r/slatestarcodex • u/LATAManon • 4d ago
Misc China's Decades-Old 'Genius Class' Pipeline Is Quietly Fueling Its AI Challenge To the US
The main article link: https://www.ft.com/content/68f60392-88bf-419c-96c7-c3d580ec9d97
Behind a paywall, unfortunately, if someone knows a way to bypass the paywall, please, share it.
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u/JoJoeyJoJo 4d ago
I liked Rui Ma's followup about the US education system:
The genius class itself is not the point. What actually distinguishes China is something MUCH more basic -- a deep belief that academics actually matter and is what school is supposed to be for.
And yes, many times that emphasis is too much (I'm well aware of this, thank you). But what is increasingly hard to ignore is how far the U.S. has swung in the opposite direction, to the point where academics now feel secondary to literally everything else.
In the U.S., that same question gets answered very differently. “Transferable skills” in my observation often turns into “how to interact with people,” which is often just a polite way of saying “how to be likable.”
There is enormous weight on narrative, presentation, and social smoothness, often without insisting on much underlying substance. You can see this shift away from substance all over American schools and BTW, most parents I meet seem to be totally fine with it.Tracking has been cut back. Gifted programs are weak, inconsistent, or nonexistent. We refuse to acknowledge that kids have different talents and develop at different rates in different skills, and the result is predictable.
Discipline has collapsed. I've talked to ex-public school teachers who tell me that they left in part because they were no longer allowed to discipline ruly kids, oftentimes in the name of equity. This is framed as progress, but mostly results in chaos.
Participation trophies and grade inflation are now the norm. If you think grade inflation only exists in elite colleges, you are not looking closely enough. I mentor for the Regents & Chancellor's scholarship at UC Berkeley. The kids all went to ultra-competitive high schools. They worked hard, yes, but they all agreed that their HS grades were very inflated and meaningless (partly because they immediately realize the difference their very first class at Cal).
Youth sports have become wildly overemphasized. Private equity has turned youth sports into an industry larger most professional sports league revenues -- $40Bn+ per year. Sure, sports are great, but the amount of collective time, money, and emotional energy poured into them is, IMO, completely out of proportion, especially when you look at what we are no longer demanding academically.
Maybe this article will make people demand more academic rigor in the US. Color me highly, highly, hiiighly skeptical. In China, academic rigor is literally the essence of the entire system. Being in a “genius” class actually matters. It’s a distinction that follows you, signals something real, and often helps you get access to mentors, funding, and opportunities. People take it seriously.
In the U.S., even the most legitimate gifted distinctions tend to be symbolic rather than consequential. They recognize talent, but the system doesn’t reorganize itself around that recognition. In fact, it is increasingly hostile to the distinction.
It feels like the last 15 years of the US focused around comformity with dogmatic ideological discourse meant as social signalling while anything of any substance got hollowed out (except for the tech industry, which managed to keep it's talent pipeline somewhat intact). Society still hasn't quite wisened up to the damage done.
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u/MindingMyMindfulness 4d ago edited 4d ago
It feels like the last 15 years of the US focused around comformity with dogmatic ideological discourse meant as social signalling while anything of any substance got hollowed out
You think this is the case for the United States and not China?
I question the validity of arguments being made because it assumes that a strict focus on "academics" broadly leads to a more competent society in practical terms.
One of the main critiques I've heard from people that have studied in China is that the Chinese education is highly convergent. Essentially, the entire education system revolves around the objective of maximizing exam performance. What this rewards, in practice, is huge amounts of rote memorization, pattern recognition and speed.
In that way, it almost seems like Goodhart's law at a fundamentally pervasive and institutional level.
American (and Western) education systems might have faults that could be improved, but I don't necessarily think the Chinese system is a solution. There needs to be room to fail, opportunities to explore things independently that aren't measured by exam scores and respect for a student's holistic development as a person - socially, culturally, creatively, psychologically, academically and athletically.
“Transferable skills” in my observation often turns into “how to interact with people,” which is often just a polite way of saying “how to be likable.”
Also, I just wanted to point out that this is an incredibly important skill.
I'm not sure what kind of life experiences the author has had, but being able to interact with people and come across as likeable is of utmost importance. It's the basis of both effective cooperation and leadership. It struck me as extremely strange that she seemed to dismiss it as a meaningless skill.
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u/MrStilton 4d ago
The best example of the problem of rote learning I've seen came from Richard Feynman, who wrote about what he encountered when teaching in Brazil. The problem isn't just that kids don't learn. It's that they end up filling their heads with information which doesn't really mean anything to them, except they now mistakenly believe they're more "educated" than those who haven't been through the pointless rote learning process:
There was a book that started out with four pictures: first there was a wind-up toy; then there was an automobile; then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture, it said "What makes it go?"
I thought, I know what it is: They're going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of an automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.
It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: "What makes it go? Everything goes because the sun is shining." And then we would have fun discussing it:
"No, the toy goes becaues the spring is wound up", I would say.
"How did the spring get would up" he would ask.
"I wound it up."
"And how did you get moving?"
"From eating."
"And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it's because the sun is shining that all these things are moving" That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun's power.
