The US has generally resorted to propaganda rather than addressing the self-inflicted structural conditions responsible for the erosion of our dominance. China also conducted a broad, sustained, large-scale campaign of IP theft across almost every industry.
Obviously there is no natural law preventing China from innovating (We have treated political liberalism as a prerequisite to innovation in a way that was always partly self-congratulatory), but it's also obviously true that the speed of the gap closure is due in significant part to theft.
That doesn't change the fact that they are now a legitimate competitor who has gotten a lot of things right (and among these, some things that we get very wrong) and probably actually leads in some areas.
The math is obvious on this one. It's super well-documented that model performance on complex tasks scales (to some asymptote) with the amount of inference-time compute allocated.
LLM providers must dynamically scale inference-time compute based on current load because they have limited compute. Thus it's impossible for traffic spikes _not_ to cause some degradations in model performance (at least until/unless they acquire enough compute to saturate that asymptotic curve for every request under all demand conditions -- it does not seem plausible that they are anywhere close to this)
Another (higher profile) example are the baseless threats of criminal indictments against Jerome Powell -- it is impossible to argue that these threats have been made for any reason other than that he, as a nonpartisan official, defied the president's demands to execute his duties as fed chair in such a way (that is, poorly) so as to put a temporary thumb on the scale for the current admin.
The more important question, I think, is how many folk in explicitly nonpartisan functions are choosing not to break step with the current admin for fear of some sort of (likely professional) reprisal. I'm not alleging that they're disappearing dissenters or anything that inflammatory, but it would be intellectually dishonest to contend that there isn't a long, well-documented trail of malfeasance here.
For what it's worth, I have lived in, and currently spend a lot of time in, both places. You're both very obviously wrong.
There is a serious problem in the US. There is also a serious (though different) problem in the UK. The problem in the US is the chilling effect of the vindictiveness and lawlessness of the current regime. I will not elaborate on this because it's too complicated to communicate effectively in a forum post.
The problem in the UK is a set of vaguely and arbitrarily specified-and-enforced laws that enable the criminalization of 'grossly offensive" speech. There is no statutory definition of what constitutes a 'grossly offensive' communication -- all enforcement is arbitrary and thus can be abused. Whether is it actually abused in any widespread fashion is irrelevant.
- Communications Act 2003 (Section 127): Makes it an offense to send messages via public electronic networks (internet, phone, social media) that are "grossly offensive," indecent, obscene, or menacing, or to cause annoyance/anxiety.
- Malicious Communications Act 1988 (Section 1): Applies to sending letters or electronic communications with the purpose of causing distress or anxiety, containing indecent or grossly offensive content.
The US has generally resorted to propaganda rather than addressing the self-inflicted structural conditions responsible for the erosion of our dominance. China also conducted a broad, sustained, large-scale campaign of IP theft across almost every industry.
Obviously there is no natural law preventing China from innovating (We have treated political liberalism as a prerequisite to innovation in a way that was always partly self-congratulatory), but it's also obviously true that the speed of the gap closure is due in significant part to theft.
That doesn't change the fact that they are now a legitimate competitor who has gotten a lot of things right (and among these, some things that we get very wrong) and probably actually leads in some areas.