As if having Dr. Lee put together his Manhattan Project team, "Kai-Fu Lee launches AI start-up to seize on ‘historical opportunity’ to build Chinese LLMs"wasn't enough, the whole country seems re-energized.
From Bloomberg via the U.S. military magazine Star and Stripes, June 28:
China’s tech sector has a new obsession: competing with U.S. titans such as Google and Microsoft in the breakneck global artificial intelligence race.
Billionaire entrepreneurs, mid-level engineers and veterans of foreign firms alike now harbor a remarkably consistent ambition: to outdo China’s geopolitical rival in a technology that may determine the global power stakes. Among them is internet mogul Wang Xiaochuan, who entered the field after OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted to a social media firestorm in November. He joins the ranks of Chinese scientists, programmers and financiers — including former employees of ByteDance, e-commerce platform JD.com and Google — expected to propel some $15 billion of spending on AI technology this year.
For Wang, who founded the search engine Sogou that Tencent bought out in a $3.5 billion deal not even two years ago, the opportunity came fast. By April, the computer science graduate had already set up his own start-up and secured $50 million in seed capital. He reached out to former subordinates at Sogou, many of whom he convinced to come on board. By June, his firm had launched an open-source large language model and it’s already in use by researchers at China’s two most prominent universities.
“We all heard the sound of the starter pistol in the race. Tech companies, big or small, are all on the same starting line,” said Wang, who named his start-up Baichuan or “A Hundred Rivers.” “China is still three years behind the U.S., but we may not need three years to catch up.”
The top-flight Chinese talent and financing flowing into AI mirrors a wave of activity convulsing Silicon Valley, which has deep implications for Beijing’s escalating conflict with Washington. Analysts and executives believe AI will shape the technology leaders of the future, much like the internet and smartphone created a corps of global titans. Moreover, it could propel applications from supercomputing to military prowess — potentially tilting the geopolitical balance.
China is a vastly different landscape — one reined in by U.S. tech sanctions, regulators’ data and censorship demands, and Western distrust that limits the international expansion of its national champions. All that will make it harder to play catch-up with the U.S.
AI investments in the U.S. dwarf that of China, totaling $26.6 billion in the year to mid-June versus China’s $4 billion, according to previously unreported data collated by consultancy Preqin.
Yet that gap is already gradually narrowing, at least in terms of deal flow. The number of Chinese venture deals in AI comprised more than two-thirds of the U.S. total of about 447 in the year to mid-June, vs. about 50% over the previous two years. China-based AI venture deals also outpaced consumer tech in 2022 and early 2023, according to Preqin.
All this is not lost on Beijing. Xi Jinping’s administration realizes that AI, much like semiconductors, will be critical to maintaining China’s ascendancy and is likely to mobilize the nation’s resources to drive advances. While start-up investment cratered during the years Beijing went after tech giants and “reckless expansion of capital,” the feeling is the Party encourages AI exploration....
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