Most of the papers in machine learning are coming from China. The vast majority.

Most of the open source models on GitHub, too.

Hailuo, Kling, Vidu, and Hunyuan (posted on Banodoko) blow Sora and Runway out of the water.

China is dominating at this field. And if they begin releasing weights as open source, that'll mean foundation model companies can only bank on the thin facade of product. That's a really good strategy to make sure American AI startups don't achieve escape velocity if they have to fend of dozens of fungible clones.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted.

Anyone actually reading papers in this area knows there's a lot of interesting work coming out of Chinese universities.

For many years, American immigration policy has meant a PhD is particularly beneficial to immigrants, with predictable effects on who earns PhDs [1]. It's no surprise that, when industry needs advanced degrees and people who can read and write papers, we find author lists full of one-syllable surnames.

[1] https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2023-CRA-Taulbee-...

Quantity of papers is really not a good measure.

> that'll mean foundation model companies can only bank on the thin facade of product.

The “facade” of product tested in the real world in the hands of millions or billions is better than thousands of unread/uncited/clique-cited papers using questionable gameable benchmarks.

> That's a really good strategy to make sure American AI startups don't achieve escape velocity if they have to fend of dozens of fungible clones.

A strategy pioneered by Meta.

Are they making breakthroughs or are they taking what exists and copying/marginally improving?

"taking what exists and marginally improving" You just described most scientific progress. Real breakthroughs only happen in the newspapers and movies.

I think they had the earliest paper with the modern take on scaling laws, from Baidu about 3 years before the similar paper from the US.

I don't know enough to comment but can someone downvoting this please explain why they are doing so? Is it untrue, an exaggeration, something else or maybe simply an observation they don't like to see.

Btw renting GPUs in Nvidia GPUs in China is cheaper than in the US

Crypto mining was made illegal in China, likely leaves a lot of GPU's available for AI.

Or they could be training the models in the states? It’s hard to say since alibaba does R&D in Bellevue as well as Hangzhou.

My understanding is that R&D in the US is a very small part of the business for these China-based companies, both in terms of headcounts and org chart. TikTok hires many people in the US, but that's nowhere near the number in the Beijing office, not to mention that all decisions come from China. You can find lots of articles that talk about midnight meetings for folks in US. And there is a good reason for that -- you can hire a few engineers in China for the same price of hiring 1 engineer in the Bay Area.

I visited their office in Bellevue once and it wasn’t small, although not huge either. There were a lot of smart people working there at least. You don’t really need hardware in China to train models, you could host it in the USA and just use it remotely. I don’t think these sanctions will be very effective unless they completely cut off trade and communication with China, which is going to hurt us as much as them.

The sanctions only prevent exporting a certain class of GPUs to China. There's nothing stopping Chinese companies from setting up their operations overseas (ahem Singapore), or even renting space from AWS/Google/Azure.