Will China overtake the U.S. on AI? Probably not. Here's why. - The Washington Post - 0 views
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Chinese authorities have been so proactive about regulating some uses of AI, especially those that allow the general public to create their own content, that compliance has become a major hurdle for the country’s companies.
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As the use of AI explodes, regulators in Washington and around the world are trying to figure out how to manage potential threats to privacy, employment, intellectual property and even human existence itself.
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But there are also concerns that putting any guardrails on the technology in the United States would surrender leadership in the sector to Chinese companies.
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Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) last month urged Congress to adopt “comprehensive” regulations on the AI industry.
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Rather than focusing on AI technology that lets the general public create unique content like the chatbots and image generators, Chinese companies have instead focused on technologies with clear commercial uses, like surveillance tech.
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n a recent study, Ding found that most of the large language models developed in China were nearly two years behind those developed in the U.S., a gap that would be a challenge to close — even if American firms had to adjust to regulation.
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This gap also makes it difficult for Chinese firms to attract the world’s top engineering talent. Many would prefer to work at firms that have the resources and flexibility to experiment on frontier research areas.
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Restrictions on access to the most advanced chips, which are needed to run AI models, have added to these difficulties.
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Recent research identified 17 large language models in China that relied on Nvidia chips, and just three models that used Chinese-made chips.
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While Beijing pushes to make comparable chips at home, Chinese AI companies have to source their chips any way they can — including from a black market that has sprung up in Shenzhen, where, according to Reuters, the most advanced Nvidia chips sell for nearly $20,000, more than twice what they go for elsewhere.
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Despite the obstacles, Chinese AI companies have made major advances in some types of AI technologies, including facial recognition, gait recognition, and artificial and virtual reality.
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These technologies have also fueled the development of China’s vast surveillance industry, giving Chinese tech giants an edge that they market around the world, such as Huawei’s contracts for smart city surveillance from Belgrade, Serbia, to Nairobi.
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Companies developing AI in China need to comply with specific laws on intellectual property rights, personal information protection, recommendation algorithms and synthetic content, also called deep fakes. In April, regulators also released a draft set of rules on generative AI, the technology behind image generator Stable Diffusion and chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
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They also need to ensure AI generated content complies with Beijing’s strict censorship regime. Chinese tech companies such as Baidu have become adept at filtering content that contravenes these rules. But it has hampered their ability to test the limits of what AI can do.
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No Chinese tech company has yet been able to release a large language model on the scale of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the general public, in which the company has asked the public to play with and test a generative AI model, said Ding, the professor at George Washington University.
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“That level of freedom has not been allowed in China, in part because the Chinese government is very worried about people creating politically sensitive content,” Ding said.
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Although Beijing’s regulations have created major burdens for Chinese AI companies, analysts say that they contain several key principles that Washington can learn from — like protecting personal information, labeling AI-generated content and alerting the government if an AI develops dangerous capabilities.
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AI regulation in the United States could easily fall short of Beijing’s heavy-handed approach while still preventing discrimination, protecting people’s rights and adhering to existing laws, said Johanna Costigan, a research associate at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
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“There can be alignment between regulation and innovation,” Costigan said. “But it’s a question of rising to the occasion of what this moment represents — do we care enough to protect people who are using this technology? Because people are using it whether the government regulates it or not.”