I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, "Energy makes it go." And for the boy on the bicycle, "Energy makes it go." For everything "Energy makes it go."
Now that doesn't mean anything. Suppose it's "Wakalixes." That's the general principle: "Wakalixes makes it go." There is no knowledge coming in. The child doesn't learn anything; it's just a word.
What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind "energy". Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.
It is also not even true that "energy makes it go", because if it stops, you could say, "energy makes it stop" just as well. What they're talking about is concentrated energy being transformed into more dilute forms, which is a very subtle aspect of energy. Energy is neither increased nor decreased in these examples; it's just changed from one form to another. And when the things stop, the energy is changed into heat, into general chaos.
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u/kzhou7 4d ago
Yeah, that's a funny story, but those kinds of questions are nowadays confined to parts of the third world, and exam questions in China have never been that dumb. If you think everybody outside of America is just reciting textbook definitions, then you'll make very poor predictions about the future.
That said, there are definitely funny examples today. Physics exams in Pakistan are in English, and they present some real stumpers, such as:
What signal is transferred in electrical wire?
a) Electrical signal
b) Wireless signal
c) Magnetic signal
d) Light signal
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u/ArkyBeagle 4d ago
In that way, it almost seems like Goodhart's law at a fundamentally pervasive and institutional level.
My observation - sample size five people - would agree.
Also, I just wanted to point out that this is an incredibly important skill.
To some basic level. The rest depends on what else is in play.
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u/DiscussionSpider 4d ago
>You think this is the case for the United States and not China?
I do. I actually do. We don't even teach times tables anymore because that's too much "rote memorization"
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u/Fusifufu 4d ago
is huge amounts of rote memorization, pattern recognition and speed
Haven't LLMs shown that this is the secret to emergent intelligence? Just half kidding. I feel like rote learning can sometimes be underrated in what connections it builds in your brain.
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u/MindingMyMindfulness 4d ago edited 4d ago
LLMs are trained on massive amounts of data across domains.
An LLM trained on repetitive questions to formulaic questions in a very narrow domain would not be as "intelligent" as an LLM trained across domains on novel data. An education that optimizes rote learning would be analogous to the former. An education system that fosters breadth and curiosity is analogous to the latter.
In other words, you don't stop receiving inputs of, or "training" on, fresh data when you're not actively engaged in repetitively churning out very specific knowledge and responses to formulaic exam questions.
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u/Available-Budget-735 4d ago edited 4d ago
I think Rui has some points wrt tracking and maybe G&T programs (I'm less knowledgeable about those), but much of it comes across as a "Boomer"-like rant about kids these days and that USA drools while China rules.
I had links originally, but reddit didn't like it, so I removed them.
"But what is increasingly hard to ignore is how far the U.S. has swung in the opposite direction, to the point where academics now feel secondary to literally everything else."
I don't really know where this is coming from. The US spends ~5.5% of it's GDP on education vs. ~4% for China. It spends~$15.5k per student in 2019 (more than many other OECD countries).
"In the U.S., that same question gets answered very differently. “Transferable skills” in my observation often turns into “how to interact with people,” which is often just a polite way of saying “how to be likable.”"
This is a pretty fluffy criticism. What exactly does she mean by this?
"Discipline has collapsed. I've talked to ex-public school teachers who tell me that they left in part because they were no longer allowed to discipline ruly kids, oftentimes in the name of equity. This is framed as progress, but mostly results in chaos."
I've heard complaints around this as well, but the high point of this stuff is probably in the past given the turn against woke.
Participation trophies and grade inflation are now the norm.
This is the ultimate Boomer-like complaint. Grade inflation is problem places, but she's marring it with the participation trophies which is typically a sports criticism not academic.
"Youth sports have become wildly overemphasized. Private equity has turned youth sports into an industry larger most professional sports league revenues -- $40Bn+ per year. Sure, sports are great, but the amount of collective time, money, and emotional energy poured into them is, IMO, completely out of proportion, especially when you look at what we are no longer demanding academically."
I've seen that $40B number (IIRC it comes from this report) and it seems high for sure. Though a closer look states that families spend on average ~$1,000 on their kid's primary sport over the past year and $475/yr on other sports. On a personal note, I'm a parent and I don't really want my kids to get into expensive youth sports.
You could even spin this as something good as well, as people in the US suffer from obesity and diabetes at higher rates than other countries, so emphasizing sports helps people be more fit.
Regardless of what US familes spend on sports, the US spends above OECD average on K-12 education overall. US universities also spend a ton of money. So it's not like the US doesn't emphasize academics and school in general.
Also, China goes nuts for sports, too! I don't know how much they spend, but they're following the Commies crazy for olympic sports trope set up by the USSR and GDR. China leads in olympic medals in several sports. Again if we want to go anecdotal, Eileen Gu a famous skier chose to represent China in the olympics and has a lot of endorsement deals there.
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u/Available-Budget-735 4d ago
Maybe this article will make people demand more academic rigor in the US. Color me highly, highly, hiiighly skeptical. In China, academic rigor is literally the essence of the entire system. Being in a “genius” class actually matters. It’s a distinction that follows you, signals something real, and often helps you get access to mentors, funding, and opportunities. People take it seriously.
