> Acknowledgements Special thanks to Jon Lee, Sicheng Liu, Chaomin Yu, and Chenglong Hao, who contributed to this post, and to the entire team that helped scale PostgreSQL. We’d also like to thank the Azure PostgreSQL team for their strong partnership.
Human action is entirely causally dependent on human psychology vis a vis biology, of which we have now only a rudimentary formal understanding and certainly not a sufficient model of its structure, let alone the relation between its aspects and the resulting actions.
At the same time, statistical methods are interesting and suggestive but should be understood at the relatively coarse level they inhabit.
Both approaches have their uses and it is worth delineating the boundary between their respective appropriate contexts.
Human action isn’t just another physical process because it’s driven by intention, not mechanical causation. A rock falls because gravity compels it; a person acts because they want something to happen. That difference makes human behavior fundamentally qualitative. It’s rooted in meaning, interpretation, and choice. You can measure motion, but you can’t measure purpose. Once you strip away intention to fit behavior into a mathematical model, you’re no longer describing human action. You’re describing an abstraction that behaves like a machine. The numbers might be tidy, but they stop representing what people actually do.
People often underestimate how much impact the education of certain aspect (Infrastructure in China and Democracy in Westerner countries) has made to their values to a government, and meanwhile the education is controlled by the government to certain degree.
China's territorial claims over Taiwan starts from 1949 since the civil war ends. [1]
The semiconductor doesn't play significant factor here. It only becomes hot topics in past few years because of TSMC's lead on its process, but really doesn't have any direct relationships.
In other words, current situation is a result of U.S. "Asia-Pacific Rebalance" strategy and military deployment over the first island chain [2] that China wanted the island regardless of TSMC.
That's definitely reading the situation totally wrong.
This so called arms race is only in western minds. It would be stupid to not think about this possibility and its consequences of course but this is the most illogical option by China.
The best option would be to advance their own semiconductor tech beyond TSMC and make it irrelevant, which so far is the course of action they are taking (alas only because they are forced by US).
Expanding on why capturing Taiwan is stupid: TSMC already has fabs and people with knowhow outside Taiwan. The fab assets are not as strategicly valuable as their knowhow. Plus, even if you acquire the knowhow, there's the supply chain: ASML, others, ASML's supply chain.
I think US might force ASML and TSMC to move to US in the coming years even stronger but more than that this arms race isn't getting hot.
There's no way the EU will allow US to force ASML to move to the US, especially given the burning of the bridges of decades of diplomacy by the incumbent president.
If the trade war continues and escalates, which form our current perspective it looks like it will, the EU will not lose one of its greatest assets in that space.
The idea of Trump that the US is powerful enough to strong arm everyone to his will is mistaken, an alienated US without its allies will suffer, as will the rest of the world..
Totally agree. It is really in both sides interest to make TSMC irrelevant in Taiwan and avoid WW3.
So we will have a cold war, trade war and saber rattling until that time.
Then when the chips don't matter someday Taiwan will become old news to western minds like Iraq is today. When China takes Taiwan it will barely be a western news story because right now will feel so long in the past.
The CCP doesn't want Taiwan for the chips, they want it because having a successful democracy of ethnic Chinese off the shore means there are viable alternatives to communist rule, by and for Chinese people.
In the same way that Russians want to "take over" Ukraine or Argentinians want to "take over" The Falklands or Americans want to "take over" Greenland?
Territorial expansion is always popular with the masses before the shooting starts.
It is more nationalistic than political; in fact, many unpopular politicians start wars in order to get a sense of national unity and tamp down unrest at home.
I’m not sure Greenland should be lumped in with the others considering the very different (lack of) history, and polling does not support its popularity.
> A strong majority of Americans, 66%, are opposed to U.S. territorial expansion accomplished “by invading other countries and territories,” according to a recent poll from More in Common.
> In contrast, just 13% support the U.S. launching an invasion to acquire territory, and 16% were not sure
why you mixed [Argentinians want to "take over" The Falklands] between [Russians want to "take over" Ukraine] and [Americans want to "take over" Greenland]
> He stressed that China will not blindly follow trends or engage in unrestrained international competition. With a robust governance and regulatory system in place, China is confident in its ability to manage and utilize AI technology effectively
Taiwan has been touting it's "Silicon Shield" defence for years and trying to tie China's self-interest with leaving Taiwan alone for now.
But the Silicon Shield is tumbling.
On the one side the US (the carrots of the CHIPS act under Biden, the stick of sanctions on Taiwan under Trump) is trying get sovereign control of chip production.
And on the other side China is ramping up getting sovereign control of it's own top-end production.
If both stay on course then China will have one less big reason not to invade, and the US will have one big reason less to defend.
Of course if China wins the 'race' then it could be to it's advantage to have a rocket exchange or invasion with Taiwan to choke of the West's supply of chips before the West has brought chip production home?
I don't really think it will choke the supply, but only reduce in capacity in short term, for example TSMC Arizona[1] took 4 years to be in produciton. Intel's process is still acceptable and better than China.
