AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

by Kai-Fu Lee

If one’s only edge is a single novel idea, that idea will invariably be copied, your key employees will be poached, and you’ll be driven out of business by VC-subsidized competitors.

This unparalleled trove of real-world data will give Chinese companies a major leg up in developing AI-driven services.

Yes, but only for chinese market and public . Even trnsfer lerning go so far if you try to adpt to many different makerts.

To that end, how valuable would Uber become if in the span of a couple of years, the company was able to replace every single human driver with an AI-powered self-driving car?

This failed. humn drivers still have 10-15 years .

to become the founder and chairman of Zhongguancun Bank, a financial “startup” modeled on Silicon Valley Bank and dedicated to serving local entrepreneurs and innovators.

I hope he manages risk better than SVB.

But the super-app model proved wildly successful for WeChat and has played a crucial role in shaping this alternate universe of internet services.

5 years later and Super Apps are not dominating other markets .

But that advantage has now turned into a liability, with fees of 2.5 to 3 percent on most charges turning into a drag on adoption and utilization.

There are no free lunch. Even QR payments need to have fees.

Those startups are now scrapping for a slice of an AI landscape increasingly dominated by a handful of major players: the so-called Seven Giants of the AI age, which include Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.

How 5 years change things!!? No mention of Nvidia.

Those tinkerers didn’t have to break new ground like Edison.

He should hve used Maxsuel and Farhaday.

Not so today. When asked how far China lags behind Silicon Valley in artificial intelligence research, some Chinese entrepreneurs jokingly answer “sixteen hours”—the

Almost one year, and I'm not aware of any real ChatGPT rival from China.

team members leave to found their own AI startups, and some groups like Microsoft Research, Facebook AI Research, and DeepMind still publish articles on their most meaningful contributions. But broadly speaking, if one of these companies makes a unique breakthrough—a trade secret that could generate massive profits for that company alone—it will do its best to keep a lid on

A groundbreaking discovery occurring within one of these closed systems poses the greatest threat to the world’s open AI ecosystem. It also threatens to stymie China in its goal of becoming a global leader in AI.

Like transformers?

But if the next breakthrough on the scale of deep learning occurs soon, and it happens within a hermetically sealed corporate environment, all bets are off. It could give one company an insurmountable advantage over the other Seven Giants and return us to an age of discovery in which elite expertise tips the balance of power in favor of the United States.

Good prediction. It is called GPT.

To be clear, I believe the odds are slightly against such a breakthrough coming out of the corporate behemoths in the coming years.

What if one coorporation bahimot buys it?

But if the next deep learning is destined to be discovered in the corporate world, Google has the best shot at it. Among the Seven AI Giants, Google—more

Yes. But leadership was too slow to push to market its own solution. Google left other rip the benefits .

Between 2016 and early 2018, the company’s stock price multiplied by a factor of ten.

That was becase of crypto mostly.

There will be traditional technology companies that merely rebrand themselves as “AI companies” to rake in subsidies, and AI equipment purchases that simply gather dust in government offices.

Obama survived the negative onslaught to win another term, but the lessons for American politicians were clear: using government funding to invest in economic and technological upgrades is a risky business. Successes are often ignored, and every misfire becomes fodder for attack ads. It’s far safer to stay out of the messy business of upgrading an economy.

Looks like Biden ignored that lesson and did Buil Back Better anyways .

But it won’t happen all at once. The complete AI revolution will take a little time and will ultimately wash over us in a series of four waves: internet AI, business AI, perception AI, and autonomous AI.

Did he forgot generative ai?

I predict that in five years’ time, Chinese technology companies will have a slight advantage (60–40) when it comes to leading the world in internet AI and reaping the richest rewards from its implementation.

It failed. but why? those technologies are finally being adopted in the west. But the Chinese compankes are taking advantage of their jump start.

That data forms a kind of digital fingerprint, one with an astonishing ability to predict whether the borrower will pay back a loan of three hundred dollars.

This can never work in the west. Lgpd.

For instance, it considers the speed at which you typed in your date of birth, how much battery power is left on your phone, and thousands of other parameters.

I worked in a company that did that.

Not everyone, however, is so optimistic. Elon Musk has called superintelligence “the biggest risk we face as a civilization,” comparing the creation of it to “summoning the demon.”

Elon Musk is a idiot.

These are what economists call general purpose technologies, or GPTs.

Another GPT!

loved one after its victory. Despite what science-fiction films like Her—in which a man and his artificially intelligent computer operating system fall in love—portray, AI has no ability or desire to love or be loved.

How do you know?

Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator president Sam Altman

Our boy Sam showing for the first time.