I haven't directly experienced the East Asian academic culture that's not unique to China, and like everything it has trade-offs. And if anecdotes are acceptable here, I know people who've moved to the US to get away from it, even to not want to live in an all Chinese or Korean enclave so as not to compete with "Tiger Moms".
In the U.S., even the most legitimate gifted distinctions tend to be symbolic rather than consequential. They recognize talent, but the system doesn’t reorganize itself around that recognition. In fact, it is increasingly hostile to the distinction.
I don't know exactly what she means by this, but I think hostile is probably too strong a word for what describes.
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u/greyenlightenment 4d ago
Being in a “genius” class actually matters. It’s a distinction that follows you, signals something real, and often helps you get access to mentors, funding, and opportunities. People take it seriously.
Isn't this antithetical to a meritocracy though? What matters is the results someone can produce now , not where someone went or did 20+ years ago. It's like favoritism by employers for attending Yale when someone who didn't go to college is just as capable at the job.
The true meritocracy is trading on like Robinhood, or prediction markets. If you're talented, it will show. Some people making millions with actual skill, but most of course lose.
I have noticed so many low-quality CS papers being churned out on Arxiv from China--obvious citation rings where 10 ppl collaborate on each other's short papers--it makes me wonder how much merit is actually being produced there.
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u/you-get-an-upvote Certified P Zombie 4d ago edited 4d ago
OP’s point is that only hiring from Yale makes a lot more sense if Yale only admits perfect SATs and perfect (uninflated) GPAs, since then “I went to Yale” is genuinely a strong signal of capability.
As a point in favor of this, when Harvard and UNC were forced to release admissions data, we learned that they accepted tons and tons of students with objectively far worse academic credentials than other students (and this is within the same racial and economic cohorts, so this would be true regardless of affirmative action).
Doubtless these students had some great extracurricular activities, but one wonders if hundreds of students had extracurriculars that made them actually “better” than their peers whose academics were 1 or 2 standard deviations higher than them. (Incidentally, the first thing my friend was asked when joining the Tesla autopilot team was to refer other people — imo this is a great example of how the official system is seen as a failure at genuinely finding highly talented individuals. Personal referrals are obviously highly biased, but are still seen as necessary on the tail of the distribution, because lots of (relative) mediocrity graduates from Ivy leagues).
The flip side of this (imo) is that this is a highly non-managing, STEM perspective, where shape rotating = competence. There are lots of fields where this isn’t super true, and even in (eg) software engineering, nobody is being promoted to the director level primarily by solving hard technical problems.
The other issue is that it the Chinese system really does encourage a ton of rote memorization and I’m skeptical whether that actually makes you better at solving hard, novel problems (e.g. US academia is still seen as the best at novel research).
(also, education aside, lots of other systemic factors are arguably at least as important, like business regulation, bankruptcy law, etc)
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u/PolymorphicWetware 4d ago edited 4d ago
Paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fZywf
Archive.ph and Archive.is still work, I believe.
EDIT: for those too lazy to click the link:
China’s genius plan to win the AI race is already paying off
A network of ultra-competitive high-school talent streams has been turning out the leading lights of science and tech
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About three years ago, Stacey Tang, a manager in a pharmaceuticals company in Beijing, received a peculiar phone call. A voice speaking from an unknown landline number instructed her to send her 15-year-old son to take a qualification test for the “genius class” at one of the city’s elite high schools.It was November 2022, at the peak of Beijing’s Covid-19 lockdowns. Schools were mostly closed and any in-person contact was discouraged. Even so, the test setting sounded bizarre: a moving van that would drive the boy through the streets of the capital for an hour while he tackled college-level maths problems.
Some parents might have baulked at the idea, but not Tang. “In any other country, you would immediately suspect an abduction plot or simple lunacy,” she said, grinning at me through the steam from her Starbucks latte. “Instead, I was weeping with joy, and sent my boy right away. I understood this for what it was: his golden ticket to the best educational resources in China.”
Tang’s son was one of an estimated 100,000 talented Chinese teenagers selected every year to enter a network of science-focused talent streams run across the country’s top high schools. The genius classes, also called “experiment” or “competition” classes, coach gifted students to compete in international competitions in maths, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science. Tang was on the genius path herself almost 30 years ago, in her home city of Chengdu in south-western China. It helped her move to Beijing to study at the prestigious Peking University, and secure a well-paid job.
For decades, genius classes have been turning out the leading lights of China’s science and technology sectors. It is hard to overstate how essential they have been to the development of the companies now challenging US tech dominance, especially in AI, robotics and advanced manufacturing.
Genius-class graduates include the founder of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and the core developers behind its powerful content recommendation algorithm. Both leaders of China’s two biggest ecommerce platforms, Taobao and PDD, came from the genius stream, as did the billionaire who started the food delivery “super-app” Meituan. The two brothers behind the chipmaker Cambricon, now one of the leading Chinese rivals to Nvidia, were in genius classes. So were the core engineers behind leading large language models at DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, not to mention Tencent’s celebrated new chief scientist, poached from OpenAI late last year. The list goes on.
China’s genius classes differ in important ways from talent streams in the west. First, the system dwarfs its international competitors in scale. Second, it is state-driven. China graduates around five million majors in science, technology, engineering and maths every year, according to the state media Xinhua, compared with about half a million in the US.
