in a ganja shop on the way.
The Russian in his late twenties left a few years ago to avoid conscription. Least I could do to show my appreciation for his dedication to world peace was buy him drinks for the rest of the night. So .... A Chinese, Russian, and American walk into a bar ... and the jokes write themselves. The shenanigans and tuk tuk rides that ensued continued till the sun came up.
One of the more interesting aspects of going to Stuyvesant High School in the 90s was a very large portion of my classmates and subsequently friends were born in communist China or Soviet Union who travelled on the F Train from either direction. I was reminded of some aspects of my teenage years like hanging out with a group friends who were born in either China or Russia.
> I hope that this sharing will continue and increase
It will continue until they pass us. They're coming from behind, and releasing models as open source essentially wipes the board of hundreds of American startups.
Growth hackers and solopreneurs like @levelsio can be nipping at the heels of $300M funded companies who poured all of their points into training models, making expensive mistakes, and overpaying for compute.
Companies like RunwayML are probably doomed at this point between Hunyuan, Wan, and the half dozen other open source foundation video models. They failed to raise their last round in 2024, and they definitely face a much bleaker world in 2025.
To expound on that some more, while China might not be leading in LLMs just yet, they definitely are with media. Their video models are the best in class. This poses some significant questions.
In some years, China might be able to unseat the US as the global cultural export powerhouse. As the price of content creation drops orders of magnitude, content creation will become hyper local. That'll be another ding to US soft power.
The interesting thing in this article isn’t that China is telling people to avoid the US for national security reasons. Many states, including the US have similar guidance to people who work in jobs sensitive to national security.
What’s interesting is that China is viewing AI tech as a technology vital to their security.
The real reason why states are pouring billions into AI isn't to generate silly emoji, help people rewrite their emails, or make a web app without learning how to code.
It's for autonomous drone warfare.
Invading a neighboring nation doesn't seem too appealing if it means sending tens/hundreds of thousands of your young people (a resource that's getting scarcer and scarcer most everywhere in the world) to the meat grinder. Millions of drones though...
It seems to not be about national security, as much as personal security. You know like when America tells it's citizens not to go to Burkina Faso because it's dangerous.
I used to work for an American startup that dealt with quite some PII. We were forbidden from traveling to a laundry list of countries with work devices and were required (expected? I am not sure now) to inform the company if we travel to those countries even w/o work devices.
This reminds me of the historical period when London and Berlin were the two technology centers of the world, in intense competition to develop the next generation of math, science, and applications to military. Most scientists in one country did not read the output of the other country, although in some cases, the Danes or the Dutch would translate interesting research.
A scientist from London visiting Berlin (and vice versa) could well expect to be surveilled by the opposite country and possibly even considered a traitor by their own.
Unsurprising considering the U.S. has been arresting and imprisoning Chinese and American academics with highly prestigious positions in well known universities because they forgot to mention a conference in China they were paid to speak at a decade ago.
I worked at a well-known company that told us we couldn't bring any work electronic devices to China, because there was a risk malware could be installed on it. They advised us not to bring any personal electronic devices either, like phones because they could be confiscated at the border and returned with malware installed on it.
It makes sense that this happens.
I'm curious why they haven't attempted to tighten the screws on Tesla since Elon's position has weakened and they can really put him in a bad spot if they force him to give up something to them.
Why would they need to? They have direct Chinese competitors to Tesla who are selling more units for far cheaper prices and innovating far faster. Tesla has a bunch of political baggage with a now drugged out and unstable CEO and nothing they are providing has a leg up on Chinese alternatives. People who can't even legally buy chinese models in their own country want Chinese cars now because they are so cheap and modernized.
> I'm curious why they haven't attempted to tighten the screws on Tesla since Elon's position has weakened and they can really put him in a bad spot if they force him to give up something to them.
Its possible they believe he will destroy Tesla left to his own devices and their best course of action is to sit back and let it happen naturally with no meddling exposure for themselves and then maybe they can even poach some of his employees in the aftermath.
