In order:
GenAI?
I said "AI aside" for a reason.
Self-driving cars?
Fair enough, though I don't hear much about those these days.
Robots? Materials science?
No idea what's going on with materials science, but robots aren't exactly new, so this is incremental improvement to existing technology.
The article implies that the US is still ahead.
The whole point of the article is that it's not (or at least not enough for the disparity we're seeing).
The root comment of this thread implies that the US is still ahead.
No, it implies it was ahead at one point (which is obviously true)
Its investment lags far behind America’s. Its models do not
Their models appear only fractionally less powerful owing to this frugality. K3, an advanced model launched last month by Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based startup, is 95% as clever (on widely used benchmarks) as Fable 5, a frontier model from Anthropic, another top American lab. It is also 70% cheaper to use. On August 3rd Alibaba, a Chinese tech giant, released a model which reportedly scored among the world’s best by some measures.
See also: Chinese models showing up at or near the top in leaderboards. Admittedly it seems I was wrong about China being clearly ahead, but what little gap exists is far from enough to explain the disparity in investment efficacy.
But the problem there is that China is clearly ahead of America now when it comes to AI, so if that was it they wouldn't be getting higher fuel efficiency anymore.
I'll never understand why people keep saying I'm Mrdown.
Edit: Oh it's not "people" it's just you. Still, why Mrdown in particular? Like what's the thought process here?
Which is great. Intellectual property is innovation-stifling cancer. I'd certainly rather China have the tech to make all those EVs than leave the West to hoard it.
That's more due to the lack of new technology these days. AI aside most modern engineering is incremental improvements to existing technology—that's the innovation everyone is doing.
That'd only make sense if this was a total investment thing, but it's not. America is investing at a higher rate yet China is getting more returns. Who started first is irrelevant here.
A bidet, you should buy a bidet.
I mean most of the world has no idea what a school shooting is. They're an almost uniquely American phenomenon.
The majority of Americans with guns do like what the government is doing though. Gun ownership is well over double for Republicans and they currently strongly support ICE and many other abusive domestic policies.
Uh... therefore?
Please point out an armed revolution that wasn't just wealthy people using humans as pawns in their struggle for control.
I'm not sure how that's relevant here. Most revolutions tend to be about wealthy people using humans as pawns in their struggle for control, but also: Yemen, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Russia, China, Mexico, Ireland*2, decolonization in general. There's also two Frances (1830, 1848) but those are more iffy.
I mean, usually people consume art/media/etc because they like it, not out of an obligation to reward the creator's effort.