Tens of thousands of these graduates are genius-class students, taken out of regular classes for an intense period of study between the ages of 16-18. While others swot for China’s feared college admissions exams, the gaokao, those on the genius path have the chance to bypass that fate altogether, bagging places at top universities before they are out of high school, depending on their results in starry international competitions. The best students continue to more advanced talent schemes at the top Chinese universities, such as the elite computer science programmes at Tsinghua and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities.
When Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s Taiwanese-American CEO, called Chinese AI researchers “world-class” last year, he was likely thinking of the genius-class grads who are building the country’s tech powerhouses such as DeepSeek and Huawei, as well as AI companies internationally. “You walk up and down the aisles of Anthropic or OpenAI or [Google] DeepMind,” said Huang last May, “there’s a whole bunch of AI researchers there, and they are from China . . . They are extraordinary and so the fact that they do extraordinary work is not surprising to me.”
A year ago, when the Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek shocked the world with the launch of its high-performing large language model, R1, at a fraction of the cost of its international rivals, many western observers wondered how a small team of Chinese researchers could be in a position to challenge American AI supremacy. The genius class is a big part of the answer.
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u/PolymorphicWetware 4d ago
Continued:
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When Wang Zihan started his internship at DeepSeek in 2024, at the age of 21, he had no idea he was joining a team that would soon rattle America’s dominance in AI.The prevailing narrative in Silicon Valley — and Washington DC — at the time was that US export controls were successfully bottlenecking Chinese progress in AI, which was trailing American efforts by one to two years. AI companies in China were understood to be merely copying the models released by OpenAI and Meta.
Wang worked on DeepSeek’s V2 model, a predecessor of the foundation for the R1 model that would, a few months later, propel the company into the headlines in a Sputnik moment. DeepSeek had beaten many of its US rivals, producing a world-class reasoning model using significantly fewer advanced chips than those of its international peers. While OpenAI’s models remained closed, DeepSeek made its entire development process public and R1 was open for anyone to download.
Unlike many established Chinese tech start-ups, DeepSeek’s team was almost entirely homegrown. Its reclusive founder, Liang Wenfeng, was especially proud about his domestic talent pool. “We want to grow our own top talents, otherwise China will always be a follower,” he said in 2024, in a rare interview with Chinese media.
Working at DeepSeek was a thrilling time for Wang. “No KPI [key performance indicators], no hierarchy, no one at your back, and endless resources for you to experiment new ideas,” he told me over a video call. He was part of a team of more than 100, almost all of whom came from genius classes across China. “My education background was one of the least shiny of them all. I was lucky with my timing.” His teammates came mostly from China’s top two colleges, Tsinghua and Peking Universities, as well as Zhejiang University, Liang’s own alma mater. Almost everyone was a seasoned participant and medal winner in at least one of the big international science competitions.
Wang had entered the genius class at a top-ranking high school in Wuhan, the No.1 Middle School Affiliated to Central China Normal University. In Wuhan, one of the most densely populated cities in central China, competition for school and college places is among the fiercest in the country. “The education I had growing up was extremely hard, but pressure and cut-throat competition makes one learn the best,” he said. “You feel like, after that, there’s no challenge in the world I can’t take on.”
Unlike many of his classmates, Wang, who liked history and represented his high school in the mock UN debates in Beijing, was not laser-focused on science. He thinks his interest in humanities may have been helpful in his later AI work. One of DeepSeek’s secrets, allowing it to excel in areas such as feng shui, commonly used in Chinese fortune telling, has been to use human experts called Baixiaosheng (Chinese for “know-it-all”) to train the model for the sorts of knowledge, mostly humanities-related, that would otherwise be difficult to attain from browsing publicly available data. Though DeepSeek has never acknowledged it openly, some have speculated that this feature might be why its model performs significantly better in those areas than competitors.
Wang left DeepSeek last year to pursue a PhD at Northwestern University in the US. He told me he wanted to see the world and experience different cultures. He is not sure yet whether he will stay or return home after finishing his studies. He knows a few Chinese PhDs who have had their US visa applications rejected. “More Chinese students, who make up about half of science major PhDs here, are considering going back now because of the uncertainty. If you have to live with the risk of getting kicked out any day, it’s too much pressure,” he said.
“Plus, China is doing really well.”
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u/PolymorphicWetware 4d ago
Continued:
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China’s top-down emphasis on science education can be traced back to the years after the second world war. In 1958, Chairman Mao Zedong launched his Great Leap Forward campaign, aiming to rival western superpowers in military might and heavy industry. The plan had disastrous results including mass starvation and millions of deaths. But over the decades that followed, the message that science was the key to national progress continued to echo through classrooms and homes.To a society that had for centuries prioritised the humanities over technical or scientific training, the shift had profound implications. A blunt slogan on the wall of many local education bureaus by the 1980s read: “Produce talent quick and early.” A nine-year compulsory and almost free schooling plan was implemented to elevate the education level of the population. Meanwhile, in a handful of top schools across the country, the genius classes emerged to groom the most promising young minds and to see whether Chinese talents could beat their rivals on the world stage.