Considering that the administration Elon is gleefully making himself the "chainsaw" figurehead for is actively working to cripple the EV market in the US, this doesn't seem like a bad plan to me.
It's not in their interest to do so. Tesla is the EV leader and exports many vehicle from China to other countries. Additionally, Elon has a direct line to Trump, it makes no sense to burn bridges.
No, this is just about keeping people from defecting and taking secrets / cash with them. Many Chinese people working for state controlled companies or similar (schoolteachers were one ridiculous example I think) in super mundane jobs have their passports taken away or exit bans for "national security" reasons.
One note, if you’re working for a top AI company in China, your quality of life other than work hours is already good enough to not to want to leave. It’s not 1990s/2000s anymore. Urban life in China, excluding pandemic times, is better than urban life in the states.
The same applies to other sectors as well. Top talent is genuinely valued in China.
This would be the only answer, if it wasn't for the all ICE's history, official threats against non US individuals and how reliable the current US gov is.
This year China's advice just sounds reasonable TBH.
I hear this type of statement often, but people rarely mention the scope or who the brain drainees are. In my experience, it's exceptionally rare that American talent comes to Europe compared to the opposite, and I see little reason why that would change in the near future. When it comes to Chinese individuals returning to China from the US, this isn't exactly traditional brain drain, and it's also something China has actively, sometimes aggressively, been pursuing the past decade or so.
China has just developed to the extent that top STEM professionals can have a good quality of life at home. Chinese immigrants were pouring when the US was far less welcoming. The US used to also get hordes of migrants from Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea before they developed.
I wonder if given the recent "moral" loss of US, we will see a post-WW2 Soviet vs USA style defection of scientists & engineers between USA and China?
When you read the reasoning of people that defected from UK/US to soviet with nuclear secrets it's kinda hard to grasp now, but back then I can definitely understand that a mix of "the soviets are not that bad" and "are we really that good?" could've made people switch, vise-versa.
I feel like that have for the past decades mostly been a one-way street (China to US) but given the recent trends, (chiense scientist leaving US)[1] I could kinda see how some people might start to debate that question internally.
Why would a moral loss cause a defection to China, that's fucking hilarious bro. China, the place with a national firewall, subjects you can't speak about, try asking questions about certain things to a taxi driver and they'll call the ccp police on ya.
Absolutely hilarious opinion man, why not suggest the UK or hell, a defection to New Zealand. China on a moral basis? Comedy.
It's already been happening for years. Award winning faculty and scientists are fleeing US universities and institutions and setting up shop in China, often with more funding and talent available, and no McCarthyism accusations of being spies. It started officially in 2018 with the US Department of Justice's "China Initiative", which basically just allowed anyone to go on a witch hunt of Chinese and Chinese American academics. Of course, the vast majority of those cases were bogus and was just a guise for racism.
This isn't the first time. In the 1950s, the founder of Berkeley JPL, an MIT professor who was one of the forefathers of NASA and Manhattan Project contributor, and who Theodore von Karman called a generational genius, Chinese educated Qian Xuesen was humiliated with accusations of being a communist spy and given a multi-year house arrest where he couldn't work so that his knowledge would fall behind the state of the art. He was then deported, and went back to China where he created the Chinese space program entirely from scratch. In China today, he's widely known as a national hero and the "father of Chinese rocketry". If you really want your mind blown, look up his family tree and see how many Nobels and National Science Medals are related to him.
The past few years alone has seen some really high profile scientists taking their knowledge and experience with them to China. These are people who've spent 30+ years building lives here in the US, and were initially being forced out, but now are actually being lured with better pay packages and working conditions since the first wave was treated so well. It's absolutely insane.
I wonder if given the recent "moral" loss of US, we will see a post-WW2 Soviet vs USA style defection of scientists & engineers between USA and China?
