Let’s Not Link AI Competition to Geopolitics: Zhao Hejuan

Image source: China Visual

Last night I came across an article written by former Global Times Editor-in-chief Hu Xijin and titled ChatGPT Sparks Off Fierce Global AI Competition and China Mustn’t Lose. After reading it, I felt as if a fish bone got stuck in my throat despite his good intention. I need to get things right.  

Hu is prone to grandiose ideas and big words. However, when big words are associated with enterprises or business, it may backfire. 

When Google published the paperTransformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding in 2017, did they do it in order to make America victorious? When OpenAI released ChatGPT last November, did they do it in order to make America victorious? To a company, fair competition in a market is the best medicine. With the accommodative and tolerant environment for tech companies, entrepreneurs and investors, great companies will emerge on their own.        

If all those companies wear a hat that reads “China Mustn’t Lose,” it would be too heavy for any company. American companies cannot afford to wear it, neither can Chinese ones. When Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress, he cited Chinese companies as a threat to the United States, but only to the ridicule of the U.S. elite. “If you cannot win in a rivalry, admit it. Why would you invoke national interests as a defense?!” many may have wondered.    

Some U.S. companies deliberately linked their Chinese peers to geopolitics, clamoring for the decoupling of America from China. Chinese companies have to stress that “business is business” to avoid the possibility of being decoupled. With a unique global clout, Hu should not elevate corporate competitiveness to the state will. He should have avoided making such comments.     

Furthermore, when people are about a nation’s winning or losing, some scammers would scramble to weave the emperor’s new clothes. That is to say, some would get an enormous amount of government money to finance their private projects.  

Some Chinese companies may brag about “China-made GPT” or “winning for the nation.” However, no matter how pretentious they are, it is to no avail. Recently many made-in-China GPT large models were launched by tech giants and start-ups, which all claimed that their large models were very close to ChatGPT. Despite their allegation that they have burned hundreds of millions of yuan, they do not have enough computing power or pre-training. Nonetheless, they said their development has been accomplished. What a joke.  

Let companies compete. Some will win and some will lose but the nation will benefit from it eventually.

What on earth does China lack in terms of technology and innovation? Is it a “strangling” technology?

Definitely not. I would suggest to change the term “strangling” technologies to “drowning” technologies. They do not compress the throat at the beginning. When the water floods above the mountain under our feet, we are still unaware of the looming danger. We realize the problem when the flood was as high as our neck, but it is too late. The process goes from scientific research to inter-disciplinary research, from lab results to company products, from company products to market demand to continued iteration and innovation. During the long process, a company needs a vibrant market with open exchanges. The ultimate results are beneficial to the nation.   

A simplistic and palliative approach cannot address issues like the lack of innovation in Chinese companies. In order to avoid flooding all the way to the neck, the entire society and value chain must be encouraged to innovate. Do not fear bubbles. There is a saying in the investors circle: an industry is not worth your investment if there is not even a bubble.      

Yesterday, TiPost published an article on an interview with OpenAI’s Co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever.  He did not mention the United States even once in the long interview. All he cared about was the technology and its impact on the world. He was excited about it.

I could feel his passions for technologies and changing the world. I was also excited about it.

With the trend being set and rules being made by the government, let us not be pretentious or talk about the state will. Let us just do it.   

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