ChatGPT makes it look like US is ahead of China. But the AI race is still wide open

AI Race : CHINA VS U. S. ! China Isn’t Losing Sleep Over ChatGPT

If there is an “AI race” between China and the U.S., it’s not over generative AI or language modeling.

During a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services last month, Senator Mike Rounds mentioned that many prominent AI experts had just called for a six-month pause on “giant” AI experiments, largely in reaction to the announcement of GPT-4 (the current basis for ChatGPT). But Rounds had drawn a different conclusion.

“A greater risk is taking a pause while our near-peer competitors leap ahead of us in this field,” he said. “AI will be the determining factor in all future great power competition and I don’t believe that now is the time for the United States to take a break in developing our AI capabilities.” 

Rounds isn’t the only person who has reached this conclusion. Ever since the meteoric rise of the new chatbot, this “AI race” frame has become increasingly common. And almost universally, China is seen as the United States’ lead competitor in the “race.”

But this narrative is wrong. It’s wrong not simply because China has a poor hope of leapfrogging the United States in the field of generative AI (though that’s true), but more importantly, because China isn’t particularly interested in leapfrogging the U.S. to begin with. 

China Isn’t Losing Sleep Over ChatGPT

If there is an “AI race” between China and the U.S., it’s not over generative AI or language modeling.

During a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services last month, Senator Mike Rounds mentioned that many prominent AI experts had just called for a six-month pause on “giant” AI experiments, largely in reaction to the announcement of GPT-4 (the current basis for ChatGPT). But Rounds had drawn a different conclusion.

“A greater risk is taking a pause while our near-peer competitors leap ahead of us in this field,” he said. “AI will be the determining factor in all future great power competition and I don’t believe that now is the time for the United States to take a break in developing our AI capabilities.” 

Rounds isn’t the only person who has reached this conclusion. Ever since the meteoric rise of the new chatbot, this “AI race” frame has become increasingly common. And almost universally, China is seen as the United States’ lead competitor in the “race.”

But this narrative is wrong. It’s wrong not simply because China has a poor hope of leapfrogging the United States in the field of generative AI (though that’s true), but more importantly, because China isn’t particularly interested in leapfrogging the U.S. .

Let’s start with the immediate reaction to ChatGPT. It is true that a number of Chinese companies rushed to deploy similar products – though their actual performance has been disappointing, and their use cases sharply restricted. But at the same time, the Chinese government rapidly issued warnings about excessive hype around the technology and initiated new regulations that make it far more legally fraught to deploy similar AI systems. 

Even before ChatGPT was announced, the Biden administration was making moves that could constrain China’s ability to create similar models by restricting the export of high-end computing hardware to China. According to outside experts, part of the rationale for this policy was likely that cutting-edge AI methods – in particular, the field of language modeling, which includes models like ChatGPT – are heavily dependent on advanced computing hardware. 

But China’s response to these controls has also been muted, which would seem to belie assumptions that it cares much about leading the pack in language modeling. In December, China floated plans for a major subsidy package to bolster its native semiconductor industry, only to back away a month later. In March, the government appeared to settle on a solution that would offer additional subsidies to a few companies, without pouring more money overall into the sector. 

China’s output in language modeling has actually been half-hearted for some time now. The announcement of ChatGPT’s predecessor, GPT-3, sparked a worldwide flurry of activity in language modeling, including in China, where new announcements were often breathlessly covered in U.S. media. (Many of these 2021-era models still lack any validation and have almost certainly been seriously overhyped.) But a new, exhaustive compilation of China’s published language models shows that Chinese activity largely died down in 2022, even as it continued to accelerate in the United States.