+1 biggest takeaway from me was that China / Asian societies emphasize process knowledge, which does not seem to be the case for U.S. tech in my working experience.
As often the case with Dan's letters, a well balanced take on many issues. I particularly appreciated the thoughts on AI and (what I read) the undertone of infrastructure being the real differentiator between the US effort and China. We'll see how it plays out this year. "May you live in exciting times" etc.
> Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI.
This is just not accurate though? For example, this post from a tech titan might not necessarily be that funny but it's neither blandly corporate nor philosophical: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2006548935372902751
> I believe that Silicon Valley possesses plenty of virtues. To start, it is the most meritocratic part of America.
Oh come on, this is so untrue. Silicon Valley loves credentialism and networking, probably more than anywhere else. Except the credentials are the companies you’ve worked for or whether you know some founder or VC, instead of what school you went to or which degrees you have.
I went to a smaller college that the big tech firms didn’t really recruit from. I spent the first ~5 years of my career working for a couple smaller companies without much SV presence. Somehow I lucked into landing a role at a big company that almost everyone has definitely heard of. I didn’t find my coworkers to necessarily be any smarter or harder working than the people I worked with previously. But when I decided it was time to move on, companies that never gave me the time of day before were responding to my cold applies or even reaching out to _me_ to beg me to interview.
And don’t get me started on the senior leadership and execs I’ve seen absolutely run an entire business units into the ground and lose millions of dollars and cost people their jobs, only to “part ways” with the company, then immediately turn around and raise millions of dollars from the same guys whose money they just lost.
The beginning perfectly embodies the culture in Silicon Valley and touches on a crucial part that I notice when I visit: the complete lack of self expression or as I would put it ZERO drip.
Remove the tech, what does SF contribute to the world wrt culture? Especially when compared to other metropolitan cities: NY, London, LA, Tokyo.
> One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.
There is a commedy show literally called Silicon Valley making fun of what's going on in the valley and everybody I know in tech loves it and appreciates the humor.
USA is cooked sadly, that being said being Britain 2.0 ain't too bad. pretty much all the YC companies in the past few cohorts just are desperately rent seeking, sad but true - go look urself
One of my intentions for this coming year is to critically examine and (if appropriate) alter or dispel some preconceptions I have. To that end, I'm curious about this part:
> You don’t have to convince the elites or the populace that growth is good or that entrepreneurs could be celebrated. Meanwhile in Europe, perhaps 15 percent of the electorate actively believes in degrowth. I feel it’s impossible to convince Europeans to act in their self interest.
Can someone elaborate on how growth is aligned with the general interest? To my mind, although growth could _theoretically_ lead to a "lifting all boats" improvement across the board, in practice it inevitably leads to greater concentration of wealth for the elite while the populace deals with negative externalities like pollution, congestion, and advertizing. Degrowth, on the other hand, would directly reduce those externalities; and, if imposed via progressive taxation, would have further societal benefits via funded programs.
I'd very much like to hear the counter-argument. It would be pleasant and convenient to believe that growth and industry are Good, Actually, so that I needn't feel guilty for contributing to them or for furthering my own position - but (sadly!) I can't just make myself believe something without justification.
This is such a long letter it would take me probably 3 months to write it. I would have to end my year by September and spend the rest of the year writing the letter.
>Lack of action due to the expectation of long timelines is one of the sins of the lawyerly society.
>But American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems.
China has stayed on trajectory of improving life of its society for a long time. USA has been in decline all that time and decent accelerated after Cold War with Russia ended.
All of China's growth comes from its internal resource. Growth in the USA had been driven by exploiting other countries.
>I made clear in my book that I am drawn to pluralism as well as a broader conception of human flourishing than one that could be delivered by the Communist Party.
Pluralism had been eradicated in the western society. I can't speak freely in Canada. People get cancelled or jailed for speaking their mind in UK. US is not too far behind in that.
There is no meaningful pluralism in the West. They never make a long term plan they can follow for many years.
