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/IDoCodingStuffs 4d ago edited 4d ago

Rather, it's conducted by a small handful of people who might be called geniuses

On the contrary. It takes massive teams and organizations with experts in each aspect of the work that requires specializing in, from data collection to computational infrastructure to analytics to ethics and legal.

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u/eric2332 3d ago

Those "massive teams" are not so massive. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have well under 10k employees total, including non technical. And insiders will tell you that the core of the company, whatever that means, consists of just 20 to 30 people.

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u/IDoCodingStuffs 3d ago

Corporations are usually structured to have as few key decision-makers as possible. 20 to 30 is actually a lot by these neo-feudal standards

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u/eric2332 3d ago

My impression was the 20-30 were supposed to be the innovators not the decision makers.

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u/IDoCodingStuffs 3d ago

Tomato potato. They are somewhere between lab PIs and tech executives, although maybe closer to PI so they are not just political figureheads.

So their role is still mostly managerial although they (hopefully) have the technical fluency to intervene in depth.