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FILE PHOTO: Chinese Premier Li Qiang delivers the work report at the opening session of the National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China March 5, 2024.
China worries about falling behind on AI
Chinese researchers at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence have reportedly issued a warning to Chinese Premier Li Qiang that the country is falling far behind the United States when it comes to artificial intelligence.
The researchers said there’s “a serious lack of self-sufficiency” in the Chinese technology space, especially since researchers are dependent on open-source large language models like Meta’s LLaMA.
China is already playing catch-up when it comes to chips and the technological infrastructure necessary to train and run generative AI models, but this reporting sheds new light on the technical struggles to build capable models. The US is seeking to cut off China from as much AI technology as it can, but its aim is ultimately more about limiting its enemy’s military prowess rather than restricting its access to perhaps relatively harmless language models.
How democracies nurture the growth of artificial intelligence
China wants order to beat the US in the race to dominate artificial intelligence. But open-ended research? No way — and that's a problem for Beijing.
"If you are in a society where there are certain things that you can't ask, you don't know what you can't ask, and the penalty for asking those things you don't know that you can't ask is very high ... it will start to limit the capabilities of researchers to explore," Azeem Azhar, founder of the Exponential View newsletter, says in a Global Stage livestream conversation hosted by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft.
Meanwhile, he adds, the US or Europe are freer societies where culture wars hurting academic freedom are the biggest threat to AI research.
What does this mean? For Azhar, democracies are ahead because "people have the freedom of thought to think and challenge in their process of research."
Watch the full Global Stage conversation: AI at the tipping point: danger to information, promise for creativity
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