China’s AI elite issue stark warning amid US rivalry
Executives from Alibaba, Tencent and Zhipu have painted a grim picture of an ‘overstretched sector’
Battle lines are being redrawn in the artificial intelligence war between China and the United States. Already the Chinese AI elite have warned Beijing they risk losing the superpower conflict without state-of-the-art American chips.
Last week, executives from Alibaba, Tencent and Zhipu painted a grim picture of their country’s “overstretched sector.” They illustrated the global hype surrounding Chinese AI breakthroughs as the gap widens between rival US leaders OpenAI and Anthropic.
“A massive amount of OpenAI’s compute is dedicated to next-generation research, whereas we are stretched thin – just meeting delivery demands consumes our resources,” Justin Lin, the head of Alibaba’s Qwen open-source AI models, said as reported by Bloomberg News.
Tang Jie, the founder of newly-listed Zhipu and chief AI scientist, was just as scathing. “The gap between China and the US may be widening because the US has many models that they have not released to the public,” he said as reported by the South China Morning Post.
One answer: they’re lobbying Beijing to get export controls lifted.
Kyle Chan, Brookings Institution
Tech Tok:
- Lin and Tang voiced their concerns at the AGI-Next summit in Beijing over the weekend.
- They came just days after the US$1 billion IPOs of Zhipu and MiniMax in Hong Kong.
Delve deeper: “Why would top Chinese AI leaders admit so publicly that they’re falling behind the US due to computer constraints,” Kyle Chan, of the Washington-based Brookings Institution, asked in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Between the lines: “One answer: they’re lobbying Beijing fiercely to get export controls lifted and allow purchases of more powerful Nvidia chips like the H200,” Chan, of the John L Thornton China Center, said.
Big picture: The ruling Communist Party has championed tech self-sufficiency in the world’s second-largest economy. But reports surfaced last week that the Party was on the verge of approving imports of game-changing Nvidia processors.
China Factor comment: H200 semiconductors will certainly ease “computer constraints,” but will not claw back the lost ground in the race for AI dominance. They are still outdated compared to Nvidia’s ultra-powerful Blackwell Superchip or the B200 GPU.