I think the difference comes down to the material conditions. The US is largely a financialized economy, so the niches for automation are largely in the bullshit economy. In China, there is a huge industrial base and as a result there are a lot of opportunities for AI integration within factories, supply chains, and so on.

It’s also worth noting that AI is a very general term. The hype bubble is around LLMs which is what I was discussing in the article, but this is just one branch of research. They’re great for making chat bots, but you need different types of AI, like symbolic logic engines, for robotics. So, I imagine the AI industry in China is a lot more diversified because automation is being applied in a far broader context. The focus there isn’t just on making chatbots. I wrote an article about that earlier here incidentally.

In my opinion, really interesting AI developments are happening precisely in the area of robotics. Training through embodiment and constructing an internal world model makes it possible to do genuine reasoning about how objects behave in the physical world. We have a continuous feedback loop where we take an action, and see the result. That’s our shared context we lean on when communicating with each other. This context is key for being able to explain why you made a particular decision, and allows for error correction and guidance towards better decisions through conversation. This is largely what we mean by having understanding in a human sense. So, what China is doing with robotics is leading to AI systems that can take over jobs that produce use-value as their output.

How that develops will be interesting to watch because then we’ll have a real test of socialism in China. If China is genuinely socialist then we should expect mass automation of physical labor to start translating into people having more free time and doing less work overall.