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

by Kai-Fu Lee

The engineering know-how and design sensibility needed to create a world-class technology product don’t just appear out of nowhere. In the United States, universities, companies, and engineers have been cultivating and passing down these skillsets for generations. Each generation has its breakout companies or products, but these innovations rest on a foundation of education, mentorship, internships, and inspiration. China had no such luxury. When Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975, China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, a time of massive social upheaval and anti-intellectual fever. When Sergei Brin and Larry Page founded Google in 1998, just 0.2 percent of the Chinese population was connected to the internet, compared with 30 percent in the United States. Early Chinese tech entrepreneurs looking for mentors or model companies within their own country simply couldn’t find them. So instead they looked abroad and copied them as best they could. It was a crude process to be sure, and sometimes an embarrassing one. But it taught these copycats the basics of user interface design, website architecture, and back-end software development. As their clone-like products went live, these market-driven entrepreneurs were forced to grapple with user satisfaction and iterative product development. If they wanted to win the market, they had to beat not just their Silicon Valley inspiration but also droves of similar copycats. They learned what worked and what didn’t w...