How censorship in China could hold back its quest for AI supremacy

A few years ago, China appeared well placed to threaten the US’ technological lead, but the advent of large language models is a game-changer

New draft rules covering chatbots, on top of the existing censorship regime, will constrain the ability of China’s tech companies to develop generative AI

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A recent assessment by internet trust tool NewsGuard found that OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 generated far more false information in Chinese than it did in English. Image: Shutterstock

Stephen Roach

Stephen S.

Published: 3:45pm, 25 May 2023

In his now-classic 2018 book, AI Superpowers, Kai-fu Lee threw down the gauntlet in arguing that China poses a growing technological threat to the United States. When Lee gave a guest lecture to my “Next China” class at Yale in late 2019, my students were enthralled by his provocative case: America was about to lose its first-mover advantage in discovery (the expertise of AI’s algorithms) to China’s advantage in implementation (big-data-driven applications).

Alas, Lee left out a key development: the rise of large language models and generative artificial intelligence. While he did allude to a more generic form of general-purpose technology, which he traced back to the Industrial Revolution, he didn’t come close to capturing the ChatGPT frenzy that has now engulfed the AI debate.

Lee’s arguments, while making vague references to “deep learning” and neural networks, hinged far more on AI’s potential to replace human-performed tasks rather than on the possibilities for an “artificial general intelligence” that is close to human thinking. This is hardly a trivial consideration when it comes to China’s future as an AI superpower.