Is China more advanced than the US in AI

China leading US in technology race in all but a few fields, thinktank finds

The United States and other western countries are losing the race with China to develop advanced technologies and retain talent, with Beijing potentially establishing a monopoly in some areas, a new report has said.

China leads in 37 of 44 technologies tracked in a year-long project by thinktank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The fields include electric batteries, hypersonics and advanced radio-frequency communications such as 5G and 6G.

The report, published on Thursday, said the US was the leader in just the remaining seven technologies such as vaccines, quantum computing and space launch systems.

It said the findings were based on high impact research in critical and emerging technology fields, focusing on papers that were published in top-tier journals and were highly cited by subsequent research.

Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the worlds leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains, the report said.

The critical technology tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the worlds top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US).

The Chinese Academy of Sciences ranked first or second in most of the 44 technologies included in the tracker, the report added.

We also see Chinas efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country, it said, referring to the intelligence-sharing grouping of the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

Chinas lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.

Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address last month that the US was investing in American innovation, in industries that will define the future, and that Chinas government is intent on dominating.

But the institute said China was at high risk of establishing a monopoly in eight technologies, including nanoscale materials and manufacturing, hydrogen and ammonia for power, and synthetic biology.

The report said Chinas strides in nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles in 2021 should not have been a surprise to US intelligence agencies because, according to our data analysis, over the past five years, China generated 48.49% of the worlds high-impact research papers into advanced aircraft engines, including hypersonics, and it hosts seven of the worlds top 10 research institutions in this topic area.

Across the board, the institute also found that there was a large gap between China and the US, as the leading two countries, and everyone else.

The data then indicates a small, second-tier group of countries led by India and the UK: other countries that regularly appear in this group-in many technological fields include South Korea, Germany, Australia, Italy, and less often, Japan, it said.

The research, launched at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi on Thursday, was conducted by a team led by Jamie Gaida, a senior analyst with the institutes international cyber policy centre.

The institute disclosed that its research was funded by the US state departments global engagement center and a grant from the Special Competitive Studies Project, a foundation that aims to strengthen Americas long-term competitiveness.

The institute also called for democracies to establish large sovereign wealth funds for research, development and innovation in critical technology that they add to each year. It suggests allocating 0.5% to 0.7% of gross national income, with co-investment from industry.

It said while sovereign wealth funds should support the most promising programs, governments should also allocate some funds to high-risk, high-reward moonshot initiatives.

AI: How far is China behind the West?

Chinese tech giants are speeding to catch up with their US peers in the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. The world's second-largest economy is on course to spend $15 billion (13.5 billion) on AI projects this year alone, a rise of nearly 50% in just two years.

Even before the arrival of large language models like the Microsoft-backed Chat GPT, some tech experts refused to bet that the West would dominate the AI race, despite the most advanced AI labs being located in the US and UK.

Kai-Fu Lee, the Taiwanese computer scientist, venture capitalist and tech executive predicted in 2018 that China would quickly surpass the US as an AI superpower, insistingthe technology had already passed the innovation stage.

Lee argued that the world was now in the AI implementation stage, where China has the edge, due to years of state surveillance. Snooping on the Chinese populationhas allowed the accrual of huge amounts of data, which AI platformsharness to improve their learning.

Strong growth ahead

But while more than half of the estimated 1 billion surveillance cameras on the planet have been deployed in China, Lee's critics argue that the AI revolution is still in its infancy and the West still holds the key.

"The big innovations in AI haven't happened yet far from it [...] and the US currently has the advantage in that area," Pedro Domingos, professor emeritus at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineeringat the University of Washington, told DW.

Domingos spoke of large data having "diminishing returns,"in that China won't get a lot more benefit from snooping on its 1.4 billion population than the US does, with its 332 million inhabitants.

"The diversity of the data also matters. I would prefer to have the data from, say, Europe than China as it is more diverse and therefore you can learn more from it."

The US is clearly troubled by Beijing's technological ambitions, especially as the official Chinese government policy is to make the country the world's dominant AI player by 2030.

Chip curbs delays Beijing's ambitions

Ever-worsening relations between Washington and Beijing led the US last year to put export curbs on the most advanced memory chips, which Chinese firms need fortheir own advanced AI language models.

"The most cutting-edge AI systems require massive amounts of hardware thousands of very specialized chips, running for weeks or months at a time,"Paul Scharre, executive vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, told DW.

"Denying China access will shut them out of building the most advanced systems and that gap is likely to widen over time as chip technology continues to advance."

Chinese tech firms may find other ways around the ban. The domestic semiconductor market is likely to see an investment boom as local producers race to improve their own chips.

Is the West giving it away?

Another hole Washington may seek to close is how the US machine learning platformsare currently open source freely available to be copied and modified.

"If you have access to the trained AI model you don't need the advanced chips. So there is a real risk that the export controls will become ineffective,"Scharre, the author of the book "Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," warned.

Indeed, China's own versions of Chat GPT, created by the likes of e-commerce giant Alibaba and social media platform Baidu, were released to the world in April, just months after their US rivals.

