“Where Does China Stand In the Current AI Wave? China’s Top Policy Experts Discuss the US-China Gap, Open vs. Closed, and Societal Implications”, 2024-05-10 ():
[Xue Lan, Zhang Hongjiang, Li Hang, & Zhou Zhonghe debate Chinese AI quality, compute/talent, & scaling laws]
In this article, ChinaTalk presents the highlights and a full translation of a panel discussion on AI that took place 6 weeks ago in Beijing. Hosted by the non-profit organization “The Intellectual” 知识分子—whose public WeChat account serves as a platform for discussions on scientific issues and their governance implications—the panelists delved into a wide range of topics, including:
the state of China’s AI industry, discussing the biggest bottlenecks, potential advantages in AI applications, and the role of the government in supporting domestic AI development;
the technical aspects of AI, such as whether Sora understands physics, the reliance on the Transformer architecture, and how far we are from true AGI;
and the societal implications—which jobs will be replaced by AI first, whether open-source or closed-source is better for AI safety, and if AI developers should dedicate more resources to AI safety.
…Talent, data, compute—what’s the bottleneck?: Due to US export controls, many consider compute the key constraint on China’s AI development. The panelists in this debate, however, identified talent as the more important concern.
- Zhang Hongjiang: …“Stanford University annually publishes an AI Index report. This report counts the publication of AI papers globally. Guess where MIT ranks among the top-ten institutions?”
Zhou Zhonghe: “Isn’t it ranked first?”
Zhang Hongjiang: “If MIT ranked first, I would not ask the question. In fact, MIT ranks tenth. The top 9 are all Chinese institutions. This shows that we must have a lot of talent in the industry. We simply need to turn the quantity of published articles into quality, move from follower status to breakthroughs and leadership.”
[COAGULOPATH: “No mentions of Ernie 4.0, PanGu-Sigma, or any other Chinese model (unless it’s after the paywall). Instead, American models like GPT-4 and Sora dominate the conversation. The best thing they say for China’s AI industry is that it produces a lot of talent… but it’s left unsaid who that talent ends up working for.”]