No. The US will experience a brain drain to Europe, Canada, and Australia, but not to China. Trump still has a ways to go to match the excesses of the Xi regime.
if only one side has nukes slavery will be much more widespread if everyone has them all the slave traders competing with each other will be at least mitigated
kind of crazy they saw all the graffiti license plate games that early
A lot of developed countries like across Europe and Singapore dont have the same geopolitical history with China as the US does, as such the Sinophobia isn’t really there
Many people really enjoyed Shanghai and other cities and are recipients of expansive social safety nets of China
If you’re middle class and in a big city or some of the planned cities, China is fine, not without its difficulty of adjusting to, some people sour on etiquette and difficulty founding entrepreneurial things. But an academic or programmer would be fine.
So people in the US often try to focus on political edge cases to write off an entire country but its easy to see that focus going away
It seems a bit strange. This isn’t like nuclear weapons researchers in the 1940s, where only a small group had the knowledge to build the bomb. There are a LOT of AI researchers out there, and it’s more a battle of resources rather than rare knowledge at this point, it seems.
As a general rule if your only source of information about contemporary China ( or Ukraine/Palestine wars) is from English language press and analysts, you should consider yourself disinformed or possibly misinformed.
There is no substitute for foreign language press, at a minimum add Le Monde Diplomatique, or Der Spiegel to your digest if not Al Jazeera, RT and Xinhua.
At first they'll seem propagandist with stilted English writing but you'll learn so much more about what's actually going on in the world and why countries do what they do.
China could broaden the message to “tells anyone to o avoid U.S. travel...” and that would be right thing to do because of the far-right happening here now.
The article leaves it until the very end to point out the risk of high-performing employees being poached, but I'd say it seems like a huge liability for China. The USA would be well-placed to identify vulnerable Chinese individuals working in AI development and offer them a large sum of money to 'defect'. It would be both a propaganda win for Trump's administration and a relatively cheap way of removing these individuals from the Chinese economy.
If the South China Morning Post is to be believed[1], the salaries for software engineers in AI-related fields are far lower in China than in the USA, despite already being "two thirds higher" than other software engineers in China.
It’ll enable mass surveillance, and hence it is the wet dream of authoritarian governments like China.
They can intercept every call and every message now, but they can’t read it all or build a file on a billion citizens. Human intelligence doesn’t scale, but AI inference does.
In the very near future (maybe the present!) every call will be listened in by an AI with a system message along the lines of “Report any anti-government or potentially rebellious behaviour. Summarise the conversation for each party and add it to their permanent file.”
The end goal is something capable of human-level intelligence in most, if not all, fields, and from there, it's not that difficult to continue scaling it up across speed / scale (and perhaps intelligence.)
[+] [-] bookofjoe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|1 year ago|reply
I worked in a university research spinout US-China multinational AI hardware startup, and (without getting into confidential information, but only speaking of general engineering practice) I can mention that both nations' government concerns could be barriers.
And some rules can be counterproductive for the one making the rule, even from a competitive perspective -- not even turning a win-win into a lose-lose, but turning it into a lose-win where you are the "side" who loses.
Another thing I'd like like to say, as a US person, who interfaced throughout the org chart at the multinational startup, is that my colleagues in China, as well as those who were recent immigrants, were generally very smart and knowledgeable, and also very nice people.
It's especially tragic when nations feel they have to act adversarily on tensions, because (as seen in this case) the respective individual citizens are not natural enemies, but rather, they are natural friends. They are also valuable fellow contributors, to the shared wealth of our shared world.
In recent weeks, the world is fortunate that DeepSeek has shared some of its AI advancements, even in the context of themselves being denied the latest hardware with which to work. I hope that this sharing will continue and increase, in all directions.
[+] [-] dataviz1000|1 year ago|reply
December, flying out of Thailand I spent one night in Bangkok. Looking for a bar late for one or two drinks after I settled into my hotel I saw two guys, one Chinese and other Russian, stumbling out of a building a few doors down from my hotel. I asked, "Is that a bar or a brothel? I'm looking for a bar." They laughed saying they were looking for a bar too and it was a brothel which is why they were leaving. The Chinese guy said he knows where to find some bars and they invited me to join them. The Russian stopped in a ganja shop on the way.
