Episode 2195 - June 30 - Tiếng Anh - Tỷ phú và Quan chức Trung Quốc huy động để tranh đua AI với Mỹ - Vina Technology at AI time - Lê Quang Văn | Podcast - Nhac.vn

Billionaires and Bureaucrats Mobilize China for AI Race With US

Jane Zhang, Sarah Zheng, June 29, 2024.

China’s tech sector has a new obsession: competing with US titans like Google and Microsoft Corp. 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 Ltd., e-commerce platform JD.com Inc., 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 Holdings Ltd. bought out in a $3.5 billion deal less than two years ago, the opportunity came fast. By April, the computer science graduate had already set up his own startup 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,” Wang, who named his startup Baichuan or “A Hundred Rivers,” told Bloomberg News. “China is still three years behind the US, but we may not need three years to catch up.”

The top-flight Chinese talent and financing flowing into AI mirror 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 US 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 US.

AI investments in the US 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.

China's Catch-Up Game | The aggregate size of US deals in AI still outpaces China's in 2023

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 US total of about 447 in the year to mid-June, versus 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 startup investment cratered during the years Beijing went after tech giants and “reckless expansion of capital,” the feeling is the Party encourages AI exploration

It’s a familiar challenge for Chinese tech players

During the mobile era, a generation of startups led by Tencent, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., and TikTok-owner ByteDance built an industry that could genuinely rival Silicon Valley. It helped that Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp were shut out of the booming market of 1.4 billion people. At one point in 2018, venture capital funding in China was even on track to surpass that of the US — until the trade war exacerbated an economic downturn. That situation, where local firms thrive when US rivals are absent