Chinese tech sector tamed

But the country has lots of other hurdles to overcome before it rules the AI space. For one, President Xi Jinping's crackdown on the power of the tech sector over the past two years likely made Chinese executives more risk-averse.

"You've seen an explosion in rules and enforcement for the tech sector,"Karman Lucero, a fellow at thePaul Tsai China Center, at Yale Law School, told DW. "Often it[the enforcement] has been very opaque and haseven preceded the new rules, which has a chilling effect on the industry."

Luceronoted how the Chinese government's obsession with censorship could be theirAchilles heel as AI models won't realize their full learning potential with large amounts of missing data or when programmed to avoid many off-limit topics.

"In China, you have this wide range of [censorable] content that is always shifting. Something that could be a permissible topic today could be prohibited tomorrow, and there's no way to predict it."

Brain drain inevitable

The country is also short of skilled workers needed to achieve Beijing's goals. Despite an effort to build an army of AI talent, retaining top tech workers is a challenge when their skills are in demand globally.

"Talent exodus is amajor hindrance to China's authoritarianism in that it drives people away. China's top AI scientists leave and it's not just that they go abroad to study and work, they prefer a more democratic way of life," Scharre said.

Despite these issues, hethinks China's AI labs are just 18 months behind the current leading research labs in the Westand that the country already has the edge when it comes to deploying AI across society.

How to regulate artificial intelligence

China undeterred

While some in the West still question whether the rollout of AI should be paused over safety concerns, Domingos says China is going full steam ahead in exploiting what he said wasa "dream tool for an autocrat."

"For us in the democratic world, it's absolutely essential that the US comes out ahead. If China does, we're in a lot of trouble politically, economically and militarily," he warned.

In the same way that US culture and technology spreadglobally over the past century,Domingos argued that China's domination ofAI would make the rest of the world more like them, giving the example of how the West quickly followedChina into strict lockdowns when COVID first hit.

"In some ways, it may be harmless there are many great things about China but as far as their ideology goes, it is very dangerous."

Why China Can Do AI More Quickly and Effectively Than the US

When Enrico Fermi decided to leave Benito Mussolinis Italy and emigrate to the United States, he changed the global balance of power. After arriving in the US, Fermi led the worlds first self-sustaining nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago and played an indispensable role in the Manhattan Project, which led to the end of World War II in the Pacific and laid the groundwork for a new world order and Americas prominent role.

So it is not surprising that some Americans think the same should be true with AI. Emigrant AI researchers like Geoff Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng, and Fei-Fei Li are the Enrico Fermis of AI and should secure an American (and Canadian) hegemony in AI. Indeed, the US and Canada have 100 percent of the top 10 AI researchers, and 68 percent of the worlds best 1,000 or so researchers.

But technological revolutions are not only driven by big discoveries. Often, once a fundamental breakthrough has been published, the center of gravity quickly shifts from a handful of elite researchers to an army of tinkerersengineers with enough expertise to apply the technology to different real-world problems and customer needs. This is particularly true when the payoff of a breakthrough is diffused throughout society rather than just concentrated in a few labs.

Mass electrification exemplified this process. Following Thomas Edisons harnessing of electricity, the field rapidly shifted from invention to implementation. Thousands of engineers everywhere began tinkering with electricity, using it to power new devices and reorganize industrial processes. Those tinkerers didnt have to break fundamentally new ground like Edison. They just had to know enough about how electricity worked to turn its power into useful and profitable machines.

Our present-day phase of AI implementation fits this latter model. But you might say: A constant stream of headlines about AI breakthroughs (AlphaGo, Stanford beating doctors in cancer diagnosis, Microsoft beating human in speech recognition, etc.) shows that we are still in an age of discovery. In reality, we are witnessing the application of the same fundamental breakthroughdeep learning and related techniquesto many different problems. Thats a process that requires well-trained AI engineers, the tinkerers of this age, to apply and tweak deep learning for each domain. Today, those tinkerers are applying AIs superhuman powers of pattern recognition to making loans, driving cars, translating text, and powering our Amazon Go and Amazon Alexa.

Deep-learning pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengiothe Enrico Fermis of AIcontinue to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence. And they may yet produce another game-changing breakthrough, one that scrambles the global technological pecking order. But in the meantime, the real action today is with the tinkerers, those who implement AI and make it solve real-world problems.

And this is where China comes inwhile the US is the worlds leader in AI discoveries, China is actually the leader in AI implementation. What matters in AI implementation is speed, execution, product quality, data, and government support. Chinese companies are equal to or ahead of their American counterparts in each of these areas.

First, lets look at speed. The Chinese environment is a combination of a huge market, ample capital, and daring entrepreneurs who are the embodiment of lean startup: fail fast, fail early, and fail often. Chinese entrepreneurs are fast to find market opportunities, build products, and pivot when needed.

For example, after companies like Uber and Didi proved the viability of ride-sharing, Chinas startup world caught sharing fever, trying out every possible iteration of it: shared bicycles, shared mopeds, shared concrete mixers, and shared mobile phone chargers. The vast majority of these died off quickly (known as fail fast), but a few rose to become unicorns, such as Mobike, which reached 20 million rides per day and was sold for $2.7 billion three years from founding.