China has monolithic ( more so ) society with shared culture, language(s) and national identity that runs deep to the gene level. They don't don't allow foreign influence to erode it. It's much easier to make progress when people share the same long term vision and goals.
CPC is doing just fine leading the country into the future. Sure, it has a monopoly on power, but it also owns its mistakes and fixes them. Multiparty systems of the USA and the rest of the West are just two curtains on the stage, and when you draw the curtains you see the same people attending the same party.
Elected officials aim to earn as much as they can in their short stay in power. After all, they only have a few years before they get replaced, better make use of the short time you got.
China IMO has a much brighter outlook for the future
> Narrowness of mind is something that makes me uneasy about the tech world.
> The Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things.
> There’s a general lack of cultural awareness in the Bay Area. It’s easy to hear at these parties that a person’s favorite nonfiction book is Seeing Like a State while their aspirationally favorite novel is Middlemarch.
It's refreshing to read someone addressing this aspect of the Mecca of the tech word.
For the reasons above the tech elites are the ones I trust the less and fear the most when they are involved in national and international politics. And I think the current state of the US is directly caused by the rise of post dot com Silicon Valley.
> I always reflect on the energy generation statistics of the UK per capita
Can you elaborate on this?
From what I can tell, the UK's per-capita electricity generation has dropped steadily from a 2003 high[0] (4,069 kWh in 2024, 6,657 in 2003, 5,266 in 1985) and per-capita energy consumption has been going down since 2005,[1] but energy intensity (read: inverse of efficiency) has been decreasing consistently since at least 1965.[2] Domestic electricity production is down 24% since 2000,[3] whilst imports (which I don't think includes Albanians) are up 206% in the same period.[4]
That all reads to me as a country whose domestic generation has been replaced by imports and whose consumption has been reduced by efficiency gains, but I'm aware that I'm conflating figures here for 'energy' and for solely 'electricity'; I couldn't find anything for per-capita energy generation, as you specified.
In the thread "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges" [1], I wrote about China'a hardware capability now going far beyond what US can imagine. In Dan's article;
>A rule of thumb is that it takes five years from an American, German, or Japanese automaker to dream up a new car design and launch that model on the roads; in China, it’s closer to 18 months.
Not only is China 3 - 5 times faster in terms of product launches, they would have launch it with a production scale that is at least double the output of other auto marker. If you were to put capacity into the equation as well, China is an order of magnitude faster than any competing countries, at half the cost if not even lower.
Every single year since 2022 China has added more solar power capacity than the entire US solar capacity. And they are still accelerating, with the current roadmap and trend they could install double the entire US solar power capacity in a single year by 2030.
CATL's Sodium Ion Battery is already in production and will be used by EVs and large scale energy storage by end of this year. The cost advantage of these new EV would mean there is partially zero chance EU can compete. And if EU are moaning about it now, they cant even imagine what is coming.
Thanks to AI pushing up memory and NAND price. YMTC and CXMT now have enough breathing room to catch up. If they play this right, I wont be surprised by 2035 30 - 40% of DRAM and NAND will be made by the two Chinese firms. Although judging from their past execution record I highly doubt this will happen, but expect may be 10-15% maximum.
Beyond tech, there are also other part of manufacturing that China has matched or exceeded rest of the world without being noticed by many. Lab Grown Diamond, Cosmetic Production, Agricultural Machinery, Reinforced glass etc. Their 10 years plan on agricultural improvement also come to fruition especially in terms of fruit and veg. I wont be surprised if they no long need US soy bean within 10 years time.
All in all a lot of things in China has passed escape velocity and there is no turning back. China understand US better than US understand themselves, and US doesn't even have any idea about China. I think the quote from the article sums this up pretty well.
"Beijing has been preparing for Cold War without eagerness for waging it, while the US wants to wage a Cold War without preparing for it.".