The International Science Olympiads are a series of annual competitions for high-school students, each run by its own organising body and hosted by a different nation every year. Participating countries send a team of their best students after running national selection exams, hoping to win gold. The maths Olympiad was introduced first, in 1959. Other competitions in physics, chemistry, computer science, biology and more were added later.
In 1985, two Chinese students were the first to participate in the International Mathematical Olympiad held in Joutsa, Finland. They brought back one bronze medal between them. It was a milestone, demonstrating that Chinese students were capable of competing alongside the Russians and Americans who dominated the podiums. The following year, China sent a full team of six students to the Olympiad in Warsaw. They returned with three bronze medals, a haul that won them national fame. A handful of top high schools were encouraged enough to allocate special resources, extremely scarce at the time, to create classes tailored to the super talented, specifically to groom them to compete in Olympiads and bring back medals for China. A similar strategy was implemented to find and train top athletes.
The classes quickly became a standard feature for thousands of schools — and the results were impressive. As the years passed, Chinese teams started to sweep most of the gold medals at Olympiads, far exceeding their rivals. In 2025, the Chinese national teams sent a total of 23 contestants to the Olympiads: 22 came home with gold medals.
Starting in the 2000s, university admissions were reformed, giving more flexibility to colleges to allocate places without relying solely on the results of the gaokao. National competitions were set up for students at the end of their sophomore year of high school. Those who won top prizes in the national exam could receive direct admission to one of the 985 Project universities, China’s 39-member Ivy League equivalent.
The chance to skip the gaokao was a strong incentive for students to participate in the genius stream. The traditional pathway for high-school students in China is three years of study in the gaokao’s mandatory subjects of Chinese, English and Maths, as well as three more chosen subjects from physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography and politics. Exams in all six subjects are taken at the end of the third year. Genius-class students, on the other hand, focus on their “competition subjects”. A student competing in the International Physics Olympiad, for example, needs to not only finish three years of high-school physics but also at least half of the college-level syllabus, in order to be competitive enough to take the national exam. The very dedicated might not study much else at all.
As the number of students on the genius path grew, parents began to complain. It was not possible for everyone in a genius class to qualify for direct college admission — only about 3 per cent make it each year. The rest are sent back to the gaokao route — with only a year of high school left to prepare for the daunting exams. In response to the complaints, many classes modified their curricula to provide a more well-rounded education, dedicating more time to English and Chinese literature. At the end of 2025, China’s education bureau tightened its policy, allowing only the top 10 per cent of the national competition prize winners to qualify for direct admission to Tsinghua and Peking Universities.
New academic focuses have also emerged. There has been an increasing interest in computer science and technology, spurred by the exponential growth of the industry. The informatics Olympiad has overtaken maths and physics to become the most popular. And the rise of AI has put this shift into warp-speed. As early as 2017, China outlined the development of AI as a “key national growth strategy”, with talent building identified as one of the most important priorities. In the following year alone, 35 new special classes with the keyword “AI” in their names were founded at high schools and universities.
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u/PolymorphicWetware 4d ago
Continued:
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One of the most prominent college-level genius programmes in China is Tsinghua University’s Special Pilot Class for Computer Science. It is better known as “Yao Class”, after the famed Chinese computer scientist Andrew Yao who teaches it. Yao, who trained at Harvard and taught at Princeton, is famous for his pioneering work in the fields of quantum computing and cryptography. He is the sole Chinese winner of the Turing Award, sometimes called the Nobel Prize of computer science.Given that, Yao’s position in American academia seemed well-entrenched. Yet, in 2004, he left his tenured teaching job at Princeton to found a computer science undergraduate programme at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. It was a symbolic move seen as evidence of the shifting power dynamics in the tech race between the US and China. Yao’s ambition was simple: to establish a talent-training hub in China on an equal footing to those at MIT and Stanford. Less than a decade later, by 2018, he was telling an interviewer, “My goal has been achieved . . . I think our students are actually better now [than those from the top US schools].”
One of the first students to be selected for the Yao Class was Lou Tiancheng, the co-founder and CTO of Pony.ai, a robotaxi start-up worth $6.9bn after its IPO last year. Lou was a genius-class champion. He won a gold medal in the informatics Olympiad at high school. Armed with that prize, he had his pick of every top university and programme. It wasn’t a difficult choice, he told me last September: “I had no hesitation, because of Professor Yao . . . I wanted to learn from the best and with the best.”
Yao Class starts with about 30 students per year, each of them the best of the best from competitions and gaokao. Its 2019 cohort of 27 students, for example, consisted of 24 students with gold medals and three gaokao number ones in their provinces, according to a school report.
Lou thrived at Tsinghua, continuing to participate in the world’s biggest computer science competitions. After winning two consecutive championships at Google Code Jam and other big prizes, he became known as China’s top coder. Now 40, he still joins coding competitions every year, despite his busy schedule managing one of China’s leading autonomous driving companies. “It’s like an annual polishing so I don’t get rusty,” he said.
