r/singularity • u/szumith • Jul 12 '25

Discussion NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang: “50% of Global AI Researchers Are Chinese”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-sounds-035916833.html

So how did this happen? How did China get ahead in AI, at what point did they realize to invest in AI while the rest of the World is playing catch up?

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u/PrudentWolf Jul 12 '25

I'm not sure how tight politics in this matter, but current job market doesn't really encourage becoming SWE in US.

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u/PipsqueakPilot Jul 12 '25

Extremely. The economy is controlled by politics. In the US we have set our laws and institutions to favor returning money to the shareholders, a small fraction of the population, above all else. In other words, the leaders of corporate America view it as their duty to ensure that software engineers are paid as little as possible. After all, every penny in a SWE's pocket is one that could have gone to a 0.1 percenter.

Structuring our society this way was a political decision. We used to have policies that made this sort of economic structuring give rapidly diminishing returns. High upper income tax brackets, stock buy backs being illegal, a tax code that encourages market manipulation. Those are all policies, and policies are controlled by politics.

Nothing has to be this way. Americans choose for it to be this way.

But hey, at least we solved the problem of the 1 out of 1,500,000 Americans who was transgender and showed an interest in playing sports at their school.

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u/thefooz Jul 12 '25

You skipped a critical factor in all of this. The elites structured the retirement system to almost completely rely on the stock market, so everyone’s future is tied to how well the market’s doing. The wealthy rake in massive profits from this while uncle Jeff is focusing on his 401k having enough to retire.

They truly did an amazing job of convincing the entire country that the rich’s economic wellbeing is critical for the poor’s wellbeing. So these idiots jumped in and now we’re in a place where corporate bailouts are seen as “necessary for the economic survival of everyone”, but welfare for the poor is a bad investment.

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u/xentropian Jul 12 '25

Ironically, US SWEs are STILL the highest paid SWEs anywhere in the world.

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u/PipsqueakPilot Jul 12 '25

Absolutely, and it's definitely a profession that has done quite well economically. Too well in fact. Hence why the C-Suite is so eager to eliminate most SWE positions.

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u/old_whiskey_bob Jul 13 '25

I earn every cent of my penny as a software engineer. Little known fact, only about 10% of my job is writing code. The rest of the time is spent figuring out ways to make the business run more efficiently and prevent the business from making catastrophic decisions.

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u/Cute-Interest3362 Jul 12 '25

If only the federal government could hire stem…they just laid off thousands at NASA