Might also pave a path towards governments moving off windows if it can run existing software they use.

yeah the entitlement here is off the charts

I mean all we can do is wait and see, but there’s nothing magical about this tech, and the geopolitical situation today is very different from what it was in the past. It’s not like Chinese people are too dumb to build a GPU, it’s that there was no real reason to push this tech hard before when you could just buy these chips from NVIDIA. Now that the US is actively trying to cut China off, there’s a reason to make this stuff work. Just look at how rapidly Huawei phones improved and how much progress Huawei is making with their chips in just past few years. Why shouldn’t this happen with other types of chips going forward?

It is a base that you can build on though which is a lot easier than starting from scratch.

I mean China has a proven track record of scaling stuff up once they decide to do something. Look at solar and EVs as two examples. Having sovereign supply chains for computing is obviously recognized as a top priority in China now, so there is every reason to expect that a lot of resources will be poured into making that happen at state level.

yeah I think that would be a very good outcome

the main site has a section on that https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/

• Tectonic automatically downloads support files so you don’t have to install a full LaTeX system in order to start using it. If you start using a new LaTeX package, Tectonic just pulls down the files it needs and continues processing. The underyling “bundle” technology allows for completely reproducible document compiles. Thanks to the Dataverse Project for hosting the large LaTeX resource files!
• Tectonic has sophisticated logic and automatically loops TeX and BibTeX as needed, and only as much as needed. In its default mode it doesn’t write TeX’s intermediate files and always produces a fully-processed document.
• The tectonic command-line program is quiet and never stops to ask for input.
• Thanks to the power of XeTeX, Tectonic can use modern OpenType fonts and is fully Unicode-enabled.
• The Tectonic engine has been extracted into a completely self-contained library so that it can be embedded in other applications.
• Tectonic has been forked from the old-fashioned WEB2C implementation of TeX and is developed in the open on GitHub using modern tools like the Rust language.
• Tectonic can be used from Github Actions to typeset your documents whenever a change to them is made:
  • setup-tectonic - Use tectonic in your github action workflows (supports caching and optionally biber)
  • compile-latex - Thanks to Vinay Sharma for creating the action.

Yes, you can run Qwen 3.6 27b on your laptop and have it do useful work, and it’s more capable than frontier models from a year ago or so. https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-27b

It’s kind of funny how China is actually doing these things right now while Americans are talking it up. I think what we’ll see in practice will be this manifesto applied to China.

Yeah, but if Chinese companies get serious about getting into the chip game, that’s a pretty good foundation to build on already.

I’m guessing it’ll take a year or two for that to get ironed out. The nice thing about the tau folding process Huawei came up with is that it’s complimentary with euv. So, once Chinese companies do master it, their chips will be that much better.

Yeah, I guess it is targeted to US techbro audience.

ZLUDA is still actively developed https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA

I expect the costs will come down once they scale up production.

Sure, but try extrapolating 2 or 3 years into the future here. Models are going to become more efficient and hardware is going to improve. Right now Chinese companies are just starting to put out GPUs, but once that process is ironed out, I don’t see why they wouldn’t put out chips that work well with Chinese models. This kind of stuff is happening already, it’s only a matter of time till it makes it to consumer market. too https://lushbinary.com/blog/deepseek-v4-huawei-ascend-ai-infrastructure-strategy

Chinese companies are very much ramping up production fo consumer devices right as we speak. I expect we’ll see the same thing we saw with stuff like solar panels and EVs in the coming years. https://www.techspot.com/news/112529-china-first-credible-gaming-gpu-sells-30000-units.html

I guess gonna have to hope that Chinese companies ramp up production soon. Might have to smuggle that hardware in though at the rate things are going.

My view is that we’re basically in the mainframe era of AI, but local models are already getting good enough to do useful stuff. Qwen 3.6 in particular is very capable, and you can do real work with it. So, extrapolate this into a couple of years into the future and it’s almost certain that we’ll be able to run models that perform as well as current frontier models locally. And that means companies are going to be much more likely to self host as well. In fact, I think you’re completely right that the immediate target will be business customers that want to self host their own models before this tech really gets to consumer grade.

I mean anybody who lived through the rise of Linux on the server should understand the benefit of releasing common infrastructure in the open and amortizing costs that way. The real difference in philosophy is that Americans companies treat the model as the product, while Chinese companies see models at infrastructure you build products on top of. You amortize the cost of deploying it at scale by sharing knowledge and iterating quickly to bring the cost down.

Yeah, NVIDIA knows they have to pivot to the consumer market soon. Apple seems to be going in that direction as well.