That's alway the issue with outsourcing. You rely exclusively on middlemen, middlemen will realize they can cut out their middlemen and just go directly to the customers.

These claims are quite hard to square with the long waits for H1B visas, extremely high salaries in the technology sector and net immigration to the US from China.

I’m not aware of any Americans or Europeans in my network who have gone the other direction to China.

Perhaps you have different data about the demand for tech worker visas in China.

EE as a US career is night and day from Software centered engineers. Night and day from 20 years ago as well.

http://www.talentsquare.info/blog/fall-engineering-jobs-elec...

I don't think it's much of a controversial take to suggest that China is kicking the US's butt in silicon chip production. EE's are one of the primary fields traditionally seeked to work with this.

That will be controversial until mainland China produces modern process chips economically (they can do one or the other so far). Rather Taiwan and South Korea are not the EE powerhouses. China though pays better than Taiwan (a lot of the hardware researchers in my Beijing lab were from Taiwan and Korea).

I think the plan was to have it built by 2027, but who knows now. Meanwhile, Trump called the CHIPS act "ridiculous" (very optimistic future, clearly) and just imposed tariffs on Taiwan.

I just bought a new laptop last night just in case. A refurbished M3 Max with enough memory to run DeepSeek 70b :).

A bit of irony was that this researcher (from Europe) used to work in the same lab as me in Beijing. But these days the talent doesn’t flow so easily as it did a decade+ ago (but maybe it will again? Researchers aren’t very nationalistic and will look for the best toys to play with).

Maybe you're thinking of 1-bit DACs with oversampling and noise shaping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-sigma_modulation

Because America offshored almost all its manufacturing to China. No wonder China has a booming hardware industry and we don't.

Lucky things seem to be changing. Even Biden continued Trump China trade polices. And now Trump is back in power.

I agree with everything you said but this part is "broken clock will be right twice a day". It is what Google would have said regardless. A moat is never impossible to cross, it's just a passive superpower making the "enemy's" job that much more difficult. By Google's suggested interpretation of a moat, moats simply do not exist. They can all be crossed eventually, when ingenuity catches up to big budgets, so it's like they were never there?

I don't buy it that they knew or predicted anything. If Google knew something about hidden optimization available to everyone or had more reason to suspect this is the case beyond "every technology progresses", they'd already be built into their models by now (it's been 2 years since the "prediction") but there's no evidence they were even close. And there's still a HW moat. The amount of high performance HW BigAI has or affords can still make a huge difference everything else being equal, after building in all those "free" optimizations.

At the least the big companies have the ability to widen the moat when they feel pressure of the small competitors closing in. It's clear now that more money can do that. If ingenuity can replace money, then money can replace ingenuity, even if via buying out startups, paying for the best people, and so on. They've shown it again and again.