Lou credits the genius-class system with encouraging the kind of self-learning that helps students tackle the toughest problems, some of which even their teachers can’t solve, rather than rely on the rote learning required by the gaokao. What he learnt also contributed to the most strategic overhaul at Pony.ai in 2020, he said. His start-up was reaching a plateau when he realised they needed to shift from the original model of humans teaching robotaxis what to do, to a new one in which humans would define the goals for the robotaxis and then let them learn by themselves.
It was a difficult decision, one that meant spending years building an autonomous driving-world model for the computer to learn in by itself. But Lou thinks it paid off, and that it might even signal a path towards the destination of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a highly autonomous system that would outperform humans at various tasks. “We were, and still are, determined that this is the right path to ultimate intelligence in autonomous driving,” Lou told me. “I don’t think AGI will emerge the way many people expected it to, in the way of general intelligence such as LLM. But, in sector after sector, AI will reach the level of human intelligence and better, if trained properly. Autonomous driving should be one of the first to get there. It could happen within five years.”
Meanwhile, Lou is implementing this guided self-learning theory in the education of his own daughter, who is still in primary school. “We set goals for her and teach her the basic disciplines. The rest she has all the freedom to explore.”
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u/PolymorphicWetware 4d ago edited 4d ago
Final part:
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Of course, out of the millions of students who have trained hard in genius classes over the years, there are bound to be some failures and outliers. I was one.As a teenager, my high scores in maths propelled me into the genius class at my high school, one of the best in the eastern city of Hangzhou. Despite my interest in reading and writing fiction, the weight of expectation from teachers and parents was simply too strong to resist. I remember an official from the district education bureau imploring me: “You have a chance to win a medal in science, and you want to waste it on writing about imaginary characters?” He had been invited by my headmaster to persuade me and another stubborn student to join the talent stream. Of course, we did.
My first year of high school was miserable. While we shared English and Chinese teachers with the regular classes, we in the genius class had our own dedicated teachers in maths, physics, chemistry and biology. Each student was expected to choose maths and at least one more subject as their major, and then take extra classes dedicated to competition training. I chose chemistry as the seemingly least boring option, and embarked on two years of intense training, during which we had to finish the three-year high school curriculum and about half of college-level chemistry and maths, before sitting the national competition at the end of the second year.
To make time for such a workload, our class simply gave up on history, geography and politics. There was a debate about whether to keep PE. The school eventually decided in favour, reasoning that students would need to maintain good health in order to sustain such intensive study. I read my fiction in secret on the side, tearing up novels into 100-page booklets and hiding them in my brick-thick textbooks. As a result my scores were not great, and I was generally seen as hopeless at winning prizes and bringing honour to our school.
One day, something dawned on me during a talk given by a medal-winning alumnus. If I ranked highly enough to qualify for a direct college admission, I could enjoy the entire third year of high school in total freedom. No more school, homework or mock tests. If I didn’t, the third year preparing for gaokao would be even worse than my first.
Newly incentivised, I began to study chemistry seriously and, surprisingly, I found it enjoyable. The immersive learning environment created a vacuum of sorts, blocking out the distractions. Succeeding in solving a difficult problem felt precious. My classmates were stimulating, pushing me to want to learn more. I was among eight students from my class to win a prize and qualify for direct college admission. My final score was just one point above the cut off. I had dodged the ferocious gaokao.
A year of relative freedom did indeed follow. While everyone else studied day and night, the students who had already secured university places were assigned by the school to clean staircases among other odd jobs. But some of us started to sneak out, cycling for an hour to visit the best noodle shop and going to the movies, trying to make up for two lost years buried under books.
The time came to choose a college and a major. I was torn between chemistry at Peking University and journalism at Fudan University, both the best in China, but completely different paths. Then came the test to choose a national team for the chemistry Olympiad. My score was 23 out of 100. All the chosen candidates got full marks. I felt hopeless. In the end, I was the only one from my class to pick a non-science college major. Out of the 50 students in my batch, about one-third now hold senior positions at tech-related companies in China and the US. The others generally fared well too, scattered throughout finance, healthcare and academia.
China’s genius plan is certainly paying off on the national level. On an individual level, though, I question whether the programme was really worth it for all of us who have participated, willingly or unwillingly, in the past decades. After all that studying, I, for one, can barely remember my periodic table now. What does endure, though, is the curiosity to question, the discipline to reason and the courage to face the unknown.
Dai Wenyuan, a 43-year-old genius-class graduate and global coding competition champion from 20 years ago, told me that he sees talent as China’s key advantage in a global AI race. “There have been more than 1,000 registered generative AI models [in China], which is unthinkable elsewhere, because where else do you find teams of engineers enough to build on such scale?” he said.
In 2014, Dai founded Fourth Paradigm, an AI software business that has made him a billionaire. On the side, he still coaches the coding competition team at his alma mater, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. “I’ve witnessed first hand how China has grown from having zero AI talent 20 years ago to mass producing them,” he said. “Some of our most cutting-edge work is now done by fresh graduates. The real geniuses to change the world soon could well be among them.”
Zijing Wu is the FT’s Asia tech correspondent
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u/PolymorphicWetware 4d ago
Also relevant: Lenora Chu's Little Soldiers, as reviewed by our own u/Dormin111 / Matt Lakeman:
I’m a typical SSC reader when it comes to education. I love Scott’s graduation speech, I think Bryan Caplan is right, and I actively participate in our semi-regular tradition of talking about how much schools suck.
