Does this make the US win the race?

– One of the world’s leading Chinese experts tells Aftenposten that the consequences are indeed great.

During the Cold War, the arms race was about building the biggest rockets and getting to the moon first.

Now the race is on to develop artificial intelligence.

– The consequences will be as dire as they were then The gap within computer technology It became larger and larger between the West and the Soviet Union, the professor writes Xu Chenggang to Aftenposten.

He is an expert on the Chinese digital economy at Stanford University.

One of the reasons the United States won the Cold War was the technology gap. It was impossible for the Soviet Union and its allies to catch up, Chenggang wrote for Aftenposten.

The professor is an expert on China’s digital economy at Stanford University.

Xu Chenggang

Professor at Stanford University.

Chatbot shock

When the Soviet Union sent Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, into Earth orbit, it threw the West into an acute, almost existential crisis.

Has the West lost its technological superiority to the Communists?

And now the Chinese are affected by a kind of opposite Sputnik shockwrites in the Danish newspaper Weekend Newspaper.

The cause of the shock is the launch of ChatGPT. It is developed by OpenAI, which is funded by Microsoft, among others.

Aftenposten wrote a week ago that a chatbot now lurks so convincingly that people are being tricked into letting it bypass barriers that were supposed to keep the bots out.

More than 1,000, highly influential experts and technology leaders, have signed an open letter now. They demand that all large AI labs halt development of new, more powerful language models for at least six months.

But while ChatGPT caused both excitement and anxiety around the world, the chatbot was a rude wake-up for China, says Chenggang.

Before that, many people thought that China had made huge progress in terms of artificial intelligence.

– Now it turns out that China is significantly behind in this area of ​​\u200b\u200bresearch. Many users have tried the Chinese version and compared it to ChatGPT. The gap is significant, writes Chenggang.

Weekendavisen writes in her article about the Chinese chatbot Ernie, which should be able to compete with ChatGPT. but According to Reuters The result was disappointing.

During the launch, a video was shown where the chatbot solved puzzles and spoke different Chinese dialects.

“But everything was recorded up front, which left the impression that they didn’t fully trust the technology yet,” Weekendavisen writes.

control barrier

When asked if China will be able to catch up, the answer from Chenggang is clear and unequivocal: “No.”

China has long sought to dominate the development of artificial intelligence (AI). The country has set out a plan to become the “global leader” in this sector by 2030. They will do so by spending billions of dollars on research and development.

In the past, many predicted that authoritarian regimes would have a hard time developing the latest technology. But this year Harvard Gazette Books China may be the exception. They pointed out that AI serendipitously acted in the interests of the authoritarian regime. Within, for example, facial recognition technology, China had five of the largest.

Thus, China has become a leader in the field of artificial intelligence. But now ChatGPT has broken the Chinese success story.

It turns out that it is difficult to develop chatbots under supervision, Weekendavisen writes.

And many researchers point out that censorship in particular could become a critical barrier to Chinese technological development.

“Chinese training data tends to be censored in one way or another, which makes it very difficult to achieve the same degree of accuracy as the English-language data,” says Antonia Hamidi, a technology analyst at the think tank. Marcator Institute for China Studies in Berlinto Weekendavisen.

Hamidi points out that there is also an internal lethargy in the Chinese system. While a western company like OpenAI could launch its own chatbot for public use, and then correct errors based on user feedback, a Chinese chatbot does not have the same luxury.

China cannot risk launching a chatbot that expresses incorrect opinions on sensitive issues like Hong Kong and Taiwan, Weekendavisen wrote.

hypoxia

Why wasn’t China invented ChatGPT?

“The development of technological products is inseparable from the system and the environment in which they operate,” said Xu Chenggang. The New York Times in February.

He mentioned Tiktok’s sister app in Chinese doyen As a kind of innovation that Chinese companies may not be able to achieve in the future.

“When the open environment is gone, creating such products will be difficult,” he said.

“The tech industry has been hampered by the state’s tight control and heavy hand. So has entrepreneurs’ reluctance to make long-term investments in China,” New York Times Books.

Chenggang points out that AI consists of three components; Algorithms, chips and data. The professor claims that China is weak in all three areas.

organic development

The essential difference is that the United States has allowed private companies to develop the technology. There were no private companies sending rockets to the Moon in the 1960s.

During the Cold War, technological development in nuclear and space technology was characterized by “a significant barrier to participation and close monopoly by state actors”, Writes Foreign Policy.

They point out that technology development is not a two-player race as it was during the Cold War. It is more than an organic evolution as a number of countries, companies and research environments develop the technology.

“I think the Industrial Revolution is a more useful comparison,” says Paul Scharre, of the think tank Center for a New American Security. for foreign policy.