Can’t wait to nerd out over the 15th 5 year plan when it comes out in March. Glad to see some focus on elderly care and employment protections. Wish the people of China a great year.

Donald Trump’s K-shaped economy

…Seems to predate Trump by quite a lot

Or maybe they meant Onlyoffice?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_state_clauses#Provisions

Article 53(1) allows regional organisations to take enforcement measures against an enemy state, without prior Security Council authorisation, if these measures were provided for under Article 107 or aimed at preventing a renewal of that State’s aggressive policy.

Article 53(2) defines an enemy State as any State that was an enemy of any signatory of the UN Charter during World War II. This covered, in particular, Germany, Italy, Japan, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Finland and probably Thailand.

Hmm… would this count, I wonder?

Hmm, if you’re asking about me specifically, the LLMs I have on my PC are small and vastly outclassed by models hosted online. I don’t have a specific use case for them other than personal amusement and familiarising myself with the technology, and I don’t gain much from using them either.

As for how China specifically is developing this technology, the main positive aspect is that a majority of LLMs released by Chinese firms and research groups have the model weights open under free software licenses, so everyone can download and tweak them.

Certainly, I do not think that Chinese tech firms have the people’s interests at heart any more than other companies, but given that a push for open source AI is explicitly part of the 14th 5 year plan, I think it’s pretty clear the CPC is aware of the exploitative potential of these technologies, and is actively working to minimise the risk.

True, I’m not blind to the rapid growth of Chinese LLMs, I’ve even got one sitting on my SSD right now. I just think that people seem to be overly focused on LLMs when there is a much broader field that is quietly advancing the productive forces, which is sadly underreported on.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. Are you saying that AI isn’t used in Chinese factories, research, ports outside of LLMs? Or are you saying that LLMs are inherently evil and no one should be developing them at all? What ‘apologia’ am I doing exactly?

Keep in mind, AI development in China is much broader than just LLMs or diffusion models. It includes traditional deep learning for science and medicine, optimisation algorithms to streamline ports and factories, embodied intelligence for industrial and humanoid robots, etc. It’s generally a much more grounded field of technological development than the Hail Mary AGI seekers in the US.

Well, the American right is not really a unified block with common material interests, but a hodgepodge mix of QAnon conspiracy theorists, cultural warriors, neoconservatives, Christian Nationalists, corporatists, etc. It’s no surprise that as a whole they are self-sabotaging and dysfunctional. The big surprise really was that Trump was able to hold all of them together for so long, but even that looks increasingly untenable as his popularity wanes.

Huawei actually already has an EUV prototype, and is believed to be currently in the process being tested and undergoing trial ruins. If all goes well, mass production should begin either next year or in 2027. It apparently uses a different approach to ASML’s, so there is a bit of risk, but it is theoretically sound and I have confidence that they could figure it out.

Most AI platforms use massive models with trillions of parameters that activate all their computational power for every single query.

The first part is probably right, frontier models are likely around a trillion parameters total, though we don’t know for sure, but I don’t think the second part is correct. It’s almost certain the big proprietary models, like all the recent large open models, use a Mixture-of-Experts system like Thuara, because it’s just cheaper to train and run.

While traditional web research might take you 10 minutes of clicking through pages and consuming cookies from major search engines, Thaura uses a fraction of the energy and provides the same information.

This part is pretty misleading. It is very unclear how much an LLM query compares to a search in terms of energy use, but even assuming they’re about equal (most estimates put LLM queries higher), the LLM also has to do their own web searches to find the information, if you’re using it for research purposes, so that point is fairly moot. Also the “consuming cookies” part isn’t really an energy problem, but a privacy problem, so I’m not sure why it’s used in this context.

Thaura uses a “mixture of expert” models with 100 billion total parameters, but only activates 12 billion per query.

Going to the actual website, it does credit the “GLM-4.5 Air architecture”, but the article doesn’t mention GLM, or the company behind it (Z.ai) at all. Given that this is likely a finetune of the GLM model that was freely released, it feels weird how the Thaura team seem reluctant to give credit to the Z.ai team.

These companies are often controlled by US-based corporations whose political stance supports occupation, apartheid, and Western hegemony - not human rights or global justice.

