China has been taking steps to keep it’s AI industry in check. They’ll be fine. Their bubble pop is essentially a market adjustment. We all just get bent out of shape because of how big these numbers have gotten over the last few decades. The important thing is that the Chinese government took steps to protect it’s other sectors which is why we likely saw their bubble pop before ours.
The important thing is that the Chinese government took steps to protect it’s other sectors
But At What Cost?!
Also, so much of this seems to undersell the global common denominator: skyrocketing energy prices.
China is getting hit earlier because they’ve relied so heavily on the Persian Gulf and Russia to date. By contrast, the US - a major energy exporter - can remain insulated (and even reap a fat dividend) as their energy export values balloon.
AI is voracious for energy, so Chinese data centers got hit faster and harder than their American peers. I would not assume this rebounds the same way in the States, because the US is willing to subsidize AI development AND fossil fuel consumption in a way China is not.
can you clarify what energy the US is exporting?
The US frequently exports light crude oil at a premium while purchasing heavy crude for less. The refineries in the US are largely set up for heavy crude, so it works out and nets a high profit for oil companies.
Not sure about the person you responded to’s specific context but the US sells energy on energy markets. Primarily to neighbors.
Source, currently interviewing for a major ISO and have had to learn this shit
What? Their real estate is popping too. Could you be more specific as to what “steps to protect its other sectors” means?
I can’t.
I believe what I said, but I’m not following the Chinese market in any serious way. One of my comment edits was to disclose that but I choose the more basic statement. I’m fully willing to be wrong when presented with data. I felt that removing my own hedge allowed comments like yours to more directly challenge the statement.
I’m in the middle of studying for a mid term. I don’t want to use the energy to dig into it. I got my stance mostly from articles I’ve read in passing on how they have regulated their AI market to protect workers and manage circular investing. It could easily have been propaganda.
their real estates have been “popping” for several years now. i still remember finance bros making videos titled “is china going to collapse in 30 days??!?!!?” a couple of years ago.
in reality it’s just the government managing risk and taper speculation in the real estate market.
It looks like every news article about China’s real estate says their prices are lowering continuously. That means in America that their loans would be under water. Honest question, isn’t that the case for China too?
And the honest answer is: it’s complicated.
First thing, property prices going down is not necessarily a bad thing, but people don’t usually see it that way.
Simple truth: if you own a house, you would want house prices to go up, forever. This is true anywhere on Earth, and it’s true in China too. But as a society, you can’t allow house prices to go up forever. Because that means getting onto the housing ladder becomes harder and harder, young people would have to rent forever. Their income thus funneled into the property owning class, inequality goes up, stability goes down, and so on. Everyone can see the problem, but not all governments can do something about it. This is where China, an oppressive authoritarian government, has its advantage. They doesn’t have to worry about if the voters are going to elect them again. So they are afford to make some people unhappy.
But it’s not that simple actually, lowering property prices is almost uniquely bad for China. Because property is universally seen as the vehicle to preserve wealth in China. In fact a majority of China’s household wealth is stored in the property market [1]. Another compounding factor: China has a large pre-sale housing system. In other words, people are borrowing money to buy houses that aren’t even built yet, and that accounts for 90% (!!) of house sales [2]. I’m sure you can imagine, when property prices go down in this kind of system, people are gonna get really really mad. In fact people got so mad they got onto the street! If you know anything about China, you know how big of a deal this is. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen in China. Last time this happened, people died and that particular event even became a freaking internet meme.
And all that plus the fact property developers in China are often choose to take a lot of risk and are highly leveraged 3. This is almost reminiscent of the subprime mortgage crisis, yet a catastrophe similar to the 2008 crash hasn’t hit. Why? Because China’s government has a much stronger hold of the economy, and they are much more willing to intervene than any western capitalist country. Being authoritarian also helps. They have a lot more policy lever they can pull, so they can allow the property prices to gradually fall, without taking the entire economy with it. Which is kind of unimaginable in the US.
This is not to say their system is perfect - and that’s without talking about their horrible human rights records. Their policy makers are human too, and make mistake. Their stock market will rise and fall, the point is you shouldn’t try to fit what happens in China into the typical western economy boom-and-bust narrative. That’s not how it works in China.
[1]: The portfolio of the average household in China is more highly concentrated in real estate than elsewhere. For instance, 62 percent of its assets are in real estate, compared with 38 percent in Japan and 28 percent in the United States. (2020) Source
[2]: Developers have responded to restrictions on accessing other sources of funds by increasing their use of presale funding (Graph 5). While presales have long accounted for the bulk of new residential property sales in China, their share has increased from around 80 per cent to almost 90 per cent since 2016. (2020) Source
you can’t allow house prices to go up forever. Because that means getting onto the housing ladder becomes harder and harder, young people would have to rent forever. Their income thus funneled into the property owning class, inequality goes up, stability goes down, and so on. Everyone can see the problem, but not all governments can do something about it.
Here in hyper-capitalist dystopia, our property owning class is placing their bets on being able to deter that ‘stability goes down’ part with all-pervasive surveillance and authoritarianism.
Boy, it seem’s China’s beating the USA at all aspects of AI.
/rimshot
You joke, but there’s a few communities on Lemmy that REALLY love China.
This is how they win: everyone’s gonna pop, but their iron fist over the banks will prevent an absolute bust.
