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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023
  • India is very different from China:

    1. India is much more diverse in terms of language, culture and history. India was politically unified for the first time in 1947. China has existed in some form since around the second century BC.
    2. Modern India is therefore one giant legal compromise, including British colonial law, laws from various princely states, community law and customary law. Some of this isn’t even written down. The fact that we haven’t broken apart is itself a miracle, and required a lot of compromise and ‘strategic ambiguity’.
    3. We also have this thing called caste, and many forms of discrimination still exist.
    4. What all of this means is that India is not a single nation moving in a single direction, but hundreds of communities with their own priorities, negotiating with each other, and forming alliances and rivalries. (Just to give an example, someone from the northeast or south might not even have heard about the Ram Temple case you mentioned.)
    5. So while Chinese officials and leaders are chosen through exams and performance reviews, Indian officials and leaders are chosen through quotas and political compromises. (This isn’t an entirely bad thing - it ensures that no group is left out.)

    So I don’t think India will be able to grow as fast as China. Parts of India have grown quite well - mostly in the south - and others will hopefully move in this direction.

  • One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure’.

    I’m sold.

    If everyone uses AI systems that people largely don’t pay for, there would be no way to finance continued frontier AI development.

    There would be no way for private companies to finance AI development. (Also has he heard of a loss leader?) Universities and governments will do it instead.

    Congress restricted the use of Chinese model DeepSeek on federal and defense networks because of security and privacy concerns last year

    Buy a server and run it locally?