KEY TAKEAWAYS
China is the global leader in AI research publications and is neck and neck with the United States on generative AI. However, China’s research publications have less impact than U.S. ones, with fewer citations and less private-sector involvement.
Tsinghua University in Beijing is the breeding ground for China’s leading AI start-ups, including four of the country’s “AI tigers”—Zhipu AI, Baichuan AI, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—which were all founded by faculty and alumni.
Chinese large language models are closing the performance gap with U.S. models, with some Chinese models outperforming their U.S. counterparts in bilingual benchmarks.
China has less private AI investment than the United States, but foreign investment in China’s generative AI sector is growing, with Saudi Arabia’s Aramco leading the way.
State-directed capital funds and financial aid are proving effective at supporting high-potential firms in regions of China the private sector typically underinvests in.
China’s open-source LLM ecosystem is rapidly advancing, with models such as Alibaba’s Qwen 1.5 and Zhipu AI’s ChatGLM3 outperforming some U.S. counterparts and gaining recognition for their impressive capabilities.
U.S. policymakers should not prioritize containing China, but rather craft and fund a comprehensive national AI strategy that addresses the twin goals of increased AI development and increased AI adoption to stay ahead.
https://itif.org/publications/2024/08/26/how-innovative-is-china-in-ai