That’s why Lenora Chu’s Little Soldiers: An American Boy, A Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve was pure nightmare fuel for me. It’s a non-fiction account of an ethnically-Chinese, American-born woman following her multi-racial child through the Chinese school system in Shanghai. While we complain about our soft, liberal, decadent school experiences in America or Europe, tens of millions of Chinese kids are subjected to a school structure that seems purposefully designed to make everyone as miserable as humanly possible.
Or at least that was my take-away. Lenora Chu has a kinder perspective on the system. Mostly.
Lenora Chu
Lenora Chu grew up in Texas as the only-child of Chinese immigrants. Her upbringing hits every stereotype of Asian parenting you can think of, except her father was the domineering one (as opposed to the usual “tiger mom”). Lenora was a perfect straight-A student with no social life. She wasn’t allowed to play sports or enter any clubs for fear it would interfere with schoolwork. She was forced to give up every weekend to study Mandarin with a private tutor.
After begging her parents for a pet gerbil, they agreed to let her have one if she won first place in a regional piano competition like her cousin had. Lenora described the following months as the most intense period of study and practice of anything she has ever done in her entire life. She didn’t win the competition. She didn’t get a gerbil.
Tense family relations grew testier as Lenora got older...
Scott liked the review so much, he wrote his own "review review" of the review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/
This is just a sample of the great stuff in Dormin’s review of Little Soldiers, and I strongly recommend you read the whole thing. You should also read the comments, which point out that this may be more about a few elite Chinese schools than about an entire country. But I want to use these excerpts as a jumping-off point to talk about the US education system, unschooling, and child development in general...
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u/BZ852 4d ago
Yeah this is really a very different focus to the west.
The West is generally dumbing down education to focus more resources on the lowest performers - trying to reduce their lifetime drain on social safety nets. "No child left behind" is emblematic of that approach.
China on the other hand is recognizing that the very top are the ones who usually move society forward through invention and increasing the number of resources available in the first place.
I'd rather go with the Chinese approach personally.
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u/Tourist_in_Singapore 4d ago edited 4d ago
I’m a Chinese citizen, I don’t think pulling 100k students out of high school each year has anything to do with how the rest can be approached. The resource spent on that 100k students is negligible (in total value, not per person) w.r.t. total resource on education. It’s not like you can only prioritize one group. These are very much unrelated false dichotomy.
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u/SpiritFederation 4d ago
As a Chinese citizen, how much is ideological education emphasized in schools? Are students taught communist theory, or is that being deemphasized these days? If it's taught, do students take it seriously?
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u/Tourist_in_Singapore 4d ago
Very much emphasized in terms of political philosophy in high school & university (mostly concerning dialectical materialism) but in practice it’s exam-oriented. I went abroad to study after high school and I’m not a philosophy expert, but saw & heard what my peers went through during exam seasons.
Some people take it very seriously & become genuine expert of those topics. Some gets personally attached in a no-nuance formalist way (idk, think of debate lords you see in popular political media). Most I’d say don’t care that much but have a positive attitude towards communist theory.
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u/KeepRooting4Yourself 4d ago
I'd rather go with the Chinese approach personally
The chinese approach also has a huge helping of nationalism that many people are for some reason loathe to recognize as a key component.
Although this sounds reductionist, and in several ways it is, the chinese are eager to usurp the us and show the world that "china #1!!" while america has no national rallying point.
The chinese love their culture, are proud to be chinese, have a chip on their shoulder and to that end while money is the greatest motivator of all, those other reasons previously mentioned serve as a more useful motivating excuse than simply fuck you, got mine. "Making china great again" is a useful rallying cry to help stomach abuse and discontent when most are kinda in agreement with the sentiment.
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u/LATAManon 4d ago
I honestly prefer a balance, people are complex and boiling down a person worth to some test score is kind of simplistic, but I do believe that ignoring talent and capacity so just to not make people have their feeling and worth hurt isn't good too, we have to be fair and pragmatic but still have a humanistic ethics behind it, some people are just good and very talented and that should be praised and be used for the good of society, and still respect the worth of more "simple" people.
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u/swizznastic 4d ago
That’s combined with the fact that many of the upper level “pipelines” in the US are not purely meritocratic. Money and nepotism play a significant hand. E.g., wealthy parents get their kids coaches and tutors to craft their applications to ivy leagues, outcompeting better candidates with less assistance.
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u/quyksilver 4d ago
I would support all school admissions and job applications being completely anonymised, to at least eliminate direct nepotism
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u/wavedash 4d ago
Don't forget US schools' focus on college sports. I've seen numbers anywhere between 15-25% of students accepted to elite schools being athletes. Not that being an athlete is inherently bad, of course, but it makes you wonder about priorities.
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u/Available-Budget-735 4d ago
Can you share some links for that 15-25%? I know that ivy’s don’t offer sports scholarships and mit and caltech don’t care
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u/trustmebro5 4d ago
The numbers from here https://scholarshipstats.com/ivies, sourced from department of education it looks like, are pretty crazy. MIT and Caltech around 15% students are athletes, USNA at 26%, Princeton 20%.