Whenever the topic of "China Speed" comes up, I feel the need to add that speed is not a strategy but an outcome of the previous four decades of relentless hard work: https://dilemmaworks.com/on-china-speed
As a Brit, I struggled to get much interesting out of this considering how many times he mentions "Europe" (in that condescendingly general way that only US folks seem to manage).
He talks about "European" prospects and his trip to Denmark but then cites London as a representative example?
This almost broke my brain it felt so incoherent.
Never mind that (despite my personal wishes) we're not even part of the EU (which I assume is what he means by "Europe"). Surely he knows what an anomaly London is? It's not representative of anything except itself.
Referencing the extreme wage dispersion and severe housing pressure of London in a rant about Europe in general is a completely pointless endeavour.
He did say one thing I agree with. If you like good food, rich culture and great surroundings, "Europe" is indeed a lovely place to be for the most part.
Maybe I'll just keep that as my takeaway. It's too early in the year for doom and gloom anyway
I read the whole post. Really revealing - so much analysis but not a single mention of a global system that is reaching a singularity in wealth concentration, and maybe how that might be an important dimension to reflect on. Its like using so many words to deeply analyze the speed differentials in a car race, but not looking up to see that all the drivers are racing towards a brick wall.
those articles were written a plenty about the Davos Elite - even precovid. It’s a tad lazy now.
Sure there was some evidence of wealth concentration mattering. But there was also evidence against it (like Jack Ma). Power is still the ring to kiss.
And hopefully it’s very understood to the parent comment and agreers, wealth creation is not zero sum. When something new is created the pie gets bigger. All wealth inequality discourse is driven by that misunderstanding and a lack of building more homes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429212...
Maybe your brick wall is the singularity instead and I misread you but I don’t think so.
>but not a single mention of a global system that is reaching a singularity in wealth concentration
that's not the case though and Dan is implicitly addressing this given that China is the subject of a decent chunk of the letter. Wealth in the global system is much more evenly distributed these days. We're much closer to a multi-polar world than we used to be in a long time. A lot of the emerging economies are building middle classes of serious size, it's a whole other world compared to 20 to 30 years ago. The developed world's been mostly stable inequality wise, the only outlier being tech oligarchs in the US but that's hardly a defining feature of the global system.
But globally we're likely living now in the first time in human history when the median human is going to see a drastic increase in their fortunes.
Sometimes I wonder if our system evolved the discipline of economics as an incredibly expensive intellectual distraction to pacify the petit bourgeois.
We can read Dan Wang and Tyler Cowen and whoever else to educate ourselves on the idea that {interests aligned with the further concentration of capital} are the real reason why we the people of the middle class can’t afford to buy a home, and actually you should be grateful you have antibiotics and shelf-stable, flavorless tomatoes and Instagram Reels. Your forebears were not so lucky!
US Per-capita real income tracked productivity growth until about 1975. After that, productivity continued to climb, but per-capita real income did not. This is why life sucks worse than it used to for everybody but the top 10%.
With AI coming along, productivity is about to get another boost. Maybe a big boost. But will most people benefit from it? Under capitalism as currently implemented, no.
That's the meaning of Sam Altman's “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”
Universal basic income is not the answer. That's welfare 2.0, leading to high-rises of useless people. Altman doesn't have the answer. Wang doesn't have the answer. They both see the problem coming but suggest no viable solutions.
I have nonspecific positive associations with Dan Wang's name, so I rolled my eyes a bit but kept going when "If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes" was followed up by "People aren’t reminiscing over some lost golden age..."
But I stopped at this:
> “AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.” It’s a Pascal’s Wager
That's not what Pascal's wager is! Apocalyptic religion dates back more than two thousand years and Blaise Pascal lived in the 17th century! When Rosa Luxemburg said to expect "socialism or barbarism", she was not doing a Pascal's Wager! Pascal's Wager doesn't just involve infinite stakes, but also infinitesimal probabilities!
