Why ‘Beating China’ In AI Poses Its Own Risks

The Biden administration this week introduced new export restrictions designed to control AI progress globally and ultimately prevent the most advanced AI from falling into China’s hands. The rule is just the latest in a series of steps taken by Donald Trump and Joe Biden to keep Chinese AI at bay. , the Trump administration may add even more. Paul Triolo is a partner at DGA Group, a global consulting firm, a member of the foreign relations board, and a senior advisor to the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Project on the Future of US-China Relations. Alvin Graylin is an entrepreneur who previously ran the China operations for Taiwanese electronics company HPC. Together they have tracked China’s AI industry and the impact of US sanctions. In an email exchange, Triolo and Graylin discuss the latest sanctions, Silicon Valley rhetoric, and the dangers of viewing global AI as a zero sum game. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Did you make new AI diffusion rules from the US government this week, which aims to curb China’s access to AI? Paul Triolo: In general, the focus is on high-performance computing clusters. The rules also control the weight of proprietary models for the most advanced “frontier” models, but it is not clear how the level of performance will be determined, and the weight of the most open. [freely shared] AI models are tuned and improved by users, including major AI companies in China. Complex rules and unclear compliance conditions inject uncertainty into the long-term plans of medium and major US and western hyperscalers. For hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Oracle, the rules introduce critical issues, including slower or more complicated international expansion, new compliance and legal costs, impacts on global R&D, and uncertain enforcement requirements. measures, including sanctions introduced by the first Trump administration, affected the AI ​​industry there? Paul Triolo: US export controls have slowed down China, but at a high level sanctions have united the will and efforts of the Chinese government to become more self-reliant. It has plowed tens of billions to help local players capture technological capacity or scale in core areas, resulting in significant changes in the semiconductor industry and the ability to support advanced hardware to develop frontier AI models. Chinese AI developers have been very good at using legacy AI hardware from western companies and are gradually incorporating domestic alternatives into their development processes. Chinese companies will continue to innovate in the AI ​​hardware and software stack, if not in line with their western counterparts. Do you think many in Silicon Valley are now talking about the need to “beat China” in AI? Paul Triolo: There is a growing relationship between conservative venture capitalists, mostly in Silicon Valley, and tech companies whose business models depend on the threat of China. It’s a troubling combination that combines China’s threat, private gain, and pushback against advanced AI regulation. It also portrays US China competition around AI as zero sum, which is very dangerous.

Source link