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.
That, and they tend to not let things like copyrights and patents stand in the way of innovation. It’s hard to imagine how much better off consumers, and how many more advancements in technology there would be, if we had reasonable time limits on copyrights and patents. Instead, we have things like “I drew a mouse and now you can’t for the next 100 years” and “I was the first person to change this equation slightly, so you can’t compress video like this for the next 20 years.”
Most startups are not building foundation models, but using them as an input. So commoditizing their complement can actually lead to more opportunities. Similarly, web hosting which required big investments previously is now commoditized after emergence of AWS and other cloud providers.
Good point regarding movie localization. But, there is still a network effect in entertainment - people want to watch what is popular. So the top content made with lot of money can still have a big market.
Chinese companies have been diligently releasing a lot of models. I guess they could try shoving the genie back in the battle, but if it works out for them, I doubt they will just stop when/if they get ahead of everyone else.
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...
I think that the autonomous drone warfare is more of a near-term milestone than the goal. The goal itself seems to be AGI and the advances in the basic research and engineering that it brings.
Surely it'd be a lot more cost-effective to train up people to fly drones remotely, or is the issue more that they can't secure the communications to control them remotely?
>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...
Sorry but this is alarmist bullshit. What keeps countries from going to war is not the cost in soldiers; it's the cost of retaliation on its home soil. Indeed, countries that don't anticipate the enemy to meaningfully retaliate on its civilians are quite trigger-happy to engage in various small wars around the world.
Bro ai via programming with people is already good enough to fight wars with drones in the air. You don’t even need LLMs or machine learning black boxes.
Basically the reason is because there’s so little noise in the air. If it’s black and metal and flying and doesn’t match the iff signal than simple “if then” logic can verify it’s a bogey.
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.
Are the Chinese carrying out espionage in the U.S.?
Yes.
But Indoubt China’s key AI CEOs that need to be warned not to travel to the U.S. will be the ones doing espionage for the Chinese government. If they were, then the govt wouldn’t need to announce not traveling publicly…they’d just pass on the message through their handlers.
The point is that the Chinese (and now, even allies) governments would be justified in thinking that the U.S. despite its reputation for a fair legal system, will arrest or detain a Chinese citizen for no legitimate reason at all.
Is the opposite also true? Should the US government be warning its AI CEOs not to travel to China? Absolutely.
But it’s disappointing that the US’s reputation has fallen so far over the past decade.
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.
In what sense is Tesla the EV leader? BYD sold 4.3M EVs last year and is up 40% from 2023. Tesla only sold 1.8M and is down from 2023.
From where I’m sitting, Elon is very lucky the US government is protecting his business with tariffs, but that only affects US sales. They haven’t made a new car since 2020 either (cyber truck doesn’t count).
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.
Guess why most those recently emerged Chinese high tech companies (DeepSeek, Game Science, Unitree etc) are all located in Hangzhou? Because property prices are insane in tier-1 Chinese cities like Shanghai which is just 200km away from Hangzhou. You know it is a huge ponzi scheme when even those well paid high tech engineers couldn't afford a modest apartment in those major cities.
$3m USD buys you a 3 bedroom apartment in Shanghai next to a noisy main road, you have unlimited free supply of all types of pollutions. PM2.5 pollution was about 100 yesterday, any self respecting medical professional would suggest you to wear a mask when going outdoors in such environment well known for causing lung cancer. By moving to Hangzhou, you ONLY need to pay $1.5-$2m for the same shit.
Oh, btw, prices above are after the 30% drop. Just imagine how stupid it was before the crash. Of course you can jump up and lecture me how affordable it is to just spend like $1m to secure a nice family apartment of 40square meters built 60 years ago with disgusting everything inside of it.
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.
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Swipes like "Lol, keep dreaming man" are against the site guidelines, and getting into nationalistic spats is not what HN is for. When you post like this, you're just inviting even worse from others (unintentionally of course). That's how we end up with degraded responses like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226552.
Worse, you've been repeatedly posting nationalistic flamewar comments in recent weeks. This is bad. I understand the frustrations, but this is no way to make your case.
There's an extra burden on commenters who are representing a minority view, especially when the topic is divisive. That's arguably unfair, but it doesn't make it ok to break the rules, and it's not in your interest to do that.
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.
