Outside of BYD, Every Chinese EV is losing money with every sale. Insiders say that every one of them will fold within the next 3 years. and when the EV company disappears, your car is now a worthless block of metal.
Nobody should be buying Chinese EVs, and only BYD if you have to.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for nationalistic battle, as well as several of your other accounts doing the same. That's not allowed here, regardless of which country you have a problem with.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
>every one of them will fold within the next 3 years
The same way China has been predicted to collapse every year since 1990? No matter how much money you lose, you can grow yourself out of it. Which is why OpenAI can raise $6b at nearly $150b, despite losing $5b annually. So, why do you suggest the CPC will let BYD - their EV golden goose that has thoroughly thrashed Western competitors - to fail?
The idea that an economy with so much production would fully collapse is kind of far-fetched, but it also seemed like there were some major issues last I looked. Their housing bubble did burst and there have been periodic bank runs. I haven't been following Chinese news for a while now though so I couldn't tell you where things ended up.
Who predicted Chinas imminent collapse back then? It was certainly not a mainstream prediction.
More serious predictions have been made in recent years. And lo and behold we got Evergrande. The news since that has not been great. Some successes, and progress, yes. But also more and more deep fundamental issues brewing under the surface.
Nobody of note has claimed China will collapse over night. This is a process that spans over years if not decades.
The predictions of collapse have had demographics as its primary factor. People don’t go from 40 to 70 overnight. Yet the demographic factors are completely undeniable and its consequences bearing out year by year relentlessly.
And that is on top of a debt to GDP ratio which is utterly insane if you include shadow banking.
No, not like that. This is a case where China has offered disgusting subsidies to anyone willing to make an EV. And therefore tons of companies have done so with no intention of ever really being a car company
>According to Bloomberg, there were 500 Chinese electric car manufacturers in China in 2019. After fierce competition, only 100 manufacturers remained by 2023. According to Wired, as many as 300 manufacturers, both domestic and international, were offering electric vehicles in China in 2023. (wikipedia)
looks more like a capitalist free for all than a few state appointed winners. BYD got a big boost in the early days when it got investment from the US company Berkshire Hathaway, rather than the Chinese govt. Which was because Charlie Munger thought the founder seemed like a new Thomas Edison.
The reason there were 500 manufacturers in the first place was the enormous subsidies.
The Chinese government strategy is to fund a massive number of attempts and then suffer a huge number of failures and consistent end up with far too much production capacity leading to a large number of unprofitable companies.
It’s not a terrible strategy if you can dump vehicles elsewhere. It may or may not work if you can’t.
Parent account is two months old and looking at his comments, practically all of them are bashing China. 2 Questions: 1. Does your org. really think this works? and 2. How much do you get paid for doing this and where can I apply?
> when the EV company disappears, your car is now a worthless block of metal.
This sounds like a problem, but it doesn't have to be. I've driven cars from brands that no longer exist and some parts were a challenge, but largely you could make everything work. It's unfortunate that new cars aren't like that. :(
EVs (and all newer cars) aren't really comparable to a car from the 90s or early 2000s. Finding spare parts is one thing, dealing with electrical issues is a much bigger beast.
I drive a 24 year old Lexus - mechanically, an absolute tank. Electrically? Well, it's relatively "electronic" by the standards of its time, and it shows. If I coughed up the money to fix the handful of little electrical glitches it's picked up over the years, I'd be paying more than the car is worth. It'd cost more than all the other work I've done on it combined.
The headlights don't switch on automatically anymore, and you have to manually lock all of the doors (except the driver's door which mysteriously still works). I can live with that! The powertrain isn't inundated with electrical stuff, which makes it less susceptible to the weirdness that comes with aging sensors, rotting wire harnesses, corroding electrical contacts, moisture ingress, and so on.
losing money because of heavy competition, because of free market, too much competition. not because some evil intent to sell below cost. Every auto exec is complaining the market is too tough.
China is almost everyone's top-5 trading partner by imports, and half the world by exports, according to the CIA World Fact Book.
The other way around, China puts Taiwan (the closest China has to its own Cuba) on a list of major countries with 291 bn USD* whereas Cuba's total with everyone put together was estimated to be 4.6 bn USD in 2017.
Even if we grant that US-based apps give similar access to the USG (I don't know, I just know it's a likely claim that I don't care to dispute), it's ludicrous to say that it's just as acceptable to give that access to the Chinese government. If you think those are equivalent you have not been paying attention.
Is there adequate content in my short comment that substantiates the full model you've formed of my stance in your mind?
Ironically, if you tune your TikTok feed carefully, it can offer plenty of great learning material on human psychology and cultural cognition, I highly recommend it.
