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

by Kai-Fu Lee

THE AUTONOMOUS BALANCE OF POWER While all of this may sound exciting and innovative to the Chinese landscape, the hard truth is that no amount of government support can guarantee that China will lead in autonomous AI. When it comes to the core technology needed for self-driving cars, American companies remain two to three years ahead of China. In technology timelines, that’s light-years of distance. Part of that stems from the relative importance of elite expertise in fourth-wave AI: safety issues and sheer complexity make autonomous vehicles a much tougher engineering nut to crack. It’s a problem that requires a core team of world-class engineers rather than just a broad base of good ones. This tilts the playing field back toward the United States, where the best engineers from around the globe still cluster at companies like Google. Silicon Valley companies also have a substantial head start on research and development, a product of the valley’s proclivity for moonshot projects. Google began testing its self-driving cars as early as 2009, and many of its engineers went on to found early self-driving startups. China’s boom in such startups really didn’t begin until around 2016. Chinese giants like Baidu and autonomous-vehicle startups like Momenta, JingChi, and Pony.ai, however, are rapidly catching up in technology and data. Baidu’s Apollo project—an open-source partnership and data-sharing arrangement among fifty autonomous-vehicle players, including chipmakers like Nvi...