3min chapter

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DeepSeek: What It Means and What Happens Next

ChinaTalk

CHAPTER

Navigating Technology and Tradition: AI vs. Semiconductor Policies

This chapter examines the shifting dynamics of China's industrial policy, emphasizing the distinct challenges and opportunities in artificial intelligence versus traditional sectors like semiconductors. The discussion reveals how insights from established industries may limit innovative thinking in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

00:00
Speaker 1
What's
Speaker 2
interesting is the contrast between this playbook and other sort of big Chinese industrial policy efforts. I think semiconductors is probably the most obvious, right? Where SMIC, famously founded by former TSMC engineers, CXMT, same deal. Huawei poached enormous amount of talent from Taiwan and in South Korea in order to get its chip design and engineering up to stuff. And there's something really sort of special and magical about AI today, where the decades of experience, for whatever reason, just happens to be more of a detriment than it is helpful. you know, we're we are living in this incredible sort of technological paradigm shift where people are discovering all these new like laws and principles and algorithms every day and having the muscle memory of of dozens of years of doing this back in a prior paradigm. For whatever reason, it's just not it's like actually
Speaker 1
more more
Speaker 2
harm than it than it is health, which is just the coolest thing, I think.
Speaker 1
and if i can add on that for a little bit i think there are a lot of folks who are trying to maybe fit what deep seek has done into some broader ai strategy out of china and also another sort of block into the industrial policy uh conversation right that jordan you're talking about. I think what SMIC has done makes total sense because qualitatively, they're trying to catch up to something that's known, right, which is semiconductor manufacturing, right? Like, you know, TSMC has been way ahead of anything in China for a very long time. Samsung has been ahead. And, you know, so what they do, they poach the one guy, Liang Meng Song, who was kind of the former CTO-ish. Well, he didn't get the CTO job. He wanted to get the CTO job at TSMC, didn't get the job, had this big fight with TSMC, went to Samsung, helped Samsung catch up to TSMC, and then tried to play the same role with SMIC to help SMIC catch up to Samsung and TSMC. What that means is that all you need to do is to get that one or two people who already knows how this is done to get you to do something that already exists as quickly as possible, right? And that means getting the experienced person, having their halo effect, get you the talent and the equipment, and then off you go with, state subsidies and whatnot. That is qualitatively different from AI research or AGI development or anything that we're doing AI, which is that we're all just like maybe six months, nine months ahead of each other into the unknown is clearly where we are right now. Therefore, none of the halo effect of experience, well, I shouldn't say none of that matters, but it matters so much less than other much more well-established areas of industry and technology, like chip manufacturing, for example. Totally.

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