I don’t know if China is interested in ‘winning’, but they are definitely up there. They found ways to offer comparable models to western tech companies despite the sanctions on computing power, showing that you don’t necessarily need as many latest GPUs as you can get your hands on to train a model.
Right now all the top-downloaded open-source/open-weights models are Chinese. The humiliation was so severe that US companies started pointing out “it’s actually open weights not open source 🤓” when they don’t do either lol. But I’m being a bit hyperbolic.
Regardless China is actually, right now, using AIs in industry, agriculture and medicine. Some of the basic pillars of a society. Agriculture is especially interesting considering their history, and you might think “but how do you use AI to help with agricultural yields?” and I’m thinking the same thing, hence why I think it’s important to study what they’re doing.
Meanwhile the west is still trying to find its niche for it and failing. They don’t want to let China control AI so they keep pumping money into western companies, right now it’s all about agentic and there is merit to it but I don’t think it alone justifies the close-to-a-trillion-dollars they’re putting into it. I don’t think Anthropic, the leader in agentic right now (in the west at least), is anywhere close to becoming profitable with just that. It’s still kinda niche.
I don’t know if China is interested in ‘winning’, but they are definitely up there. They found ways to offer comparable models to western tech companies despite the sanctions on computing power, showing that you don’t necessarily need as many latest GPUs as you can get your hands on to train a model.
Right now all the top-downloaded open-source/open-weights models are Chinese. The humiliation was so severe that US companies started pointing out “it’s actually open weights not open source 🤓” when they don’t do either lol. But I’m being a bit hyperbolic.
Regardless China is actually, right now, using AIs in industry, agriculture and medicine. Some of the basic pillars of a society. Agriculture is especially interesting considering their history, and you might think “but how do you use AI to help with agricultural yields?” and I’m thinking the same thing, hence why I think it’s important to study what they’re doing.
Meanwhile the west is still trying to find its niche for it and failing. They don’t want to let China control AI so they keep pumping money into western companies, right now it’s all about agentic and there is merit to it but I don’t think it alone justifies the close-to-a-trillion-dollars they’re putting into it. I don’t think Anthropic, the leader in agentic right now (in the west at least), is anywhere close to becoming profitable with just that. It’s still kinda niche.