The Russian in his late twenties left a few years ago to avoid conscription. Least I could do to show my appreciation for his dedication to world peace was buy him drinks for the rest of the night. So .... A Chinese, Russian, and American walk into a bar ... and the jokes write themselves. The shenanigans and tuk tuk rides that ensued continued till the sun came up.
One of the more interesting aspects of going to Stuyvesant High School in the 90s was a very large portion of my classmates and subsequently friends were born in communist China or Soviet Union who travelled on the F Train from either direction. I was reminded of some aspects of my teenage years like hanging out with a group friends who were born in either China or Russia.
[+] [-] echelon|1 year ago|reply
It will continue until they pass us. They're coming from behind, and releasing models as open source essentially wipes the board of hundreds of American startups.
Growth hackers and solopreneurs like @levelsio can be nipping at the heels of $300M funded companies who poured all of their points into training models, making expensive mistakes, and overpaying for compute.
Companies like RunwayML are probably doomed at this point between Hunyuan, Wan, and the half dozen other open source foundation video models. They failed to raise their last round in 2024, and they definitely face a much bleaker world in 2025.
To expound on that some more, while China might not be leading in LLMs just yet, they definitely are with media. Their video models are the best in class. This poses some significant questions.
In some years, China might be able to unseat the US as the global cultural export powerhouse. As the price of content creation drops orders of magnitude, content creation will become hyper local. That'll be another ding to US soft power.
China will want to commoditize this.
[+] [-] neuralkoi|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kasey_junk|1 year ago|reply
What’s interesting is that China is viewing AI tech as a technology vital to their security.
[+] [-] gyomu|1 year ago|reply
It's for autonomous drone warfare.
Invading a neighboring nation doesn't seem too appealing if it means sending tens/hundreds of thousands of your young people (a resource that's getting scarcer and scarcer most everywhere in the world) to the meat grinder. Millions of drones though...
[+] [-] ra7|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] im3w1l|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ninetyninenine|1 year ago|reply
Thus China knows there’s activity in this area and has issued a warning. Other than that the technology isn’t vital it’s more hype.
[+] [-] dekhn|1 year ago|reply
A scientist from London visiting Berlin (and vice versa) could well expect to be surveilled by the opposite country and possibly even considered a traitor by their own.
[+] [-] addicted|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blindriver|1 year ago|reply
It makes sense that this happens.
I'm curious why they haven't attempted to tighten the screws on Tesla since Elon's position has weakened and they can really put him in a bad spot if they force him to give up something to them.
[+] [-] AngryData|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] georgemcbay|1 year ago|reply
Its possible they believe he will destroy Tesla left to his own devices and their best course of action is to sit back and let it happen naturally with no meddling exposure for themselves and then maybe they can even poach some of his employees in the aftermath.
Considering that the administration Elon is gleefully making himself the "chainsaw" figurehead for is actively working to cripple the EV market in the US, this doesn't seem like a bad plan to me.
[+] [-] blitzar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] diebeforei485|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tz18|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tokioyoyo|1 year ago|reply
The same applies to other sectors as well. Top talent is genuinely valued in China.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|1 year ago|reply
This year China's advice just sounds reasonable TBH.
[+] [-] powerapple|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway48476|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rcpt|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lancebeet|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bitsage|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xyst|1 year ago|reply
A WW3 may indeed come to fruition if we continue on this path. It won’t be the older folks paying for this but rather our children or grandchildren.
Future is bleak.
[+] [-] xanderlewis|1 year ago|reply
Or, rather, thanks to Russia.
[+] [-] NalNezumi|1 year ago|reply
When you read the reasoning of people that defected from UK/US to soviet with nuclear secrets it's kinda hard to grasp now, but back then I can definitely understand that a mix of "the soviets are not that bad" and "are we really that good?" could've made people switch, vise-versa.
