Who will head to IA: China or the U.S.?

Chinese technology giants are rushing to capture their American rivals in creating artificial intelligence chatbots (IA). The second largest economy in the world is spending only this year, 15 billion dollars (13.5 billion euros) on IA projects alone. This is an increase of almost 50% within two years. Before the appearance of major linguistic models like Chat GPT, supported by the American company Microsoft, some technology experts could not say with certainty that the West would dominate the race for IA, despite the most advanced IA labs located in the US and Great Britain.

Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwanese informal and businessman, predicted in 2018 that China would soon pass the US as an IA superpower, insisting that technology had already passed the innovation phase. Lee said the world was now in the IA implementation phase, where China has an advantage because of the spying the state has been spying on for many years now. Persistent population monitoring has enabled China to collect large amounts of data that the IA platforms use to improve the learning process.

Western priority: Data Variety

But while more than half of about 1 billion surveillance cameras across the planet are located in China, critics of Lee argue that the IA revolution is still in its beginning and that it is the West that has the key to this technology.

The big subx0> in IA has not yet come... And the U.S. currently has advantage in that area,” says of DW, Pedro Domingos, professor of computer science at the University of Washington. He explains that the US priority lies in the variety of data it collects: “Even the variety of data is important. I'd rather have more data from Europe, let's say, that from China, because the first one is more diverse and you can learn more from it.

Problem for China: Cutapa export brake

The US is concerned about Beijing's technological ambitions, especially since the official Chinese government's policy is to make the country the dominant IA player in the world by 2030. The increasingly deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing have prevented the US from exporting the most advanced memory chips, which Chinese firms need for their advanced IA-language models.

“The latest IA systems require a large quantity of hardware -- with thousands of very specialised chips operating for weeks, or months entire” -- told DW Paul Scharre, vice president and director of studies in Center for New American Security (CNAS). The halting of chip exports poses an obstacle to the development of IA technology in China, he says.

But Chinese technology firms can find other ways out of this problem: The local market of semi-surgers can experience an investment boom, while local producers are also competing to improve their chips.

Trouble for the West: Models Open for Everyone

Another hole Washington might want to close is that American machine learning platforms are still with open sources, so they can be copied and modified by anyone. You don't need advanced chips when you have access to the trained IA model. So there's a real risk that this brake of chip export doesn't work,” warns Scharre, author of the book “Four Battle Field: Power in the age of artificial intelligence”

In fact, Chinese Chat versions GPT, created by companies like e-commerce giant Alibaba, and social media platform Baidu, appeared for the first time in April 2023, just months after Western products.

State censorship restrains the development of artificial intelligence

But China has many other obstacles to overcome, before it becomes dominant of IA worldwide. President Xi Jinping has weakened technology giants in recent years. Karman Lucero, a researcher in Paul Tsai China Center, at Yale Law School, says that the Chinese government's obsession to censorship may be Achilles' heel for artificial intelligence technology: “in China, has a long list of [censored] themes, which constantly differs. A topic that can be allowed today can be stopped tomorrow, and nothing can be done. ”

Another problem for China: Brain Escape

But China also has problems with specialists. Despite numerous efforts to build an army of IA talents, maintaining high - tech specialists is a separate challenge. “The best scientists to IA leave China. And they don't go abroad just to study and work, they prefer a more democratic way of life,” says Scharre. But despite these issues, he thinks the IA labs in China are only 18 months behind the main IA labs in the West.

Are you underestimateing the West China?

While some in the West are still asking, if they should stop using IA for security reasons, Domingos says China is moving ahead in this sector, because the IA is a <x0-instrusion for which every autism dreams.” For us in the democratic world, it is important that the United States progress in this area. If China wins this war, we will have many problems politically, economically and militarily,” warns Domingos.