Why is the U.S. leading the revolution in innovation time and time again?
Respect for talents"with"Give talents high treatment"is not the core. In fact, Musk's business is not widely known for its high wages. For example, a programmer at Space Fork may not earn as much as Alibaba's employees. The employee income of Tencent TiMi Studio is undoubtedly among the highest in the world, but the quality of its products is not satisfactory. Similarly, those top American talents who are willing to come to China will not be treated worse than those in the United States.
At the heart of American innovation is the "decentralization" brought about by the financial bubble. In this chaotic and random world, there is no fixed truth and law for "innovation", and it can only rely on people with various ideas to allocate resources and bravely try and make mistakes. There is no need to look at other countries from afar, as evidenced by the history of innovation in the United States. From the PageRank algorithm to the GFS BigTable MapReduce trio, to TensorFlow and Alphago, Google is undoubtedly the technology leader in the Internet industry in the first 20 years of the 21st century. In addition, Google's infrastructure that has a huge impact on developers, such as Protobuf, Flutter, Golang, etc., is countless.
Just before the LLM wave, the last exciting product was Google's BERT in 2018. So, when Google followed suit and released Gemini, it immediately attracted a lot of attention, mainly due to Google's entrenched image as a technology leader. If we go back to two years ago (early 2022) and ask algorithm engineers who will make the next big breakthrough in AI technology, it is estimated that most people will bet on Google.
Such companies are treated extremely well in many countries. From the national level, ** will give support and help openly and covertly, from legal tilt to provide subsidies; On an individual level, the best people aspire to join such companies, while those who are less than the best may be turned away; The company itself will also stifle potential competitors by controlling the upstream and downstream industrial chains.
Taking Japan, which is also a capitalist country, as an example, Toyota, Sony and other companies were the best innovative enterprises and technology leaders. As a result, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) has given strong support, and ordinary people are proud to join these large enterprises, which also dominate the entire industry by controlling the upstream and downstream industries. There is nothing wrong with this approach, as they do excel in terms of technology and innovation. By removing barriers and continuing to support these great companies, we can not only avoid wasted resources, but also promote the progress of the entire industry.
Sadly, however, today in 2024, we are seeing some of the once noble technology leaders and top AI innovators begin to compete unfairly. They learned from Huawei and Alibaba's methods, made unfair comparisons and brushed rankings, and even used Wenxin Yiyan's corpus for data cleaning. These behaviors have led to the development of products that are full of jokes and slots. A product developed by a startup with only two or three hundred people, Google is now unable to catch up.
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This also highlights the unreliability of the so-called "talent theory". The so-called "talent" is not the guarantee of innovation, but only the recognition of innovation achievements. For example, is Ilya Sutskever better than Jeff Dean and Geoffrey Hinton? Google has as many as 100,000 employees, including thousands of AI research directions, and their intelligence and innovation are not as good as OpenAI's three or four hundred? Therefore, the "history proves blabla" that we often hear is completely untenable. Human cognition is limited, let alone "truth". Although Japan defeated the Qing Dynasty and the Tsar**, which were far stronger than itself, this did not mean that it was able to defeat the United States. Any so-called "laws" and "experiences" are merely models that apply under specific conditions.
Under this premise, the only way to "innovate" is to try in different directions by people with different ideas as much as possible. This is where the U.S. financial bubble comes into play: anyone with ideas and abilities who can find a possible direction has the opportunity to invest and explore in that direction. Of course, 99% or more of these investments fail, but any successful project will bring great returns. This mechanism ensures that the innovative dynamism of the United States continues to emerge.