I also recommend the YouTube channel Asian Boss, I enjoy watching how frequently Asian people pause to think before answering questions posed to them, they seem unable to immediately know the correct answer like most westerners.
You quote "evidence is worse than" for emphasis, suggesting that you don't find that standard to be met by evidence that TikTok gives major inside access to an actively repressive and genocidal government. That suggests you think other social platforms are equal or worse, somehow, but you don't give any basis for that idea. Indeed your commentary consists entirely of snarky side tangents, rather than actual arguments. If you mean something other than the obvious interpretation, you best be explicit.
> Indeed your commentary consists entirely of snarky side tangents
I informed you that you are describing a model. And asked you a question about it, which you did not answer.
You are presenting your uncharitable take as representative of my stance, and then knocking it down with ease.
Might the same be happening with China in discussions in Western media (mainstream, social, etc)?
How could "worseness" of various platforms and these two countries even be calculated in a reasonably objective, unbiased manner? Is such a thing even possible?
I explained the part of my model that actually exists quite explicitly. Perhaps you are making unwarranted assumptions about my assumptions? (Two can play the snarky pseudo-Socratic question game)
Making a counter-assertion of fact is not a requirement. In fact, making claims of fact when one lacks the expertise is generally a poor idea, though it is extremely popular.
If you are so smart, why can you not answer simple questions about your facts?
I already tried answering your initial question about my reasoning, and you responded with meandering snark. Now you pretend I'm the unreasonable one for not treating any of your other "questions" seriously. If you wanted a real discussion, you could have said something of interest at that point, maybe made an actual claim about cultural influence or prioritizing problems in the social media landscape or somesuch, even just a hypothetical idea. But you've shown you don't actually want to exchange ideas, you just want to feel clever and righteous.
Here is an idea: your thinking is to some degree based on heuristic predictions, which are a consequence of millions of years of biological and cultural evolution, and it is possible to notice when a human is engaging in such behavior.
More speculatively: I think there may be a way to get someone to transcend their cultural conditioning and admit when they slipped up in this manner, something that inevitably happens to all of us.
I think it's great that the Chinese government, known for welding people inside their house, forcing citizens to continue paying into unfinished apartment building, taking passports away from teachers, transferring organs from young bodies into CCP leaders, amongst other things, have a massive tool to brainwash Americans.
More great[1] material for the one side, but to prove out more, someone is going to have to produce material on other apps & nations to compare it to.
[1] the misinformative rhetorical nature of it is going to lose people like me, but I suspect I am an outlier in this regard, misinformation aligned with culturally conditioned subconscious bias appeals to almost everyone in my experience.
Presumably because the US owned networks are just as bad.
There are many people (myself included) that oppose a tiktok ban but would happily support more stringent rules that outlawed tiktok’s bad behavior and applied equaly to facebook, youtube and musk’s ego project.
I wonder how Paul Graham thinks of Sam Altman basically copying Cursor and potentially every upstream AI company out of YC, maybe as soon as they launch on demo day.
And everyone has, YC alone has funded at least four Cursor clones, Double, Void, Continue and Pear, with Pear being a literal fork of Continue's OSS code. AFAICT Cursor isn't even the original, I think Copilot X was the first of its kind and Cursor cloned that.
Turns out they’re all just elaborate feature branches, in a giant branch-stacking-PR, and they’re all going to merge code and funding, like some kind of VC-money-fuelled-power-ranger.
I wonder whether so many clones companies funded can eventually bring in a positive return when (if) a single company manages to rise above the others and become successful. Does anybody know if yc funding is publicly available? And how to know what return they get if a company gets ipo'd?
It depends on who the moat is supposed to keep out. A reasonable case from an antitrust regulator would be that if a provider of models/apis gleans the prompts from the users of the apis to build competing products... they are in trouble.
Good prompts may actually have a moat - a complex agent system is basically just a lot of prompts and infra to co-ordinate the outputs/inputs.
> Good prompts may actually have a moat - a complex agent system is basically just a lot of prompts.
The second part of that statement (is wrong and) negates the first.
Prompts aren’t a science. There’s no rationale behind them.
They’re tricks and quirks that people find in current models to increase some success metric those people came up with.
They may not work from one model to the next.
They don’t vary that much from one another.
They, in all honesty, are not at all difficult or require any real skill to make. (I’ve worked at 2 AI startups and have seen the Apple prompts, aider prompts, and continue prompts)
Just trial and error and an understanding of the English language.
Moreover, a complex agent system is much more than prompts (the last AI startup and the current one I work at are both complex agent systems). Machinery needs to be built, deployed, and maintained for agents to work. That may be a set of services for handling all the different messaging channels or it may be a single simple server that daisy chains prompts.
