Artificial Intelligence
The Chinese government has long elevated artificial intelligence (AI) development to a strategic national priority with policies like the New-Generation AI Development Plan in 2017. It sees the potential of AI to radically transform social and productive structures due to its ability to perform tasks that usually require human intelligence.
US-China competition for dominance over AI technologies shapes today’s geopolitics. Wary of China’s potential, especially Beijing’s ambition to leverage AI for modernizing its military, the US has imposed sweeping export controls aimed at hobbling its progress.
Thanks to government support and global links, Chinese applied AI companies like computer vision firms SenseTime and Megvii are now household names. China’s fast-growing talent base and vibrant ecosystem of companies and public research labs are leading AI application development and producing high-impact AI research.
But China’s main weakness lies in its historical links with US industry: it trails in the fundamentals. China still cannot match the quality of US-designed AI chips and relies on machine learning frameworks developed by US firms. While China’s AI future is for now tied to choices made in Washington, in the long run, Chinese large language models and other types of AI systems may well prove good enough for the tasks they need to fulfill: enabling industrial applications and boosting military and security capabilities.
At a glance
The Chinese LLM ecosystem has entered what many are calling the “battle of a hundred models.” Leaderboards scoring different models on benchmarking tasks, such as language generation and translation, change constantly. In the June 2024 ranking for SuperCLUE, a Chinese-language benchmark, many Chinese models shine. Trailing only behind GPT-4, Alibaba’s Qwen is China’s top model. Leading AI startups DeepSeek, Zhipu, Baichuan, Moonshot all feature on the leaderboard, as do tech giants SenseTime, ByteDance, Baidu and iFlytek.
In 2023, China-affiliated authors publish more on AI than authors from any other country or region, after lagging both Europe and the US in 2017. This shows that the government’s focus on AI is having real impact. China’s output is even larger if Chinese-language papers are taken into account.
Chinese policy makers view AI development as a priority, evidenced by how many policy documents mention AI. They see AI as key to achieving government goals like informatization and focus on AI’s application to the real economy. Policy regulation of this emerging technology is also a concern, as policy documents also mention words like security, declaration, standard, and supervision.
Artificial Intelligence in China: Timeline of crucial events
Development
Policy/regulation
A team at Tsinghua University's Department of Precision Instruments develops Tianmoc, a brain-inspired chip designed for AI applications.
OpenAI blocks API access for China-based developers after shutting down online influence and hacking networks linked to China and others, further decoupling US and Chinese generative AI ecosystems.
The Government Work Report to the National People's Congress proposes the "AI+" initiative to deepen integration between AI and the real economy.
Top Chinese and Western scientists meet in Beijing to discuss safety and existential risks associated with advanced AI systems.
China signs the Bletchley Declaration, the outcome of a major AI safety summit hosted by the UK. China's involvement with the US and other democratic nations shows shared concern around risks of AI.
The CAC greenlights ERNIE Bot and 10 other models for release. The approvals signal regulators' balancing act between security and development and shows censorship is not an insurmountable obstacle.
China becomes the first country to regulate generative AI with final rules. Public chatbots and the underlying models must pass a review – a de-facto licensing regime.
The CAC releases draft rules on generative AI, building on existing synthetic content rules and reflecting the CAC’s focus on controlling online content.
Baidu announced ERNIE Bot, a conversational AI bot built on the company's LLM ERNIE. It is widely seen as a response to US-based Open AI’s ChatGPT of November 2022.
China releases rules on synthetic (AI-generated) content, motivated by concerns around deepfakes.
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and three other agencies require companies to file algorithms for review, reflecting concerns over how they spread online content and make decisions.
US and Chinese officials hold first bilateral talks on AI safety and risks in Geneva.
Tsinghua and ShengShu Technology unveil Vidu, a text-to-video generator and China's answer to OpenAI's Sora announced in February 2024.
Chinese online retailer Alibaba announces investment in LLM startup MiniMax, following similar investments in Zhipu AI, Baichuan AI, 01.AI, and Moonshot AI.
Yi-34B, a model from leading startup 01.AI, tops the international leaderboard for open-source LLMs. But it becomes mired in controversy over the way it referenced Meta's Llama2 architecture.
China restricts access to Hugging Face, the top international platform for open-source AI collaboration. China’s open-source community is displeased but seeks alternatives to work on leading models.
Chinese AI experts led by a team at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) publish recommendations for a comprehensive AI law after legislation is added to the State Council's work plan.
Baichuan-Inc, a startup of the founder of internet search engine Sugou, releases its first open-source LLM. The Baichuan series is among the best performing in China.
Tsinghua University's Knowledge Engineering Group announces the bilingual pre-trained model ChatGLM-130B and its open-source version, ChatGLM-6B. The team founds Zhipu AI.
The US puts export controls on semiconductors and key hardware that Chinese firms need to train AI, severely limiting their access to leading-edge graphic-processing units (GPUs).
China's algorithm filing portal goes online for recommender engines, the genesis of a licensing system later used for generative AI and large language models (LLMs).
Huawei releases deep learning software framework Mindspore to the open-source community, as China attempts to reduce reliance on Google and Meta frameworks.
Key developments
Tech progress
- The 2024 World AI Conference in July in Shanghai focused on robotics. A humanoid general-purpose robot, Qinglong, was unveiled by Humanoid Robot, a lab and state-designated innovation center. Tesla also debuted its latest humanoid robot. (Source (EN): Tech Node)
Domestic dynamics
- US firm OpenAI has ended services in China and cut off access to its generative AI models, furthering a growing split between Chinese and Western AI ecosystems. (Source (EN): Time)
- The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released a draft AI Industry Standardization Framework Guidance, setting goals for industry standards in six key areas., This is in line with other standardization framework guidance in China. (Source (CN): S&T Daily)
Foreign involvement
- US company Nvidia, the world's leading producer of AI chips, is reportedly working on a less powerful version of its new Blackwell chip in order to stay in the Chinese market despite US export restrictions. (Source (CN): EE Times China)
- The first US-China AI dialogue on risks took place in May behind closed doors, focusing on AI risks and the importance of governance measures. China reiterated its complaint against US export controls hampering its AI development. (Source (EN): AP News)
- Meta’s latest open-source LLM, Llama3.1, performs at the level of the best proprietary models. This upends previous assumptions about the strength of commercial vs freely available LLMs and will likely quicken Washington’s efforts to restrict what foreign adversaries can access. (Source (EN): The Verge)
Latest publications
Topics