Also semiconductor is very complicated manufacturing process not only invovles Taiwan but vendors all over the world, like the light source of EUV is provided by Cymer based in U.S. I don't think China taking over Taiwan would mean they can transfer whatever is there into something productive in any short time as because of supply chain problem. Note that many SMIC's (basically China's TSMC) leadership are actually from TSMC already[2].
Thinking from a different perspective, if the Chinese government has banned import of NVIDIA GPU, or downloading U.S. made llm because of so called national security reasons, DeepSeek certainly won't make such progress.
Today we are even more closed than CCP, what a joke. These elites'/attorney politicians just can't stop their arrogant attitude towards a non-western country's achievement. This is just going to destroy the industry at U.S.
Unless they're prepared to build The Great Firewall around America it's kind of cute that they think they can stop us from downloading these models. And of course stupid to want to try to stop us because if there's something to be learned from them they need to be distributed widely so that we can figure out what they've done and where they're headed.
They can sue 3000 people for millions of damages, and that will have the expected effect of banning any illicit downloading of files. I mean, it worked for torrents back in 2002, why shouldn't it work for downloading LLM files?
The funny thing is, open source A.I. music doesn't even exist yet, and at some point 2005 to 2008, music related queries were number 1 in google search. When a good music program will be released, no person on the planet will even think of downloading illegal music A.I.s.
If there's a law against downloading or possessing it, and they're serious about enforcing it, they absolutely can stop you. Yes you could still do it, and maybe even avoid detection, but would you, if getting caught meant prison time?
They already tried to wall the entire Southern border. Guaranteed, some company will step up to the plate and offer to do the same for the internet. The claim will be even easier to sell, considering we've been selling the Chinese the hardware to do it for years. Someone is about to get bloody rich (or richer) stamping on our rights.
There's no way one country continue to be the only super power / innovation center, one way or the other, we will get to the next world order of innovation. and the path to the new order will not be comfortable, denying reality as a self-defense mechanism will be inevitable for a period of time, hopefully not too long.
I think there are reasoned arguments about TikTok, export control, etc. Heck I’m old enough to remember the Clipper chip debate (go google that if you’re <30yo)
But you undercut yourself when you say that we are “more closed” than the ccp. That’s demonstrably false. Just starting with the gfw for one.
If I have to be precise with my natural languages sure, more closed on certain dimensions
Recent years efforts from these politicians make me believe we are heading towards the direction that one day it's not just certain dimensions but fully isolated.
Name one Chinese EV you can buy in U.S.
Name one U.S. EV you can buy in China
Now we want to do the same efforts for llm, not even allow to download to run locally that is specifically from China, and running llm doesn't even need Internet.
Honestly I've never heard such legislation in any other country, not even north korea or iran.
I can understand ban export, but banning import? Seriously? Even Kim Jong Un is riding with Mercedes.
So. This hasn’t happened yet. It’s just a bill sponsored by a nut job representative. Not a law. Not even put up for debate yet.
From your definition, North Korea forbids the “import” of most of the Internet for normal citizens. The fact that Kim jong un can drive around a Mercedes is just showing the supreme leader can get whatever he wants under a despotic state- if through some miracle this stupid bill became law and Trump wanted to run deepseek on his government laptop I’m sure he could do so as well.
There is truth in the statement that the CcP is more open than the US, counterfactual truth if you like but the CCP is in itself such a vast and diverse culture, that it has no choice but to be accomodating to many social,intelectual, language, and religious groups, and has technological and economic disparities that run the gamut from stone age tribes to the cities of the future. The CCP has one primary rule : dont mess with brand China.
Everything is possible, except the things that involve foriegn or alien though and control.
So there is no technological constraints in China,pattents and copyright are not weaponised, its still a meritocracy for business and intelectual achivement. The only reason they buy things from the west, is that we do those things better than them, closing those doors will only focus there , formitable, attention on achiving there well stated goals by whatever, pragmatic ,means are best.
And we are closed to the idea of actual merit and competition, and instead limit creativity, and treat markets, as property.And are so so fucked.
And what? tumpy is set to make those same
co- religion members, illegal, again!
my point is that it's America that is sliping, relative to what it was, and that China has real advantages that will insulate it from almost anything that anybody can do.
And let me be personal for a moment, in that amongst other heritage, my paternal grandmother was of Mongol origin, and it very very difficult to read about the banning of teaching Mongolian, and then there are many other sub-groups there in China, suffering a slow forced dissalusion. But that is ongoing, everywhere, like say the undermining(unintentional pun) of the Sami, the last semi nomadic indiginous population in Europe,
who made the greavous mistake of spending the last 15000 years living on top of valuable minerals.
U.S. even failed on military too as China recently demostrated their 6th-gen fighters, i.e. their own NGAD[1], while U.S. has paused the NGAD development.
Arrogance is the biggest enemy of U.S., not China.
Everytime when there is some achievement made by Chinese companies, there are always comments like "what about tiananmen square", "I won't trust companies under CCP supervision", "must be fake propaganda", and then being ignorant to the achievement and biased against the not-us-made models, and not focusing on the actual technical part of the achievement itself, like how they can make training so fast and what can we learn from it. Beyond that some US startup CEO even starts spreading rumors like they have 50000 H100 while the paper and model are open sourced since older versions of deepseek that everyone can reproduce and verify it, the theoretical compute need is calculable from model architect.