The phrase has become a thought-terminating cliche for the sort of person who wants to dismiss any claim that stakes around AI are very high, but has too many intellectual aspirations to just stop with "nothing ever happens." It's no wonder that the author finds it "hard to know what to make of" AI 2027 and says that "why they put that year in their title remains beyond me."
It's one thing to notice the commonalities between some AI doom discourse and apocalyptic religion. It's another to make this into such a thoughtless reflex that you also completely muddle your understanding of the Christian apologetics you're referencing. There's a sort of determined refusal to even grasp the arguments that an AI doomer might make, even while writing an extended meditation on AI, for which I've grown increasingly intolerant. It's 2026. Let's advance the discourse.
I'm not sure I understand your complaint. Is it that he misuses the term Pascal's Wager? Or more generally that he doesn't extend enough credibility to the ideas in AI 2027?
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This is just not accurate though? For example, this post from a tech titan might not necessarily be that funny but it's neither blandly corporate nor philosophical: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2006548935372902751
“ the median age of the latest Y Combinator cohort is only 24, down from 30 just three years ago “
does yc publish stats to validate?
Oh come on, this is so untrue. Silicon Valley loves credentialism and networking, probably more than anywhere else. Except the credentials are the companies you’ve worked for or whether you know some founder or VC, instead of what school you went to or which degrees you have.
I went to a smaller college that the big tech firms didn’t really recruit from. I spent the first ~5 years of my career working for a couple smaller companies without much SV presence. Somehow I lucked into landing a role at a big company that almost everyone has definitely heard of. I didn’t find my coworkers to necessarily be any smarter or harder working than the people I worked with previously. But when I decided it was time to move on, companies that never gave me the time of day before were responding to my cold applies or even reaching out to _me_ to beg me to interview.
And don’t get me started on the senior leadership and execs I’ve seen absolutely run an entire business units into the ground and lose millions of dollars and cost people their jobs, only to “part ways” with the company, then immediately turn around and raise millions of dollars from the same guys whose money they just lost.
Remove the tech, what does SF contribute to the world wrt culture? Especially when compared to other metropolitan cities: NY, London, LA, Tokyo.
There is a commedy show literally called Silicon Valley making fun of what's going on in the valley and everybody I know in tech loves it and appreciates the humor.
One of my intentions for this coming year is to critically examine and (if appropriate) alter or dispel some preconceptions I have. To that end, I'm curious about this part:
> You don’t have to convince the elites or the populace that growth is good or that entrepreneurs could be celebrated. Meanwhile in Europe, perhaps 15 percent of the electorate actively believes in degrowth. I feel it’s impossible to convince Europeans to act in their self interest.
Can someone elaborate on how growth is aligned with the general interest? To my mind, although growth could _theoretically_ lead to a "lifting all boats" improvement across the board, in practice it inevitably leads to greater concentration of wealth for the elite while the populace deals with negative externalities like pollution, congestion, and advertizing. Degrowth, on the other hand, would directly reduce those externalities; and, if imposed via progressive taxation, would have further societal benefits via funded programs.
I'd very much like to hear the counter-argument. It would be pleasant and convenient to believe that growth and industry are Good, Actually, so that I needn't feel guilty for contributing to them or for furthering my own position - but (sadly!) I can't just make myself believe something without justification.
if you grow - you increase total progress (and your influence on it)
but if you degrow - you concentrate your progress into smaller amount of hands, making their life better
seems reminiscent of "left vs right" debate in politics with its "wealth disperse vs wealth squeeze" - but with humans themselves instead
>But American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems.
China has stayed on trajectory of improving life of its society for a long time. USA has been in decline all that time and decent accelerated after Cold War with Russia ended.
All of China's growth comes from its internal resource. Growth in the USA had been driven by exploiting other countries.
>I made clear in my book that I am drawn to pluralism as well as a broader conception of human flourishing than one that could be delivered by the Communist Party.
Pluralism had been eradicated in the western society. I can't speak freely in Canada. People get cancelled or jailed for speaking their mind in UK. US is not too far behind in that.