I feel like that have for the past decades mostly been a one-way street (China to US) but given the recent trends, (chiense scientist leaving US)[1] I could kinda see how some people might start to debate that question internally.
[1]https://youtu.be/voUcv7ydC9o?feature=shared
[+] [-] fennecbutt|1 year ago|reply
Absolutely hilarious opinion man, why not suggest the UK or hell, a defection to New Zealand. China on a moral basis? Comedy.
[+] [-] dluan|1 year ago|reply
This isn't the first time. In the 1950s, the founder of Berkeley JPL, an MIT professor who was one of the forefathers of NASA and Manhattan Project contributor, and who Theodore von Karman called a generational genius, Chinese educated Qian Xuesen was humiliated with accusations of being a communist spy and given a multi-year house arrest where he couldn't work so that his knowledge would fall behind the state of the art. He was then deported, and went back to China where he created the Chinese space program entirely from scratch. In China today, he's widely known as a national hero and the "father of Chinese rocketry". If you really want your mind blown, look up his family tree and see how many Nobels and National Science Medals are related to him.
The past few years alone has seen some really high profile scientists taking their knowledge and experience with them to China. These are people who've spent 30+ years building lives here in the US, and were initially being forced out, but now are actually being lured with better pay packages and working conditions since the first wave was treated so well. It's absolutely insane.
https://www.justsecurity.org/82948/anti-asian-prejudice
[+] [-] gamblor956|1 year ago|reply
No. The US will experience a brain drain to Europe, Canada, and Australia, but not to China. Trump still has a ways to go to match the excesses of the Xi regime.
[+] [-] immibis|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] scrollaway|1 year ago|reply
By the way, if anyone US-based is in this situation and wants to "defect" to an EU-job, send me a message, I can help you.
[+] [-] gunian|1 year ago|reply
kind of crazy they saw all the graffiti license plate games that early
[+] [-] neilv|1 year ago|reply
We Web/app programmers are a dime a dozen, unique-skills-wise.
But the loss of an individual with much more rare scientific knowledge/skill/ideas can be felt much more acutely by the country that alienates them.
(Counterintuitive techbro salaries vs. academic salaries aside.)
[+] [-] enaaem|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yieldcrv|1 year ago|reply
Many people really enjoyed Shanghai and other cities and are recipients of expansive social safety nets of China
If you’re middle class and in a big city or some of the planned cities, China is fine, not without its difficulty of adjusting to, some people sour on etiquette and difficulty founding entrepreneurial things. But an academic or programmer would be fine.
So people in the US often try to focus on political edge cases to write off an entire country but its easy to see that focus going away
[+] [-] czk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] FilosofumRex|1 year ago|reply
There is no substitute for foreign language press, at a minimum add Le Monde Diplomatique, or Der Spiegel to your digest if not Al Jazeera, RT and Xinhua.
At first they'll seem propagandist with stilted English writing but you'll learn so much more about what's actually going on in the world and why countries do what they do.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago|reply
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/china-tells-its-ai-lea...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1A1EdF
[+] [-] llIIllIIllIIl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] robrenaud|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] seabass-labrax|1 year ago|reply
If the South China Morning Post is to be believed[1], the salaries for software engineers in AI-related fields are far lower in China than in the USA, despite already being "two thirds higher" than other software engineers in China.
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3253492/china-...
[+] [-] iammrpayments|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggawatts|1 year ago|reply
They can intercept every call and every message now, but they can’t read it all or build a file on a billion citizens. Human intelligence doesn’t scale, but AI inference does.
In the very near future (maybe the present!) every call will be listened in by an AI with a system message along the lines of “Report any anti-government or potentially rebellious behaviour. Summarise the conversation for each party and add it to their permanent file.”
[+] [-] Philpax|1 year ago|reply
See Dario Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace: https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace
It doesn't take much imagination to think about how this could end poorly if it goes wrong or is controlled by the wrong party.
[+] [-] rmrf100|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tempera|1 year ago|reply