Reading below and also looking at their website, the hosting and inference is done by US firms (DigitalOcean, TogetherAI) in datacenters hosted in the EU. That’s not inherently bad from a privacy standpoint due to encryption, but it does feel disjointed that they are railing against US firms and western hegemony while simultaneously using their services for Thaura.

While I don’t think the Thaura team had bad intentions in fine-tuning their model and building the service, I feel that this is a pretty misleading article that also doesn’t give any significant details on Thaura, like it’s performance. They also haven’t given back to the community by releasing their model weights, despite building on an open model themselves. Personally, I think it’s better to stick to Z.ai, Qwen, Deepseek, etc, who actually release their models to the community and pretrain their models themselves.

I feel really concerned for Latin Americans now, the whole restructuring the US military for that region makes me think that the US is going to ramp up their “interventions” in a region that has far too much of that already. Also the Europeans are definitely not happy about this one.

https://www.bfmtv.com/economie/entreprises/tout-s-est-inverse-les-pays-emergents-c-est-nous-la-france-en-quete-de-transferts-technologiques-venus-de-chine_AD-202512030116.html

“Everything has been turned upside down. We are the emerging countries. They are the developed countries. So we have to do to them what they did to us. We have to impose joint ventures and technology transfer,” argues Nicolas Dufourcq, CEO of the public investment bank Bpifrance, in an interview with AFP. (Translated)

It is honestly interesting to see neoliberalism being quietly thrown out the window, now that it’s shown to really be quite awful for actually building up a country. Now western countries are trying to emulate strategies that China figured out decades ago, albeit without the right ideological foundation beneath it. Really reminds me of Deng’s quote:

The superiority of the socialist system is demonstrated, in the final analysis, by faster and greater development of those forces than under the capitalist system.

And we are really beginning to see that here. Of course, actual socialist reforms will not come from bourgeois governments, and revolution is absolutely still needed, but Chinese socialism has already shattered the efficiency myth of neoliberalism, and I’m quite hopeful that eventually capitalism itself would be discredited.

The real inflation that’s going on

Apparently they’re currently spending 6.3% of GDP on defense this year. In comparison, the US spent 9.4% during the height of the Vietnam war, the CIA estimates the USSR spent around 10-15% through the late 70s and 80s, and the Nazis spent 25% in 1939 and 75% in 1944.

I haven’t really done a rigorous check on these numbers, and all of them are from western sources so take them with as much salt as you’d like, but it’s pretty clear Russia is still far from a true war economy and have significant room to ramp up further if they decide they need to. Also, they have a large trade surplus with both China and India, so they have a consistent source of revenue.

Anecdotally I do feel like there is, to a degree, more of a pro-China undercurrent to mainstream-ish discourse than there was before. Outright celebration and respect of China and the accomplishments of their people is still rare, but I’m seeing a lot of “Well, at least they’re doing [insert X] better than us.” Even if they just have to add a “But authoritarian!” somewhere.

I think there’s both a push and pull effect, Trump is an obvious push factor, but there is also a rising disillusionment of western governments’ ability to deliver a better future for their people. The pull factors meanwhile are China’s visible achievements in building a prosperous society, and the rise in Chinese cultural exports like video games, movies, and technology.

The main challenge for us is to maintain this sentiment after the Democrats take over and the liberals all fall in line. I think that emphasising what China does well, not just what China does better than Trump, is a good start. We need to erode the omnipresent idea that only liberal electoral systems can produce good outcomes for their people, and China makes it pretty easy for us to point to as a counterexample.

Time to paste your favorite piece of Marxist theory and email it back and forth to brainwash their AI.

Clearly, the best way to support tech long term is to improve educational standards, provide equal opportunities to students all across the country, foster scientific curiosity, expand sustainable energy infrastructure, and invest in the pure sciences. So that’s what you’re going to do, right?

…right?

I’ve read the report and the data is pretty interesting, the US and Europe have actually increased carbon emissions this year, but it was offset by decreases mostly in China and India. India’s reduction is considered an outlier because of an unusually cool summer, but China may have already crossed peak fossil energy.

Here’s the report if you’d like to read it: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/q3-global-power-report-no-fossil-fuel-growth-expected-in-2025/

Does it say in what time range the growth/loss is measured? Is it from 2000 to 2018 or something?