There is no meaningful pluralism in the West. They never make a long term plan they can follow for many years.
China has monolithic ( more so ) society with shared culture, language(s) and national identity that runs deep to the gene level. They don't don't allow foreign influence to erode it. It's much easier to make progress when people share the same long term vision and goals.
CPC is doing just fine leading the country into the future. Sure, it has a monopoly on power, but it also owns its mistakes and fixes them. Multiparty systems of the USA and the rest of the West are just two curtains on the stage, and when you draw the curtains you see the same people attending the same party.
Elected officials aim to earn as much as they can in their short stay in power. After all, they only have a few years before they get replaced, better make use of the short time you got.
China IMO has a much brighter outlook for the future
> The Bay Area has all sorts of autistic tendencies. Though Silicon Valley values the ability to move fast, the rest of society has paid more attention to instances in which tech wants to break things.
> There’s a general lack of cultural awareness in the Bay Area. It’s easy to hear at these parties that a person’s favorite nonfiction book is Seeing Like a State while their aspirationally favorite novel is Middlemarch.
It's refreshing to read someone addressing this aspect of the Mecca of the tech word.
For the reasons above the tech elites are the ones I trust the less and fear the most when they are involved in national and international politics. And I think the current state of the US is directly caused by the rise of post dot com Silicon Valley.
the UK is seriously broken, I always reflect on the energy generation statistics of the UK per capita
while in the US you see automated car washes, in the uk most car washes are Albanians n other immigrants etc
Can you elaborate on this?
From what I can tell, the UK's per-capita electricity generation has dropped steadily from a 2003 high[0] (4,069 kWh in 2024, 6,657 in 2003, 5,266 in 1985) and per-capita energy consumption has been going down since 2005,[1] but energy intensity (read: inverse of efficiency) has been decreasing consistently since at least 1965.[2] Domestic electricity production is down 24% since 2000,[3] whilst imports (which I don't think includes Albanians) are up 206% in the same period.[4]
That all reads to me as a country whose domestic generation has been replaced by imports and whose consumption has been reduced by efficiency gains, but I'm aware that I'm conflating figures here for 'energy' and for solely 'electricity'; I couldn't find anything for per-capita energy generation, as you specified.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-kingdom#in-...
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-kingdom#wha...
[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-kingdom#ene...
[3]: https://www.iea.org/countries/united-kingdom/electricity#whe...
[4]: https://www.iea.org/countries/united-kingdom/electricity#whe...
>A rule of thumb is that it takes five years from an American, German, or Japanese automaker to dream up a new car design and launch that model on the roads; in China, it’s closer to 18 months.
Not only is China 3 - 5 times faster in terms of product launches, they would have launch it with a production scale that is at least double the output of other auto marker. If you were to put capacity into the equation as well, China is an order of magnitude faster than any competing countries, at half the cost if not even lower.
Every single year since 2022 China has added more solar power capacity than the entire US solar capacity. And they are still accelerating, with the current roadmap and trend they could install double the entire US solar power capacity in a single year by 2030.
CATL's Sodium Ion Battery is already in production and will be used by EVs and large scale energy storage by end of this year. The cost advantage of these new EV would mean there is partially zero chance EU can compete. And if EU are moaning about it now, they cant even imagine what is coming.
Thanks to AI pushing up memory and NAND price. YMTC and CXMT now have enough breathing room to catch up. If they play this right, I wont be surprised by 2035 30 - 40% of DRAM and NAND will be made by the two Chinese firms. Although judging from their past execution record I highly doubt this will happen, but expect may be 10-15% maximum.
Beyond tech, there are also other part of manufacturing that China has matched or exceeded rest of the world without being noticed by many. Lab Grown Diamond, Cosmetic Production, Agricultural Machinery, Reinforced glass etc. Their 10 years plan on agricultural improvement also come to fruition especially in terms of fruit and veg. I wont be surprised if they no long need US soy bean within 10 years time.
