State power, open-weight models, and a 'low human rights advantage' are letting China catch up — and scale — faster than America:
China's rapid rise in artificial intelligence has caught the world's attention — and given America's AI leaders good reason to lose sleep.
China was a latecomer to the current wave of generative artificial intelligence. The leading large language models, advanced AI chips, and much of the underlying research infrastructure were initially dominated by American firms. Yet within a remarkably short period, Chinese firms have emerged as serious competitors. Models from DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen series, Moonshot AI's Kimi, and others have reached near-parity with leading U.S. systems on many benchmarks for coding, reasoning, and other tasks.
The speed of China's catch-up has surprised many observers. It should not. We have seen this pattern before in solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, telecommunications, and other industries. AI increasingly looks like another application of what I call "China Inc."
[...] In the United States and other liberal democracies, AI development increasingly encounters concerns over privacy, data use, ethics, environmental impact, and the construction of massive data centers. In China, privacy protections and ethical objections impose weaker constraints on state-prioritized data collection and AI development, while local communities have far less ability to block data centers and related infrastructure.
Electricity may make this difference even more important. AI consumes enormous amounts of power. In democracies, new generating capacity, transmission lines, data centers, and related infrastructure can face lengthy permitting, environmental reviews, litigation, and local opposition. China can mobilize land, capital, electricity, and infrastructure much more rapidly, while expanding coal, renewable, and nuclear generation with considerably less political resistance.
(Score: 3, Touché) by PiMuNu on Sunday August 02, @08:48AM (3 children)
Cost of electricity in China is way lower than the America (which in turn is way lower than Europe).
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-electricity-by-country [worldpopulationreview.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by DadaDoofy on Sunday August 02, @03:07PM (2 children)
The "great reset" crowd have decided the best way to crush the West is to cripple and bankrupt it economically by making its energy ans expensive as possible. They thought it was going to happen through green energy mandates that gave a pass to "developing countries" (like China and India *wink*). Now that the censorship that kept that narrative alive has been circumvented (in the US anyway) and they failed to achieve the desired reset, they've moved on and gone all in on AI to get the same result.
To the extent a never ending stream of stories like this stoke the flames of the "cutthroat race for AI dominance", they help to achieve the same result. It's just that instead of constricting the abundant supply of fossil fuels and mandating much more expensive sources of energy, they've flipped to the other side of the equation, exponentially jacking up demand for energy to levels that can never be sustained.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Monday August 03, @11:43AM (1 child)
Somehow, I don't think the environmentalists are the ones pushing AI. They're definitely not the same people being the public face of the idea. Also, solar panels and windmills actually do what their sellers claim they do, namely generate usable energy directly from sources that will keep running without adding oil or coal.
But you're right that the purpose of this story is to suggest to governments that they should give even more huge gobs of public money and an even higher percentage of available power and water to help replace humans with machines.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Monday August 03, @07:05PM
Don't confuse the "great reset" crowd (globalist communists) with environmentalists or AI companies (their useful idiots).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday August 02, @09:39AM (7 children)
Are they surpassing? If not then this is the old pattern of the west invent, china copies. But it rarely surpasses. It just makes copies and lots and lots of them. Bringing down the price.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bentonite on Sunday August 02, @09:57AM
What rather seems to happen is that a bunch of different countries do research on the same things and then only a few countries then proceed to bother to make them.
China does allow economy of scale, unlike many other countries.
More and more often, it seems the best quality is only available from China (LFP cells for example), although you do need to pay a premium to get something good (pay a too cheap price and you'll get scrap).
A good Chinese clone is better than the original.
But, people buy cheap garbage from China and then wonder why it's cheap garbage.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday August 02, @01:13PM (1 child)
People used to say that about Japan, too.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 02, @01:36PM
In many ways I believe Japan has reached end game ahead of the US.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 02, @01:34PM
I wonder about chatbot relative effectiveness in English and Chinese language.
Is English ahead due to the unlimited training sets developed over the last 20 years on social media while Chinese language/culture was suppressed by the great firewall?
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03, @07:53AM
There's lots of stuff the west copied from China. Silk, paper, printing, gunpowder, compass, etc.
As for rarely surpasses, I guess depends on how you measure. I think China is leading in lots of solar and EV stuff, thorium reactor stuff, quadcopter stuff. Probably the humanoid robotic and hypersonic missile stuff too, unless the West is keeping their top performers secret.
Not that long ago they couldn't make ballpoint pen tips: https://medium.com/@topbosstalk/how-ballpoint-tips-became-chinas-toughest-lesson-in-precision-f4f58c10ced7 [medium.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday August 03, @11:04AM
And what do you get when you "win the AI race"? The FIFA AI Prize?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by arslan on Wednesday August 05, @01:39AM
In some aspect yes they are.
Are they surpassing the west in pushing out better models first - no. Are they making frontier models more accessible and cheaper for everyone (or alternate phrasing: not creating a captive market to milk everyone through circular economics that will eventuate with a bailout) - yes.
It is less a "race" and more like the "games" where there's different races in different categories. Are they winning at the games? Depends on who you ask I suppose.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Sunday August 02, @09:45AM (2 children)
That the only correct way to describe LLMs etc with "AI" is by referring to such as; "degenerative AI".
After all, generative AI takes small datasets and applied fractals etc to generate quite nice things, while "degenerative AI" takes immense datasets and degenerates it all to useless slop.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02, @02:29PM (1 child)
Came here to say something similar. It's misleading to run the headline...
> China Inc. Is Winning the AI Race
...When, nearly all of us are *losing* the "AI" race. The exception are some billionaires--if you define winning as "more money" then they are winning.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday August 03, @11:51AM
The billionaires are losing too right now. Since the beginning, they've adopted a strategy of losing money on every sale but making it up with volume, with the goal of becoming too big to be allowed to fail. The ROI right now is approximately -97.5%.
All that needs to happen for them to be really screwed is that when their bubble pops and their stocks start to collapse and they inevitably go to Congress hat in hand, the politicians tell them "no". Of course, the politicians would never think of selling us all out if their own palms are appropriately greased.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin