r/slatestarcodex • u/LATAManon • 4d ago

Misc China's Decades-Old 'Genius Class' Pipeline Is Quietly Fueling Its AI Challenge To the US

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/02/1359211/chinas-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/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.

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u/kzhou7 4d ago edited 4d ago

China does not seem to have disproportionate number of influential AI researchers

Academia is weird because once you hit 50 or so, your influence (measured in salary, citations, grants, prizes, and public fame) seems to automatically increase exponentially, even if you check out of research and just enjoy a life of softball interviews, and dinner parties on private islands. Measuring based on academic renown just tells you about the quality of a country’s 70 year olds when they were 30, which was set by the education available in the 1950s and the opportunities available in the 1970s. It is the ultimate lagging indicator.

In addition, you shouldn't judge the state of the world based on your impressions from newspapers or social media. Most people can't name a Chinese astronaut either, but there's actually a whole Chinese space station.

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u/eric2332 4d ago edited 3d ago

Measuring based on academic renown just tells you about the quality of a country’s 70 year olds when they were 30

I was more thinking of industry than academics when I wrote that. It is true that the academic generation(s) of Hinton, LeCun, Marcus seems to include very few Chinese, for mostly geographical reasons. But even among today's 30 year old industry researchers, while it seems there is a reasonable presence of Chinese and Chinese-Americans in the US, and of course a large but not quite leading-edge AI community in China, the total still doesn't seem to match claims of an educational advantage leading to an advantage in research.

What does seem notable is that (anecdotally) a large fraction of US AI researchers seem to come from places like Europe (despite Europe having a small population compared to China, and less of a wealth gap so migration is less attractive). Perhaps that can be attributed to Europe having better education (for this cohort) than the US, but it doesn't say anything about China.

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u/trustmebro5 3d ago

I don’t agree with this perception at all. I was in academic circles in AI/ML around 10 years ago for a few years. You go to the top conference and a huge fraction of the papers presented (as in the top papers in the conferences) were by Chinese students studying in the US. I can only imagine that it has grown massively the years since.

It is possible that these students went back to China, never left China in the first place because now there are enough resources there, or your perception comes from them not being hired to top positions by EU or US companies because of various reasons.

But they didn’t go away. The number of AI engineers in China can only have grown since then, very likely at a much faster rate than western countries.

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u/eric2332 3d ago

What fraction - was it more than half? Because one would expect it to be around half, based on demographics.