When the San Francisco-based OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the market in November, hailed as the so-called iPhone moment for artificial intelligence (AI), it cast a shadow across the Pacific.
Speaking at a Politburo meeting in October 2021, China's President Xi Jinping pledged to “fight the battle for key core technologies” and achieve a high level of self-reliance.
In order to gain the upper hand, Beijing has embarked on an all-out effort to harness the potential of generative AI, with an emphasis on new infrastructure, to propel its computing power and close the technology gap with the US. Despite the escalating tech rivalry, both countries are engaged in the highest volume of AI research collaborations, which have quadrupled since 2010. But the pace of cooperation slowed after 2020, resulting in a modest 2.1 per cent increase by the end of 2021 compared to a year earlier.
China accounts for 33 per cent of the world’s computing power, which is only 1 percentage point lower than the US, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology , an affiliate of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Boosting the level of computing power is likely to help Beijing take a shortcut to AI development, as the release of fundamental models is viewed as a flawed factor limiting the country’s AI development.
Chips are playing an important role in the increase of computing power in China, with the share of graphics processing unit chip computing power in the computing field increasing from 3 per cent in 2016 to 41 per cent in 2020, according to CAICT data. “I would estimate the impact of the chip shortage on computing power development to be mitigated in two to three years at the earliest and five years at the slowest,” Li said.
US tech decoupling, along with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and its ageing population, is seen to be one of the new factors holding back China’s potential growth. Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said in an interview with The Economist in April that the fate of humanity depends on whether the US and China can get along, while the rapid progress of AI leaves only five-to-10 years to find a way.
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