All in all a lot of things in China has passed escape velocity and there is no turning back. China understand US better than US understand themselves, and US doesn't even have any idea about China. I think the quote from the article sums this up pretty well.
"Beijing has been preparing for Cold War without eagerness for waging it, while the US wants to wage a Cold War without preparing for it.".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273326
He talks about "European" prospects and his trip to Denmark but then cites London as a representative example?
This almost broke my brain it felt so incoherent.
Never mind that (despite my personal wishes) we're not even part of the EU (which I assume is what he means by "Europe"). Surely he knows what an anomaly London is? It's not representative of anything except itself.
Referencing the extreme wage dispersion and severe housing pressure of London in a rant about Europe in general is a completely pointless endeavour.
He did say one thing I agree with. If you like good food, rich culture and great surroundings, "Europe" is indeed a lovely place to be for the most part.
Maybe I'll just keep that as my takeaway. It's too early in the year for doom and gloom anyway
He mentions Europe without more nuance for the same reason he mentions China without more nuance: he’s talking big picture.
As someone who didn't study China's tech sector, but spent more than a decade working in it, my view is similar on Dan Wang's writing on China.
Sure there was some evidence of wealth concentration mattering. But there was also evidence against it (like Jack Ma). Power is still the ring to kiss.
And hopefully it’s very understood to the parent comment and agreers, wealth creation is not zero sum. When something new is created the pie gets bigger. All wealth inequality discourse is driven by that misunderstanding and a lack of building more homes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429212...
Maybe your brick wall is the singularity instead and I misread you but I don’t think so.
that's not the case though and Dan is implicitly addressing this given that China is the subject of a decent chunk of the letter. Wealth in the global system is much more evenly distributed these days. We're much closer to a multi-polar world than we used to be in a long time. A lot of the emerging economies are building middle classes of serious size, it's a whole other world compared to 20 to 30 years ago. The developed world's been mostly stable inequality wise, the only outlier being tech oligarchs in the US but that's hardly a defining feature of the global system.
But globally we're likely living now in the first time in human history when the median human is going to see a drastic increase in their fortunes.
https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...
We can read Dan Wang and Tyler Cowen and whoever else to educate ourselves on the idea that {interests aligned with the further concentration of capital} are the real reason why we the people of the middle class can’t afford to buy a home, and actually you should be grateful you have antibiotics and shelf-stable, flavorless tomatoes and Instagram Reels. Your forebears were not so lucky!
With AI coming along, productivity is about to get another boost. Maybe a big boost. But will most people benefit from it? Under capitalism as currently implemented, no. That's the meaning of Sam Altman's “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”
Universal basic income is not the answer. That's welfare 2.0, leading to high-rises of useless people. Altman doesn't have the answer. Wang doesn't have the answer. They both see the problem coming but suggest no viable solutions.
This is a problem.
[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
But I stopped at this:
> “AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever.” It’s a Pascal’s Wager
That's not what Pascal's wager is! Apocalyptic religion dates back more than two thousand years and Blaise Pascal lived in the 17th century! When Rosa Luxemburg said to expect "socialism or barbarism", she was not doing a Pascal's Wager! Pascal's Wager doesn't just involve infinite stakes, but also infinitesimal probabilities!
The phrase has become a thought-terminating cliche for the sort of person who wants to dismiss any claim that stakes around AI are very high, but has too many intellectual aspirations to just stop with "nothing ever happens." It's no wonder that the author finds it "hard to know what to make of" AI 2027 and says that "why they put that year in their title remains beyond me."
It's one thing to notice the commonalities between some AI doom discourse and apocalyptic religion. It's another to make this into such a thoughtless reflex that you also completely muddle your understanding of the Christian apologetics you're referencing. There's a sort of determined refusal to even grasp the arguments that an AI doomer might make, even while writing an extended meditation on AI, for which I've grown increasingly intolerant. It's 2026. Let's advance the discourse.