>It's telling that Huawei-backed MindSpore can go from 1% to 7% in 2 years, while Google-backed Jax is stuck at 2-3%. Contrary to popular narrative in the Western world, Chinese dominance is alive and well.
MindSpore has an advantage there because of its integrated support for Huawei's Ascend 910B, the only Chinese GPU that comes close to matching the A100. Given the US banned export of A100 and H100s to China, this creates artificial demand for the Ascend 910B chips and the MindSpore framework that utilises them.
Its meteoric rise started well before the chip embargo. I've looked into it, it liberally borrows ideas from other frameworks, both PyTorch and Jax, and adds some of its own. You lose some of the conceptual purity, but it makes up for it in practical usability, assuming it works as it says on the tin, which it may or may not. PyTorch also has support for Ascend as far as I can tell https://github.com/Ascend/pytorch, so that support does not necessarily explain MindSpore's relative success. Why MindSpore is rising so rapidly is not entirely clear to me. Could be something as simple as preferring a domestic alternative that is adequate to the task and has better documentation in Chinese. Could be cost of compute. Could be both. Nowadays, however, I do agree that the various embargoes would help it (as well as Huawei) a great deal. As a side note I wish Huawei could export its silicon to the West. I bet that'd result in dramatically cheaper compute.
China publishes a looooootttttt of papers. A lot of it is careerist crap.
To be fair, a lot of US papers are also crap, but Chinese crap research is on another level. There's a reason a lot of top US researchers are Chinese - there's brain drain going on.
MindSpore has an advantage there because of its integrated support for Huawei's Ascend 910B, the only Chinese GPU that comes close to matching the A100. Given the US banned export of A100 and H100s to China, this creates artificial demand for the Ascend 910B chips and the MindSpore framework that utilises them.