Photo: iStock
Dániel Kovács
02/05/2024 09:00
China has won the race against the US in artificial intelligence. „China is heading for global dominance because of its advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and cyber capabilities,” said Nicolas Chaillan, the Pentagon’s former chief software officer, three years ago. „We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion,” he told Financial Times, adding that he feared Beijing would dominate the future of the world, controlling everything from media narratives to geopolitics. Of course, the situation is much more nuanced than that, with developments in the US also moving ahead at full steam, but the reality may be that Beijing has now reached the level at which the West is now. This is no small result, given that it was only seven years ago, in 2017, that the Chinese government developed an AI roadmap, which prioritised the development of the technology and set out a scenario for the introduction of government regulation.
The so-called Next Generation AI Development Plan identified three phases. It called for China to catch up with US AI developments by 2020 and to make significant progress with AI in medicine, manufacturing, urban infrastructure, agriculture and national security by 2025. The ultimate goal is for Beijing to become a leading AI power by 2030. The government has entrusted domestic tech giants Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and iFlytek with the task. In parallel, Beijing has started to mobilise significant resources, with 21.8 billion USD already invested in the industry in 2019, and has also stepped up its build-up of autonomous chip manufacturing. In 2018, Credit Suisse concluded in an analysis that the competition between the United States and China could be won by the latter.
These predictions now seem to be coming true, as the number of areas in which China is actively using artificial intelligence, even if only as a test, is growing. One such example is the software used by the Shanghai Pudong People’s Procuratorate, which uses AI to identify the most common crimes. It filters out criminals with an astonishing 97 percent accuracy rate, based on reports.
Another notable example is the WJ-1A, China’s first satellite with artificial intelligence in its ’brain’. It is testing the system, detecting forest fires and soil moisture, and is involved in the development of various intelligent applications, so it does not need to send the data it collects to the ground, as it processes it on board.
Last year, China’s ChatGPTs were also launched after the government granted several tech companies licences to operate AI chatbots in public. Following the approval, four Chinese companies, including Baidu and SenseTime, launched their own chatbots, with Baidu’s development appearing to be the most popular so far, topping Apple’s app store download list in China immediately after its launch.
The author is an economic journalist