Those systems are a moat as much as any software is.
That prompts aren't science means little. If anything it makes them more important because you can't systematically arrive at good ones.
If one spends a lot of time building an application to achieve an actual goal they'll realize the prompts make a gigantic difference and it takes an enormous amount of fiddly, annoying work to improve. I do this (and I built an agent system, which was more straightforward to do...) in financial markets. It so much so that people build systems just to be able to iterate on prompts (https://www.promptlayer.com/).
I may be wrong - but I'll speculate you work on infra and have never had to build a (real) application that is trying to achieve a business outcome. I expect if you did, you'd know how much (non sexy) work is involved on prompting that is hard to replicate.
Hell, papers get published that are just about prompting!
> If anything it makes them more important because you can't systematically arrive at good ones
Important and easy to make are not the same
I never said prompts didn’t matter, just that they’re so easy to make and so similar to others that they aren’t a moat.
> I may be wrong - but I'll speculate you work on infra and have never had to build a (real) application that is trying to achieve a business outcome.
You’re very wrong. Don’t make assumptions like this. I’ve been a full stack (mostly backend) dev for about 15 years and started working with natural language processing back in 2017 around when word2vec was first published.
Prompts are not difficult, they are time consuming. It’s all trial and error. Data entry is also time consuming, but isn’t difficult and doesn’t provide any moat.
> that is hard to replicate.
Because there are so many factors at play _besides prompting. Prompting is the easiest thing to do in any agent or RAG pipeline. it’s all the other settings and infra that are difficult to tune to replicate a given result. (Good chunking of documents, ensuring only high quality data gets into the system in the first place, etc)
Not to mention needing to know the exact model and seed used.
Nothing on chatgpt is reproducible, for example, simply because they include the timestamp in their system prompt.
> Good prompts -> good output -> good training data -> good model.
This is not correct at all. I’m going to assume you made a mistake since this makes it look like you think that models are trained on their own output, but we know that synthetic datasets make for poor training data. I feel like you should know that.
A good model will give good output. Good output can be directed and refined with good prompting.
It’s not hard to make good prompts, just time consuming.
> but we know that synthetic datasets make for poor training data
This is a silly generalization. Just google "synthetic data for training LLMs" and you'll find a bunch of papers on it. Here's a decent survey: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.07503
It's very likely o1 used synthetic data to train the model and/or the reward model they used for RLHF. Why do you think they don't output the chains...? They literally tell you - competitive reasons.
Arxiv is free, pick up some papers. Good deep learning texts are free, pick some up.
Sure, hand wave away my entire comment as “nonsense” and ignore how statistics works.
Training a model on synthetic data (obviously) increases bias present in the initial dataset[1], making for poor training data.
IIRC (this subject is a little fuzzy for me) using synthetic data for RLHF is equivalent to just using dpo, so if they did RLHF it probably wasn’t with synthetic data. They may have gone with dpo, though.
Did you read this paper? No one is suggesting o1 was trained with 100% synthetic or 50% or anything of that nature. Generalizing that "synthetic data is bad" from "training exclusively/majority on synthetic data is bad" is dumb.
Researchers are using synthetic data to train LLMs, especially for fine tuning, and especially instruct fine tuning. You are not up to date with recent work on LLMs.
I think actually matters is the "input" and "interact". Prompt is just one of them. The key is you put how you think and how you solve the problem into the it and build a system. Not just computer system, "Multi Agents", "Human Society" are also systems.
It's just a company that promised AGI would somehow come from developing LLM-based products, rapidly scrambling to keep up with other LLM-based products, to distract from the fact that it's becoming increasingly apparent that AGI is not coming anytime soon.
There's good reasons to expect time travel is physically impossible.
Your brain is an existential proof that general intelligence isn't impossible.
Figuring out the special sauce that makes a human brain able to learn so much so easily? Sure that's hard, but evolution did it blindly, and we can simulate evolution, so we've definitely got the tools to make AGI, we just don't have the tools to engineer it.
Cursor was one of the first AI editors I used, but recently Aider has completely replaced the AI assisted coding for me. I still use cursor but just as an editor, all LLM work is done with aider in the shell.
I replaced Cursor with continue.dev. It allows me to run AI models locally and connect it with a vscode plugin instead of replacing vscode with a whole new IDE, and it's open source.
Check out https://sophia.dev Its AI tooling I've built on top of Aider for the code editing. I initially built it before Aider added support for running compile and lint commands, as it would often generate changes which wouldn't compile.
The other different is I have a file selection agent and a code review agent, which often has some good fixes/improvements.