Sure sure that censorship is a problem, but that's a political background everyone knows, while none of the researchers of deepseek can do much about it, and literally do people think Chinese people like to put more efforts to censor LLM output?
Associate researchers with CCP without any evidence and being ignorant to their achievement is really insulting to deepseek researchers' hardworks.
If you want to learn about Tiananmen Square then try reading the book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel and Eric Jason Martin.
Amazing book.
Of course, I imagine the people asking this really don't care about Tienanmen Square or China anyway.
It is really someone just being an obnoxious child.
I don't need to read books to know the tiananmen massacre is just as real as the xinjiang genocide
Im mean, there are so many evidences about this, right? unlike gaza genocide which are totally misinformation by russian bots without any credits(I should not talk about things like this, and I think this by my free will)
there are so many photos and videos shows the ccp massacre and genocide
i mean, there is a tank man photo proven this, oh poor guy must be squashed crudely
i don't need to read books, wikipedia and tankman told me everything
it's so terrible and horrible, damn you ccp, I'll expose your sins in every thread about china, by my free will and free speech
> Sure sure that censorship is a problem, but that's a political background everyone knows, while none of the researchers of deepseek can do much about it, and literally do people think Chinese people like to put more efforts to censor LLM output?
I think it is a knee-jerk reaction without understanding how LLMs work. The beauty of all of this is, we can use DeepSeek and still give the CCP the middle finger. I don't know why people don't realize we can easily add a layer above DeepSeek to never ask it for political/historical information and we can easily create services to do this.
We should be celebrating what is happening as this might force OpenAI and Anthropic to lower prices. DeepSeek is FAR from perfect and it would be stupid to not continue relying on other models, and if DeepSeek can force a price change, I'm all for it.
There's a famous quip from the 2008 US election cycle, where Biden remarked that every sentence Rudy Giuliani forms consists of "a noun, a verb and 9/11".
This is pretty much the same thing on a national scale. US discourse in particular is increasingly petty, bully-like, disrespectful, ignorant or straight up hostile as seen with the tone concerning Indian tech workers recently. Even Latin Americans or Europeans aren't safe from it any more. I'm afraid we're only at the start of this rather than the end as China and others catch up or even lead in some domains.
people have been scare mongered about china for so long theyve just absorbed the racism into their bones, half this comment section is just "tiannemen square!" or "winnie the pooh!"
If you think ppl on HN or elsewhere aren't racist against the actual Chinese people, you are just incredibly naive.
People have been talking about the Chinese like automotons of the government with no agency of their own for a long time now. However it's the same for all of humanity. In China in the Mao era, the slogan was to free the Western capitalist society from repression. It's the same old talking about enemy camp and assigning no free will to the people.
All this is to say, people here don't think of the Chinese as equals. That is the real core of racism, not about saying something against the protected race of the day.
I mean shocker: large language model trained in mainland China may have censorship around topics considered politically sensitive by Chinese government, more news at 11. Can we move on?
But it's also an easy low-hanging fruit if you want to add a comment to a Hacker News Post that you otherwise don't know anything about.
The point is, the amount of mutilation done to models released by OpenAI and co. is enormous. So I very much hoped a Chinese model would be much more free from all this kind of BS. But when I think deeper about it, they actually had no choice: imagine the amount of criticism they would face. At this point, the only accusation you can hear from their competition is "For sure they used more housepower" which seems to be quite weak.
Semantics and language are actually important here, IMHO. Democracy-"the system" saved itself here. This is somewhat distinct from who or what people vote for.
This is what I mean by the advantage of the "democratic system." Democracy can always save a country from the mess. As for why it’s in the mess, don’t worry about that.
Presidents may be impeached, removed from office, or even die, but the system will never fail.
> Democracy can always save a country from the mess.
Unless the people themselves want to give up on democracy and… oh, I don't know, let's pick a random example out of thin air… storm government buildings to stop the process to keep their desired leader in power.
To be fair (however painfully), a healthy percentage of those people believed they were there to save democracy.
We all believe things that are poorly-supported by facts, possibly serving an agenda we don't understand, and are clearly stupid when viewed rationally and with better information.
I will not defend their actions, but I have some compassion for the well-meaning dupes, and I wish the legal process could neuter their manipulator-perpetrators.
And then they all get pardoned, including the neonazis, by said leader that is elected 4 years later because the people have very short memory and he wants to protect his brown shirts.
Just a technical nitpick: Hitler was appointed by President Hindenburg, not directly elected. However Hindenburg was directly elected and Hitler was leader of the party that received the most votes (though still a minority).
> Author Bohan Zhang
> Acknowledgements Special thanks to Jon Lee, Sicheng Liu, Chaomin Yu, and Chenglong Hao, who contributed to this post, and to the entire team that helped scale PostgreSQL. We’d also like to thank the Azure PostgreSQL team for their strong partnership.
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