NoneOfUrBusiness

So long as copyright is being enforced at the individual level for consumers, large corporations shouldn't be allowed to get away with infringing on it for profit.

Sure, but my conclusion from that isn't "IP law should be enforced on the big corporations too;" it's "IP law should be abolished and also down with capitalism." Why should I want an unjust law to be enforced even more vigorously?

Yeah that's the thing: I don't believe it's wrong to profit from people's content without their permission, because I don't believe they own that content after they share it with humanity and I absolutely don't believe they should get to enforce that "ownership" via state violence. Everyone should get to use anything they want in derivative works, whether for profit or not. The fact that this could plausibly affect people's livelihoods (but IMO wouldn't; if there were significant profits in IP "theft" corporations would already be doing it) is a failure of capitalism and frankly not the reproducer's business.

I mean, a key element of the anti-AI movement is that AI "steals" art, but I fundamentally believe in that art (and ideas) can't be owned and therefore can't be stolen. Ditto for code or what have you.

The data theft is another story, but there's clearly an IP theft angle to anti-AI arguments, as seen in the other person response.

Such a pro-AI position also ignores the enormous amount of theft that these tools are built on.

Or, less likely, it could be that person knows and just doesn't care. I certainly don't because I believe intellectual property is bullshit.

Oh damn. I guess we just can't have nice things.

That's just a good thing overall assuming appropriate accessibility measures.

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.

No I don't?

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.

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.

The majority of Americans do not like what the government is doing, as seen from its approval rating, but also armed revolution usually doesn't happen by killing away everyone who disagrees with you.

They're not resisting a government that has entered the information warfare age, where every police station has SWAT gear and tanks and helicopters.

Except heavily armed populaces have resisted SWAT gear and tanks and helicopters before, but also: Even just forcing escalation to such methods is a win for the rebels/resistance/etc. There's a reason even oppressive governments don't jump straight to tanks and helicopters when they have a revolution that hasn't quite devolved into civil war. Besides, there's no guarantee the people manning the tanks and helicopters are going to be willing to fire into crowds. In a revolutionary scenario the government's grip on its armed forces tends to be shaky at best, and doing things like whipping out tanks to put down rebellion tends to alienate people who might've supported it otherwise. Hell, sometimes governments just give up instead of going through all this. Obviously armed revolution (which doesn't necessarily mean civil war) isn't foolproof, but the hurdle to winning isn't as big as people around here seem to think, since the very fact that such a thing is happening means there's a sympathetic cause that will make some fraction of the army/police/etc not want to fight.

I'm talking about Americans that don't like what the government is doing (there's a lot to criticise the American right for, but unwilling to act they are not). There's plenty of gun ownership among American liberals.

You can't assume a correlation from one data point. If it's the guns, then that'll show up in data from other countries too. When's the last time you heard of a mass shooting in Yemen?