I use both, I'll use Aider if its something I feel it will right the first time or I want control over the files in the context, otherwise I'll use the agent in Sophia.
I was going to ask what size and complexity of projects OP uses it on. I can’t imagine doing my work just with a tool like that. Cursor is pretty impressive and a definite sooner boost though.
Fair point, most projects I do are prototypes and concepts for ideas I have. Up to 2000 lines of code, built from scratch. The mode of work is me commanding 95% of the time and coding about 5%.
Like Amazon cloning the best selling products, bringing them in house, and then closing the accounts of competitors.
Met a guy who got brought in by Amazon after they hit 8 figures in sales, wined and dined, then months later Amazon launched competing product and locked them out of their accounts, cost them 9 figures.
You should also understand that there are external forces here, like state sponsorships that monetarily rewards for scientists to simply file enough research findings.
The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published scientific papers. Shadow organisations – known as “paper mills” – began to supply fabricated work for publication in journals there.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situatio...
The number of retractions issued for research articles in 2023 has passed 10,000 — smashing annual records — as publishers struggle to clean up a slew of sham papers and peer-review fraud. Among large research-producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China have the highest retraction rates over the past two decades, a Nature analysis has found. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8
That's why a recent article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41607430, where the measurement of China leads world in 57 of 64 critical technologies was based on number of journal citations, was laughable.
Talking with some Chinese colleagues in the past, they were talking about having a 'base' salary which was not enough to have a family on. For every published paper they'd get a one-time payment. So you'd have to get a bunch of papers out every year just to survive; no wonder people start to invent papers.
Of course the same thing is happening in the 'Western' world too, with a publication ratchet going on. New hire has 50 papers out? OK! The next pool of potential hires has 50, 55, 52 papers out, so obviously you take the 55 papers-person. You want outstanding people! Then the next hire needs 60 papers. And so on.
Paper mills are bad but mostly from the perspective of academic institutions trying to verify people's credentials/resumes. Paper mills aren't really that much of a concern in the sense of published research results being false in the way the article is talking about because people aren't really reading the papers they publish. In that sense it doesn't really matter if there are places where non-scientists need to get one paper published to check some box to get a promotion, because nobody is really considering those papers part of established scientific knowledge.
On the other hand, scientists intentionally (by actually falsifying data) or unintentionally (as a result of statistical effects of what is researched and what is published) publishing bogus results in journals that are considered legitimate which aren't paper mills actually causes real harm as a result of people believing the bogus results, and unfortunately the pressures that cause that (publishing papers quickly, getting publishable results, etc.) exist everywhere, and definitely not just in China, nor did they originate in China.
I think you're making the wrong distinction here, it's not about whether the result came from a known or unknown paper mill in that country. It's about whether there is a culture of fraud and fakeness that permeates that country and that scientific community. And there is certainly a culture of fraud and fakeness in China, from tofu dreg buildings, to fake food and gutter oil, to drugged olympic athletes, to fudged economic numbers.
Let me give just one example of how prevalent the culture of fakeness has pervaded through China. Nowadays, because the economic decline, people are eating out less, and restaurants are getting less and less traffic. Therefore, they needed to cut costs. So some restaurants started using pre-packaged food, and just heat those up in the microwave and serve them up as cooked dishes. Because other restaurants couldn't survive without doing the same cost-cutting behavior, they've all started doing the same things. Thus, most restaurants in China are now serving pre-packaged food. And there's a backlash from consumers, so now even less people eat out. And then restaurants started using expired pre-packaged food. Oh, and because expired pre-packaged food has a tendency to cause diarrhea, some restaurants in China have started adding Loperamide into the dishes to prevent diarrhea.
There are 1.4 billion people in China. You’re showing me a couple of people doing who knows what in a clip of unknowable provenance. This is not the hill to die on, my man
Obviously there are way more occurrences than this video. Also, the lady in the video acted like nothing was wrong and admitted no shame, which means there is a culture/common practice of using gutter oil.
Wikipedia says that today this carries the penalty of decades in prison and a suspended death sentence. I very much doubt it’s as prevalent a practice as you suggest. To suggest that this crime is a “normal part” of Chinese culture is simply wrong.
There was no penalty/death sentence for the recent public incident of the oil tank truck that was found transporting both toxic industrial oil and cooking oil, without cleaning in between. Which apparently was a wide-spread practice, as confirmed by netizens. Instead the officials just hand waved and said it's an isolated incident, and they're looking into it. And no news of it since.
