One of my favorite things about HN is the way that you can find someone who has produced definitive proof of the non-existence of the public education system in an offhand comment.
Funding didn’t make them smarter, but it did buy the hardware to scale it. Other guys had the exact same idea at the exact same time like RankDex and IBM's HITS algorithm. Google just got the cash first to actually build the server farms to run it.
They used Stanfords existing infrastructure … I don’t think the grant they were on paid for it directly. Pretty sure the cluster was a resource shared by several labs
Innovation doesn't need to have any other reason than because its cool. Think of bipedal robots, everyone went mad at the thought of building something so inefficient
But a more practical robot would be like an octopus or something. It would just be like this weird ball of tentacles that rolls around your house. No one's gonna buy that, even if it's a million times cheaper to build.
> Ultimately a win for the consumer, China does not tend to ban technology as a weapon
Doesn't have to, China will just subsidize their businesses, sometimes at a substantial loss, for as long as it takes to bankrupt the international competitors. So yeah, if by that you mean "they end up unemployed and in overall economic pain, but for a short time some stuff was abnormally cheap" then yes, "it's a win for the consumers"
Nobody is stopping the western countries of doing the same exact thing with their own industries. As a matter of fact, the EU and the US are subsiding a lot of their own companies or even entire sectors of their economy (agriculture/arms/space/IT... the list goes on) already so why is it a problem if China does it?
You can't complain about something that literally every single country on this planet is doing and then somehow be angry because China does it as well. Rules for thee not for me and all that.
The real difference between what China does and what the western countries are doing is that China jump starts some industries with heavy subsidies and then gives them time to catch up to international standards and finally turns off the money tap and it forces these companies to export their production outside of China and makes them ultra competitive which is clearly a win for the consumers.
That is exactly how it played out with EVs today. Compare that to the auto industry in the EU which has relied on the same state support for the last decades and instead of using this support to innovate and compete they simply squandered their advance in these industries and find themselves on the back-foot thinking that they could just keep doing the same thing and that everything will work out somehow.
Who made the EVs cheaper today? China by competing heavily while the rest of the world was busy milking as much cash as possible from their customers. What about solar panels, batteries, wind turbines? China, China and China again.
Because the tools are somewhat comparable, you seem to have been tricked into conflating "protectionism" (which has some stabilising virtues, especially in the area of agriculture, arms, heavy industries, resources extraction) and "dumping" (which is an aggressive act). There is also something to be said about the scale of it. And of the validity of a world view where "every trick is allowed, everything is for grabs, and let the biggest be the winner, and the winner take it all".
when those tricks benefit the average person in the end whats wrong with them?
subsidy wars give you extra manufacturing capacity that stays there even if the market collapses. economists call it overbuilding like its something wrong but i think "investment above market level" is a lot more accurate.
if everyone price dumps equally, nobody wins and the fight can go on forever. that fight is good for consumers (lower prices), good for producers (higher demand with the same margins), neutral for states and very bad for commercial lenders who deserve it because their business is pure rent extraction. and it will push the industry forward in a permanent way through higher R&D investment.
Let's not act like China doesn't use export controls for their geopolitical desires.
"China halts rare-earth exports to Japan after Japan detains a Chinese fishing-boat captain near disputed islands" [1].
"China suspends natural-sand exports to Taiwan following Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taipei" [2].
"China bans exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, and superhard materials to the United States in retaliation for new U.S. semiconductor restrictions" [3].
"China restricts exports of dual-use goods to U.S. defense companies in response to U.S. sanctions on Chinese firms" [4].
"China bans exports of dual-use goods that could strengthen Japan’s military following tensions over Taiwan" [5].