> and I see little reason why that would change in the near future
Really? There have been 2 months of reasons accumulating by now. One of which being that the government is made of fascists who make nazi salutes and oligarchs.
Imagine 30 years ago if someone said the country of Wittgenstein would not have a large language model of its own, let alone the EU.
It is insane.
Many people just talk nonsense on this topic with China vs the US. Anyone who hasn't read America Against America by Wang Huning basically has no idea what they are talking about on this subject. Of course, total ignorance on a topic has never been something to slow down the opinion of a westerner.
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.
Readit News
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.
In many parts of Thailand it's really not an either/or situation
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.
If you sit on your laurels, someone will make a solution thats at least 70% as good for free.
Good point regarding movie localization. But, there is still a network effect in entertainment - people want to watch what is popular. So the top content made with lot of money can still have a big market.
Not sure of the attribution of this quote.
Dead Comment
What’s interesting is that China is viewing AI tech as a technology vital to their security.
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...
Sorry but this is alarmist bullshit. What keeps countries from going to war is not the cost in soldiers; it's the cost of retaliation on its home soil. Indeed, countries that don't anticipate the enemy to meaningfully retaliate on its civilians are quite trigger-happy to engage in various small wars around the world.
Basically the reason is because there’s so little noise in the air. If it’s black and metal and flying and doesn’t match the iff signal than simple “if then” logic can verify it’s a bogey.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_American_Pilgrim_Museum
Who knows if Ukraine will ever play such a historic role as the Netherlands, but it's nice to dream about
Taiwan could defo step up since they are already in their Golden Age
(And where shall the asylum seekers from US stopover?)
*big for the Dutch
Yes.
But Indoubt China’s key AI CEOs that need to be warned not to travel to the U.S. will be the ones doing espionage for the Chinese government. If they were, then the govt wouldn’t need to announce not traveling publicly…they’d just pass on the message through their handlers.
The point is that the Chinese (and now, even allies) governments would be justified in thinking that the U.S. despite its reputation for a fair legal system, will arrest or detain a Chinese citizen for no legitimate reason at all.
Is the opposite also true? Should the US government be warning its AI CEOs not to travel to China? Absolutely.
But it’s disappointing that the US’s reputation has fallen so far over the past decade.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
From where I’m sitting, Elon is very lucky the US government is protecting his business with tariffs, but that only affects US sales. They haven’t made a new car since 2020 either (cyber truck doesn’t count).
The same applies to other sectors as well. Top talent is genuinely valued in China.
Guess why most those recently emerged Chinese high tech companies (DeepSeek, Game Science, Unitree etc) are all located in Hangzhou? Because property prices are insane in tier-1 Chinese cities like Shanghai which is just 200km away from Hangzhou. You know it is a huge ponzi scheme when even those well paid high tech engineers couldn't afford a modest apartment in those major cities.
$3m USD buys you a 3 bedroom apartment in Shanghai next to a noisy main road, you have unlimited free supply of all types of pollutions. PM2.5 pollution was about 100 yesterday, any self respecting medical professional would suggest you to wear a mask when going outdoors in such environment well known for causing lung cancer. By moving to Hangzhou, you ONLY need to pay $1.5-$2m for the same shit.
Oh, btw, prices above are after the 30% drop. Just imagine how stupid it was before the crash. Of course you can jump up and lecture me how affordable it is to just spend like $1m to secure a nice family apartment of 40square meters built 60 years ago with disgusting everything inside of it.
This reminds me of something I read recently...
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/02/sergey-brin-says-agi-...
What data do you have for this conclusion?
This year China's advice just sounds reasonable TBH.
Worse, you've been repeatedly posting nationalistic flamewar comments in recent weeks. This is bad. I understand the frustrations, but this is no way to make your case.
There's an extra burden on commenters who are representing a minority view, especially when the topic is divisive. That's arguably unfair, but it doesn't make it ok to break the rules, and it's not in your interest to do that.
I've written a lot about this over the years (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), including this just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213858.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Really? There have been 2 months of reasons accumulating by now. One of which being that the government is made of fascists who make nazi salutes and oligarchs.
It is insane.
Many people just talk nonsense on this topic with China vs the US. Anyone who hasn't read America Against America by Wang Huning basically has no idea what they are talking about on this subject. Of course, total ignorance on a topic has never been something to slow down the opinion of a westerner.