jn31415

For several years now, there have been talks about China catching up or even overtaking Western countries when it comes to innovation. But what concrete signs are there?

I've read multiple times that China is supposedly now a leading publisher of AI research papers. But how come ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and all these other recent AI innovations didn't come out of China? Even the three giants, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu seem to be barely able to make a dent in foreign markets (outside of straight acquisitions).

And Temu appears to be burning a lot of cash to do something similar as Wish, which hasn't been doing very well lately.

It would be interesting to hear from people active in all kinds of fields, even outside of software tech.

I've been based in Vietnam for the past few years. This country seems to be relatively slow in adopting digital payment methods (which is just fine by me, btw.). Cash is still accepted anywhere and also still appears to be the most common payment method. When it comes to digital payments, regular bank transfers via bank apps seem to be the most popular option. I take it that the same is the case for other countries in the region, such as Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. But it does make me wonder, how is the situation in other places? Do people in your country still use cash on a daily basis? If not, what is the go-to payment method?

I would love something where I could say "Show me round objects" and then the AI returns things like a soccer ball, an orange, the moon, etc. It seems such a simple task. Is there anything like this out there that can be used out of the box? How come all AI's seem to be only focused solely on art? P.S. I tried with AI's like Craiyon, Midjourney and others, but none of them did anything close to what I wanted.

One thing I noticed and that I haven't been able to completely make sense of is why there aren't any big price comparison portals that serve the U.S. market.

I'm from Switzerland. One of the first use cases of the internet for me was to use the local price comparison site comparis.ch to get the best deals on services like health insurance or broadband packages. Comparis is a hugely popular website in Switzerland. And that's despite that fact that it's much wealthier compared to say, Germany (where idealo.de is the dominant price comparison portal).

My understanding is that there are a lot niche comparison websites, such as CamelCamelCamel for setting price alerts on Amazon. There are also aggregators for travel and other verticals. However, there appears to be no one particular dominant one-stop type of portal offering comparisons across all kinds of product and service categories like Comparis or Idealo.

I do understand that the United States has one of the highest average incomes worldwide and the people there are more willing to part with their money than consumers in other places. However, there must still be a sizable addressable market here, just like there is in Switzerland, which is also a wealthy country. And yet, no dominant price comparison portal has emerged yet. Why is that?