China is the betting favorite to win the AI race. From Hua Bin at unz.com:
I discussed that embodied AI, vertical AI applications across industries, and mass adoption of low-cost AI are the main trends coming out of China in the coming 2 or 3 years. The underlying assumption of my forecast is China will have the capability to lead the AI development despite US attempt at holding back its progress.
In this last part, I’ll discuss why the US will fail in the AI war, like in the trade war and chip war it initiated. Make no mistake – the US declared war on China when it put a chokehold on China’s advanced chip imports in 2022. China imported $413 billion worth of computer chips then, accounting for 15% of its total import. This was China’s single biggest import category, surpassing its $300 billion oil import (and China is the world’s largest oil importer).
Xie Feng, Chinese ambassador to the US, drew the line last week – “trade war, tech war, and whatever other kind of war the US wants to impose on China, we will fight to the end.”
As the US attempts to strangle China’s AI development at the foundational level, China is responding by accelerating indigenous AI tech development and quickly rolling out AI applications across a broad range of industries and economic sectors.
China’s edge in the AI war
As discussed, there are three levels of AI tech stack to form a complete ecosystem – chips, foundational LLMs, and applications.
The US is trying to deny China access to the most advanced chips and LLMs. However, China is making rapid progress to become self-sufficient:
– Chips: Huawei has already rolled out its Ascend series of locally made AI chips which are closing in on Nvidia in performance; Alibaba is developing cutting edge RISC-V chips based on open source technology; Huawei has also made steady progress in developing domestic EUV lithography machine.
A research team at Peking University has developed a bismuth-based 2D transistor that outperforms the most advanced commercial chips from Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and Belgium’s Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre. The new chip is 40% faster than the latest 3-nanometre silicon chips from Intel and TSMC while consuming 10% less energy. This innovation could allow China to bypass the challenges of silicon-based chipmaking entirely. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/chinas-chip-runs-40-faster-without-silicon
