Chinese tech companies were caught off guard by a breakthrough in generative artificial intelligence. Chinese government regulations and economic stagnation don't help. From the report: In November, a year after the release of ChatGPT, a relatively unknown Chinese startup shot to the top of a leaderboard evaluating the capabilities of open source artificial intelligence systems. The Chinese company 01.AI was founded just eight months ago, but with deep-pocketed backers and a valuation of $1 billion, the prominent investor and technologist has joined Kai- Founded by Fu Lee. In an interview, Lee introduced his company's AI system as an alternative to options like Meta's generative AI model, called LLaMA. However, he had one trick. 01. Some of the technology for AI's system was provided by his LLaMA. Lee's startup then built on Meta's technology, training the system with new data to make it more powerful.
This situation is emblematic of a reality that many in China openly acknowledge. Despite China's rush to develop generative AI, Chinese companies rely almost entirely on U.S. infrastructure systems. China is currently at least a year behind the United States in generative AI and could fall further behind, according to more than a dozen tech industry officials and top engineers, marking a new phase in the fierce technology race between the two countries. We are laying the groundwork for this. Some liken it to the Cold War. “Chinese companies are under tremendous pressure to keep up with U.S. innovation,” said Chris Nicholson, an investor at Page One Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on AI technology. The release of ChatGPT became “another Sputnik moment that China felt it had to respond to.”
Jenny Xiao, a partner at Leonis Capital, an investment firm focused on AI-enabled companies, said the AI models that Chinese companies build from scratch are “not very good,” and many Chinese companies are “Adjusted version” is often used, he said. Western model. ” She estimated that China is two to three years behind the United States in developing generative AI. The fight for AI supremacy has big implications. Breakthroughs in generative AI could change the balance of technological power in the world, improve people's productivity, support industry, and secure future innovations, even as countries grapple with the risks of the technology. may lead to. The U.S. government is in a difficult position as Chinese companies seek to catch up by relying on U.S. open source AI models. The United States has sought to slow China's progress by restricting microchip sales and curbing investment, but it has not reined in its practice of openly releasing software to facilitate their adoption. For China, a new reliance on US AI systems (primarily Meta's LLaMA) has produced world-beating companies like Alibaba and ByteDance in recent decades, despite China's authoritarianism. , has sparked deeper questions about the country's innovation model, which has surprised many. Control.