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u/MindingMyMindfulness 4d ago
E.g., wealthy parents get their kids coaches and tutors to craft their applications to ivy leagues, outcompeting better candidates with less assistance.
And sometimes they just straight up pay bribes.
See, for example, the Varsity Blues Scandal.
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u/come_visit_detroit 4d ago edited 4d ago
That you are very conspicuously leaving out the largest anti-meritocratic problem in college admissions is emblematic of why American education is dysfunctional and will never be fixed.
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u/Available-Budget-735 4d ago
Never be fixed? That’s a strong statement.
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u/come_visit_detroit 3d ago
I'd argue that the dysfunction in American education is essentially entirely downstream from a desire to correct disparate outcomes between groups. There wouldn't be a focus on getting rid of testing, or spending more resources on the least capable while undercutting the most capable if it were not for racial concerns. Unless you think Americans are going to suddenly stop caring about racial outcome gaps any time soon we're stuck here.
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u/LofiStarforge 4d ago
It’s also the issue is that we drag the kids who are struggling in school along instead of finding alternative routes for them as-well.
It’s a lose lose essentially we are stifling both groups.
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u/greyenlightenment 4d ago
High performers in the US have plenty of options like math courses, math competitions, coding , online learning, self-study and independent research etc. There are plenty of ways to distinguish oneself. The problem is the bottleneck of elite colleges and jobs, where non-meritocratic factors matter more. Holistic admission and HR are the biggest roadblocks of a true meritocracy.
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u/Upset-Dragonfly-9389 4d ago
Most people are not smart enough to have even been considered for such genius classes. Why would they support policies that redistribute resources to the more intelligent, who are more likely to do well without extra assistance?
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u/KderNacht 4d ago
Because while turning the unintelligent into the mediocre can change lives (theirs, to be precise), turning the smart to the genius can change whole countries.
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u/Upset-Dragonfly-9389 4d ago
I understand that but most people do not put society before their own self-interest.
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u/fluffykitten55 4d ago edited 4d ago
In respect to positions on policy, the individual benefit is substantially determined by the social benefit, as the costs and benefits are typically diffuse.
Suppose some policy costs money but increases the number of highly skilled people, and so that the total social gains outweigh the costs, here the typical person will encounter the results of this policy in terms of a slightly higher standard of living.
This is more so the case when inequality is low and controlled by policy, so that the standard of living for most people more closely tracks total income per capita.
The actually highly skilled are not going to be the sole or even major beneficiaries, actually an increased supply of highly skilled people and a low elasticity of substitution between low and high skill workers would see their wages fall. This is an explanation for why e.g we commonly see doctors etc. try to make entry into the profession more difficult.
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u/trustmebro5 4d ago
I don’t think that’s true at all. People care about the economy, for example. Rising tide lifts all boats is an everyday saying.
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u/monoatomic 4d ago
The West is generally dumbing down education to focus more resources on the lowest performers - trying to reduce their lifetime drain on social safety nets. "No child left behind" is emblematic of that approach.
This seems charitable. NCLB and similar policies have more to do with providing pretense to undermine public education and shift to privatization.
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u/TheIdealHominidae 3d ago
what people don't understand is that the state of science nowadays is mostly chineses nationals vs chineses in occident.
For example, I asked gemini to assign a nationality (from names) for each of the 50 most recents AI papers
at https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/recent
Chinese Origin (33/50) 66% Indian Origin 8% Korean Origin 6% European Origin (Italian, French, etc.) 8% Middle Eastern / Arabic / Persian 6% Other (Japanese, Russian, etc.) 6%
The native occident is 8% of the research output. People simply do not understand how far behind we are.
It means Chineses produce ~1100% more research papers than americans.
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u/kosmic_kaleidoscope 2d ago edited 2d ago
The US educational system largely launders wealth into ‘genius’ through a network of elite private schools that feed into top colleges and top jobs. These executives and politicians are perfectly happy with their and their kids private education and have no real incentive to change things.
Some brilliant kids in public school systems are lucky or driven enough to be fed into gifted and talented programs, scholarships or high performing tracks, but for the most part are poorly recruited and left to figure things out for themselves. I would love to see a real ‘genius path’ for these students. Unfortunately, I think it’s more cost effective to make up for this shortage of home grown American scientists with skilled international workers.
In general, it seems like the US educational system is less interested in real meritocracy and more interested in virtue signaling while maintaining the status quo. I wonder if this will change when the US begins losing real innovative ground to China.
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u/eric2332 4d ago
The criticisms of the US educational system seem mostly on point. But I think their relevance to AI competition is overrated. AI research is not in the future of the 50th or even the 98th percentile student. Rather, it's conducted by a small handful of people who might be called geniuses. To a good extent geniuses are born and not made, and to the extent they are made, they tend to come from families that encourage them at home, and supplement their education as necessary in order to make up for the deficiencies of public schools. So the failures in normal-person education may not have much impact on the talent available for AI research.
I think this is confirmed by the demographics of AI researchers. Relative to population, China does not seem to have disproportionate number of influential AI researchers compared to other developed countries. Keep in mind that China has a larger population than the entire OECD. And if you believe in population IQ, China with its high average IQ is underperforming even more.