THERE IS NO RACE between China and the US to be top player in AI development, says a new report from Nature, the world’s top science journal.
The two countries are on different tracks with different endpoints. The US has been leading the pack in making big, headline-grabbing projects like ChatGPT, while China’s focus has been, and remains, the production of practical AI programs that help industrialists, farmers, business people and factories.
AI programs in China are being used “to make trains run on time, monitor fish stocks and provide automated telehealth services,” says the report by science writer Jacob Dreyer in the latest edition of the scientific publication.
Ultimately, China will do its usual thing, passing the systems that work to other nations, “especially to lower-income countries,” the report says.
DIFFERENCE CAUSED BY TARGETS
In the west, companies need to have innovative ideas that make an impact in the media to attract venture capitalists to invest. In contrast, China has more of an engineering school approach—projects must have practical benefit and be shown to be working to get government investment.
“The divergence in priorities reflects the forces driving innovation in each economy: venture capital in the United States and large-scale manufacturing enterprises and organs of the state in China,” Dreyer says.
That doesn’t mean that Chinese AI projects are always smaller. One of them is to integrate AI into a system to control the national grid so that the best use can be made of energy.
China is keen to keep its reputation as a leader in making clean energy options affordable around the world. “Its emerging AI playbook mirrors its approach to other technologies, such as electric vehicles and clean energy: not the first to innovate, but the first to make them affordable for widespread use,” Dreyer writes.
The huge attention paid to DeepSeek, a relatively cheap but high performance AI chatbot, has hidden the difference in strategies, inspiring journalists to conjure up the colorful but ultimately inaccurate scenario of a US-China AI arms race.
STRATEGIC PLAN – FOR FARMERS
The appearance of the Nature report happily coincided with the February 20 publication of a Chinese government “strategic plan” for farmers to use scientific developments, including AI and genetic modification, to boost crop production and help the country move towards food self-sufficiency. You can’t get much more practical than that.
Other recent data also bolsters the theory that Chinese AI projects may be lower profile, but have already made more inroads in business and industry.
A recent international study of usage of AI revealed that more respondents from China – 83 per cent – said their companies were using AI, than respondents from the United States – at only 65 per cent. In fact, the data in the SAS Generative AI Global Research Report shows that China was ahead of all other nations in the study in this regard.
Image at top by fridayeveryday.