Restaurants in china are legally required to use oil traps like that and the oil must be removed. It is usually reprocessed to be used for industrial purposes. The fact that those people were possibly possibly illegally collecting it to sell to a company that reprocesses it does not at all mean that it's going to be used as "gutter oil" in restaurants any more than someone collecting empty cans from a trashcan means they're going to reuse those cans in a restaurant.
Gutter oil used to be a major issue in China but the Chinese government cracked down on it a lot a few years ago.
This is what happens when Silicon Valley execs, trying to make their employees more replaceable, call for more STEM education; suddenly, tons of funding and institutional resources go into STEM research with no real reason or motivation or material for this research. It's like an gerbil wheel: once you get on the ride, once you get tricked into becoming a "scientist" just because a few billionaires wanted to cut slightly thicker margins, there's no stop. Bullshit your way through undergraduate education, bullshit your way through a PhD; finally, if you're good enough at making up statistics, you get a job training a whole host of other bullshitters to ride the gravy train.
> tons of funding and institutional resources go into STEM research with no real reason or motivation or material for this research.
I do believe that there exists an insane amount of (STEM) questions where there exist very good reasons to do research on - much, much more than is currently done.
---
And by the way:
> This is what happens when Silicon Valley execs, trying to make their employees more replaceable, call for more STEM education
More STEM education does not make the employees more replaceable. The reason why the Silicon Valley execs call for more STEM education is rather that
- they want to save money training the employees,
- they want to save money doing research (let rather the taxpayer pay for the research).
Employees are more expensive because they are less replaceable. A company must invest a certain amount of money into labor to make a profit; however, if that company learns it can invest less money into endeavours to make the same profit, then it can decrease the amount invested into labor. The only way to do so is to create some sort of technology, or social relation, that makes the price of individual workers cheaper. Thus, any reduction of cost of labor that increases profit is something that makes employees more replaceable.
I would encourage you, if you claimed so in this thread that you are a US and UK citizen, to quickly move out of US and renounce your US citizenship. So the torture and rage that you're displaying here and the paradox of your identity doesn't drive you insane. Also you should renounce your UK citizenship, as UK and US are very close allies. Maybe try moving to Russia? I heard they're having another military mobilization, and is paying pretty well.
Yeah, I'm sure you would love to "encourage" all such dissenters to exile themselves. While simultaneously claiming you stand "for freedom". Because obviously, you're in charge, right?
The persecution complex is odd too. Calling themselves a "dissenter", and invoking "exile", because their hypocrisy got called out and their factual claims are easily disproved.
2. My focus was deliberately very generalized to focus on the way the US benefits itself by pushing others down on a global level. We could drill down on a country by country basis and find ways in which the US can benefit the country and ways in which it benefits at the expense of said country. If you take the entire world population as a whole you can make the argument that it is a net negative and that maybe a stable multi-polar world might have different results. I don't follow Indian geopolitics as closely as others but sure the US Navy's efforts to patrol the oceans to benefit their main trading partners in Europe and Asia also helps to benefit countries such as India and Pakistan by helping secure trade but also secure a stable source of fuel and food (which is starting to slowly break down now) while at the same time, their clear efforts in deposing democratically elected Imran Kahn because he started to shift away from the US is a net negative to Pakistan's future.
Interesting hypothesis; I would encourage you to test your hypothesis by moving to Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea, and help those countries to grow its might equal to US. And also see how hard your life becomes
Yeah this is the standard response the right wingers and the pro-corporate Dems love to give. Just really low effort as usual.
Let me propose an alternative and just try to consider it: How about we let those countries develop and if they can have a sustainable system then great, more competition is good for humanity or if it does not shake out then they will collapse or be forced to pivot and then we will know for sure.
What isn't cool is deliberately trying to cut their legs out because we want to remain unchallenged (Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China) or quietly control their government preventing any chance of democracy (This year Pakistan, a few years back Venezuela etc.)
I'm pretty sure we let Russia develop after their collapse in 1990, right up until they invaded Ukraine again in 2022. And we let China develop after they liberalized in 1979, right up until they turned dictatorship in 2017, snuffed out Hong Kong in 2019, and became close war ally with Russia in 2023. Those are pretty long time I would say.
This history is tarnished by years of propaganda on both sides. We could have a deep discussion on how this is not the case in many aspects as well as how it may be true in some cases. If I haven't made it clear already in my other responses in this thread, in geopolitics nothing is black and white. But since you gave such a typical Republican/Corporate Dem answer before I dont think you are one of those people worth wasting time on so I bid you farewell.
Nobody should be buying Chinese EVs, and only BYD if you have to.
As Chinese EV makers close, drivers of “smartphones on wheels” say software updates and maintenance are in jeopardy. https://restofworld.org/2024/ev-company-shutdowns-china/