We haven’t learned from fanny-mae and we’re gonna get soundly fucked.
Ohh they know whats coming, they just don’t care because they are in the big boy club, and we aren’t. It’ll be another firesale where private equity thats in the know will pick up devalued assets on the cheap
Or it might be more apt to say that it shriveled like a rapidly deflating balloon: over the past four months
Not as catching as “bubble burst”. LLMs have proven their use. It’s here to stay. There’s a lot of superfluous stuff, but people are coping if they think the bubble is going to burst and their jobs will all go back to how the were.
LLMs have proven their use.
No they have largely not except in niche applications and they have proven relentlessly they cannot be trusted with anything important.
My trades friends don’t use AI, one of them doesn’t even know the names of any of the models.
My wife first heard about LLMs this year. She’s never used one, she’s never seen anyone use one, she doesn’t know anyone who has used one. She’s an engineer.
Lemmy leans way too heavily towards tech workers. There is a whole world of people that have literally nothing to do with our field and the trends inside it. They know nothing about it, they’ve no interest in engaging with it, it’s completely useless to them.
My wife’s company recently adopted using Active Directory for managing users.
EDIT: To take it a step further, I work adjacent to OEM manufacturers for industrial control systems. Half of our customers are running windows 98.
To take it a step further, I work adjacent to OEM manufacturers for industrial control systems. Half of our customers are running windows 98.
Hah! I’d actually consider industrial automation to be one of the more-likely applications for LLMs. Not necessarily LLMs driving the system, but outputting software to drive PLCs and similar. My understanding from past reading is that industrial automation is one of the principal things that China is interested in using LLMs for.
searches
https://faxiangongchang.com/en/reports/china-industrial-ai-agent-2026
What AI Agents in Factories Are Actually Doing
Down on the shop floor, industrial AI agents are currently running most solidly in four types of scenarios.
Quality inspection. Vision large models are replacing traditional rule-based machine vision. Among the 12 lighthouse factories newly added by the World Economic Forum in September 2025, AI and generative AI use cases account for up to 50%, with demonstration factories reporting results including a 41% reduction in product defect rates.
Process parameter optimization. In the Baosteel hot-rolling line case disclosed by Huawei Cloud, the Huawei Pangu large model improved finishing-mill width-spread prediction accuracy by more than 5% and raised yield by 0.5%, which by its own account translates into more than 90 million yuan in additional annual revenue. It should be noted that such figures are all vendor-disclosed and still lack independent third-party verification, but directionally they are consistent with public data from lighthouse factories.
Engineering and maintenance assistance. Siemens Industrial Copilot improves the efficiency of generating programmable logic controller code by roughly 60%, and pilots of its maintenance edition show an average 25% saving in reactive maintenance time; the product won the Hermes Award at Hannover Messe 2025. The factory operations agent Microsoft launched at Hannover Messe 2025 lets employees ask in natural language, “Why did Line 3 stop yesterday?”
Scheduling and order management. This is the entry point closest to AI agents for small and mid-sized factories. An AI tool aimed at small and mid-sized factories has disclosed a set of figures: after adopting AI scheduling and order tracking, factories’ average order delay rate fell from 25% to within 5%; one factory in Dongguan cut its order-splitting preparation time by 60%; and an annual fee of about 10,000 yuan corresponded to a return of roughly 1:12. These are again vendor figures, but they touch on an important fact—the value of AI agents for small and mid-sized factories lies first not in sophisticated process optimization, but in freeing up the labor tied down by high-frequency, tedious work such as order tracking and scheduling.
They mention PLC code generation, but I guess some other areas too.
It’s not that you can’t use LLM’s in the industrial space. It’s that there’s not much, in my experience, demand to do so.
I have worked with a food packaging plant (one of those Window’s 98 places). They are still using RSLinx from like, decades ago. Why would they change it? The PLC code does not need to be updated except under specific circumstances (which is why we use ladder logic in the first place).
New stuff may use it, but a company creating a new industrial product doesn’t really translate into that product being purchased.
This is something I think software people tend to struggle with. In “traditional” engineering you can’t just deploy something to prod. Projects take years for approval, years of testing, years to go through the political process, years to build. The things you see getting built today were being designed 10 years ago using technology from 40 years ago.
Design is normally the first thing to happen before the rest of the above does and its the fastest part of the process already. Because of this big projects are allergic as fuck to new technology. I have watched proposals for a more advanced high-pressure CO2 turbine system get knocked down purely because “it’s not what we’re used to.” That “new fangled design” was roughly 30 years old at that point. Nuclear plant’s just started implementing general purpose microprocessors.
I really believe a lot of Lemmy would benefit from spending a turn working on, like, nuclear commissioning or substation work. Software tends to compress peoples idea of a what a reasonable timeline for going from idea -> proposal -> design -> implementation is.
I’m not saying that eventually AI won’t be used but we have a understand that most of the time the customers have no interest in adding anything.
My wife first heard about LLMs this year
She’s an engineer
What
she doesn’t know anyone who has used one
How would she know if she’s only just found out herself?
These things are heavily used in engineering
In addition, the tradesmen who have done work on our place lately have all been using AI. One took photos during quotation and used AI to show what it’ll look like when they are done. One used it for invoicing. One used it to find the right parts. I’d argue your bubble in the world is an exception rather than the rule
She’s an engineer
What
An actual engineer, not a software engineer.
