posted in Technology
How China gets better bang for its buck than America in AI. Its investment lags far behind America’s. Its models do not
www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/08/03/how-china-gets-better-bang-for-its-buck-than-america-in-aiReplying to @FoxtrotDeltaTango@sh.itjust.works
Being the pioneer means doing the heavy lifting and making mistakes. So makes sense, China can learn for others mistakes
Replying to @kboos1@lemmy.world
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.
Replying to @NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
I think of it like drafting behind another vehicle on the speedway. The car behind gets higher fuel efficiency
Replying to @hirihit640@sh.itjust.works
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.
Replying to @NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
China is clearly ahead of America
Well that’s debatable. The article implies that the US is still ahead. The root comment of this thread implies that the US is still ahead. Your earlier comment made no mention of this idea. Clearly if that was part of your argument you should have brought it up earlier
Replying to @hirihit640@sh.itjust.works
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.
LLM StatsLLM Leaderboard 2026: Compare 300+ Top AI Models by Intelligence, Speed & PriceThe LLM Leaderboard — independent ranking of GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, DeepSeek and 300+ AI models by intelligence, speed and price. Filter by provider, license, modality and context window; sort by every benchmark. Composite LLM Stats Score updated continuously from public benchmarks and live API metrics.Replying to @NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
little gap exists is far from enough to explain the disparity in investment efficacy.
This is difficult to say. From what I’ve seen AI gains are slowing down, so catching up might not be that hard anymore. We’ll see from here if China is able to pull a clear lead. If so, then that’s clear evidence that they aren’t just copying