There is no value to AI as I far as I can tell,

This is such nonsense, it basically slaughtered the whole data entry industry which was a giant bottleneck to many projects. It speeds up programming workloads to an extreme degree. You can keep saying its useless but it simply isn't true, it is useful and that is why so many countries, including communist China, are adopting it. You are basically saying that applied statistics has no value. What?!

It's important to separate the marketing term from the underlying collection of machine learning technologies. In 2003 I was having chatbot experiences that felt identical to modern ones. In the 2010s I was spending hours trying to train speech-to-text algorithms for medical notation. Computer vision started maturing in the 1990s. Most of what we consider AI today is just a lipstick pig made out of things that weren't sexy a decade before that became an economic sector. The things the AI industry brought on top of that will go away while those 2000s technologies still get refined.

I don't think the Chinese AI industry is better for them. I just think it's worse for the US because it has run out of tech bubble ideas and that's the only thing that has kept it alive since the 1990s. There's nothing to carry the US economy after AI beyond healthcare and tourism that nobody can afford. Deepseek is just as useless to a Chinese guy as it is to me, but it does ChatGPT better than ChatGPT no matter how much the US autocannibalises to fund OpenAI. That just adds extra layers to my criticism which is as a neo-Luddite. It kills the thing I hate faster by making it more visibly useless.

https://bioengineer.org/new-multi-branch-ai-model-predicts-winter-wheat-yields-weeks-before-harvest-even-under-extreme-weather/

https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202503/23/content_WS67dfd013c6d0868f4e8f1146.html

These are the kinds of use cases that China is pursuing for ML/AI outside of the AI hype bubble of frontier models.

They are also doing the frontier models without hype scale waste that is emblematic of the western competition. My understanding of this is to prevent any chance of western AI dominance (quite unlikely honestly), but also to undermine the financial hype bubble as a side bonus.

China has a massive advantage in the numbers of highly educated researchers that can use these tools in materially beneficial ways, and they are openly assisting with development of these tools for BRICS partners in their own contextual uses.

https://furtherafrica.com/2025/04/21/china-africa-cooperation-in-artificial-intelligence-a-pathway-to-shared-progress/

The marxist perspective is highly imbued in the Chinese approach to the development of technology in general, and while they are not directly exporting marxism, they do create material conditions that act as fertile medium for its growth internationally. Making solar, batteries, AI models, chips, etc affordable to the global south has provided a path out of hegemonic dominance that was not available otherwise, and this process continues.

The western conception of AI is really just a false understanding of the technology, and in certain aspects China's pragmatic approach to developing the actual underlying tech without these hype goggles is quite beneficial to its use in liberatory contexts.

AI also has at least one obvious economic utility right now. It significantly improves productivity for software engineers. I'd say that with the latest crop of LLMs you can about double the productive output of an experienced developer without sacrificing quality (and literally 50x it if you only care about features getting delivered).

The questions are:

• Does it cause stupid lay-off games or a productivity boost?
• Does it cause a slide-back to fossil fuels or accelerate renewables?
• Is it used for non-productive brainrot?

You can guess how those three questions are answered by USA and China.