I work in embedded systems and until recently I would have agreed with you… But it’s getting to the point where our agents have access to debuggers/tracers, system I/O logging and basically every tool we would ordinarily use and it’s vastly improving the quality of their work.

I always attributed their better performance in web and general software development to more availability of open source examples that they are trained on, but I think the ability to ‘self check’ was a huge limiting factor. Unit and other pure software testing abstracted away too much of the real system. With real feedback and access to the data sheets it’s doing a pretty good job.

I think it’s partially innacurate to compare per capita energy consumption for the two nations.

The average American lives a vastly different lifestyle to someone in china, consider that per capita consumption of China is now higher than that of the EU. It’s not the whole picture. An average American uses almost four times as much energy as a Chinese or European person at home.

If you’re talking about standard of living, sure, per capita makes sense. There’s no argument that for the majority of people in the US their standard of living is probably objectively higher.

However, China’s industrial electricity usage per capita has overtaken that of the US long ago.

I think this is just blatantly wrong. China has vastly more energy capacity that the US and, 3-4x what the USA has. China has the entire USAs energy capacity purely as renewables. The entire time, the competition around energy has been a moot point for China. They don’t need more efficient or powerful chips because they had the energy spare to just use more. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made a good statement on this point. The reason for this, whatever it is, could be entirely unrelated to energy.