In the roiling cold war for AI supremacy, the U.S. has let China back in the race |
Participants at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, July 2023. Chinese firms have accelerated their production of cheaper and more agile AI chips in the last few years.ALY SONG/Reuters
Bessma Momani is professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
For several months, if not years, China and the United States have been in fierce competition in the high-stakes race for artificial intelligence dominance. From the continued tit-for-tat export restrictions on high-performance chips and the critical minerals used to make them, to limits to access to mineral processing, AI has clearly become another front in their intense geopolitical rivalry.
A few years ago, the United States appeared to be comfortably in the lead. Globally, the United States had the best computing power with the most sophisticated chips, further complemented by pioneering infrastructure with the highest number of data centres, which are used to store and compute enormous volumes of data. The U.S. could also flex its expansive geopolitical muscles by pressing allies like Taiwan to restrict exports of the world’s best high-performance chips needed to power advanced AI, and by pushing both Japan and the Netherlands to restrict the export of the lithographic instruments needed to fabricate these indispensable chips. It all went toward developing innovative closed-weight, frontier large language models like ChatGPT.
Ironically, however, these American manoeuvres left China to leverage its behemoth state powers, supplying its tech giants with........