Comment by bijowo1676
4 days ago
I often hear about "muh china stealing", two questions come to mind:
1. how could they steal something that western companies dont even have yet?
2. for more fundamental stuff, western companies did transfer knowledge themselves by moving factories to China, in exchange for decades of access to China market and exorbitant profits they earned. Where exactly is "supposed stealing" in unitree ?
Boston Dynamics has been at the game for a LONG time (1992 vs Unitree's 2016). During that time they slogged through a lot of fundamental work that from the outside looked like 0 but thats the thing about tech, it starts at 0.01% then increases 0.01% → 0.02% → 0.04% → 0.08% → 0.16% → 0.32% → 0.64% and so on. The world just sees 0 until they don't. If you are able to just take all the results of those years and skip the same effort required then combined with your own skilled and motivated people you can leapfrog them.
(Im basically rewording my original comment, you didn't get my point the first time)
The answer to both your questions, and the poster's obvious implication, is that somehow they stole information from Boston Dynamics. (I'm not saying I believe that.) Seems like they must've stolen the information at the exact point in time when advances in AI made these physical robots much more easy for anyone to engineer without theft...
Steal info from 10 different companies, and combine it to make a product better than any of the 10 individual products copied.
It's basically the patent problem.
US patents do not have extra-territorial power, meaning US patent means nothing outside its borders, unless there are mutual reciprocity agreements (mostly between US and its vassal puppet states).
To my knowledge, China has never been caught infringing on US patents on US soil. A lot of Chinese innovations are simply orders of magnitude better than any US alternative, for example TikTok's algorithm and TikTok as a short-video social network.
So please answer my question, how could China steal anything that either 1) Western companies explicitly granted as part of Joint Venture corporation, 2) Western companies havent even developed themselves, and at best, only possess inferior version, generation or two behind the state of the art?
in IP realm, India for example forcefully nationalizes all pharmaceutical IP and produces generics of brand name drugs for its internal market (1970 Patents Act)