China is closing the AI gap with the United States

SHANGHAI – At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July, start-up founder Qu Dongqi showed off a video he had recently posted online. It displayed an old photograph of a woman with two toddlers. Then the photo sprang to life as the woman lifted the toddlers up in her arms, and they laughed with surprise.

The video was created by AI technology from Chinese internet company Kuaishou. The technology was reminiscent of a video generator, called Sora, that American start-up OpenAI unveiled in 2024. But unlike Sora, it was available to the general public.

“My American friends still can’t use Sora,” Mr Qu said. “But we already have better solutions here.”

While the United States has had a head start on AI development, China is catching up. In recent weeks, several Chinese companies have unveiled AI technologies that rival leading American systems. And these technologies are already in the hands of consumers, businesses and independent software developers across the globe.

While many American companies are worried that AI technologies could accelerate the spread of disinformation or cause other serious harm, Chinese companies are more willing to release their technologies to consumers or even share the underlying software code with other businesses and software developers. This kind of sharing of computer code, called open source, allows others to more quickly build and distribute their own products using the same technologies.

Open source has been a cornerstone of the development of computer software, the internet and, now, artificial intelligence. The idea is that technology advances faster when its computer code is freely available for anyone to examine, use and improve upon.

China’s efforts could have enormous implications as AI technology continues to develop in the years to come. The technology could increase the productivity of workers, fuel future innovations and power a new wave of military technologies, including autonomous weapons.

When OpenAI kicked off the AI boom in late 2022 with the release of the online chatbot ChatGPT, China struggled to compete with technologies emerging from American companies such as OpenAI and Google. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.) But China’s progress is now accelerating.

Kuaishou released its video generator, Kling, in China more than a month ago and to users worldwide on July 24. Just before Kling’s arrival, 01.AI, a start-up co-founded by Mr Kai-Fu Lee, an investor and technologist who helped build Chinese offices for both Google and Microsoft, released chatbot technology that scored nearly as well as the leading American technologies on common benchmark tests that rate the performance of the world’s chatbots.

New technology from Chinese tech giant Alibaba has also leapt to the top of a leaderboard that rates open-source AI systems. “We have disproved the commonplace belief that China doesn’t have the talent or the technology to compete with the US,” Mr Lee said. “That belief is simply wrong.”

In interviews, a dozen technologists and researchers at Chinese tech companies said open-source technologies were a key reason that China’s AI development has advanced so quickly. They saw open-source AI as an opportunity for the country to take a lead.

But that will not be easy. The United States remains at the forefront of AI research. And US officials have resolved to keep it that way.

The White House has instituted a trade embargo designed to prevent Chinese companies from using the most powerful versions of computer chips that are essential to building artificial intelligence. A group of lawmakers has introduced a Bill that would make it easier for the White House to control the export of AI software built in the United States. Others are trying to limit the progress of open-source technologies that have helped fuel the rise of similar systems in China.

The top American companies are also exploring new technologies that aim to eclipse the powers of today’s chatbots and video generators.

“Chinese companies are good at replicating and improving what the US already has,” said Professor Yiran Chen, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University in North Carolina. “They are not as good at inventing something completely new that will bypass the US in five to 10 years.”

But many in China’s tech industry believe that open-source technology could help them grow despite those constraints. And if US regulators stifle the progress of American open-source projects (as some lawmakers are discussing) China could gain a significant edge. If the best open-source technologies come from China, US developers could end up building their systems atop Chinese technologies.

“Open-source AI is the foundation of AI development,” said Mr Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, a company that houses many of the world’s open-source AI projects. The US built its leadership in AI through collaboration between companies and researchers, he said, “and it looks like China could do the same thing”.

AI systems require enormous resources: talent, data and computing power. Beijing has made it clear that the benefits accruing from such investments should be shared. The Chinese government has poured money into AI projects and subsidised resources like computing centres.

But Chinese tech companies face a major constraint on the development of their AI systems: compliance with Beijing’s strict censorship regime, which extends to generative AI technologies.

Kuaishou’s new video generator Kling appears to have been trained to follow the rules. Text prompts with any mention of China’s President, Mr Xi Jinping, or controversial topics such as feminism and the country’s real estate crisis yielded error messages. An image prompt of this year’s National People’s Congress yielded a video of the delegates shifting in their seats.

Kuaishou did not respond to questions about what steps the company took to prevent Kling from creating harmful, fake or politically sensitive content.

By making their most advanced AI technologies freely available, China’s tech giants are demonstrating their willingness to contribute to the country’s overall technological advancement as Beijing has established that the power and profit of the tech industry should be channelled toward the goal of self sufficiency.

The concern for some in China is that the country will struggle to amass the computing chips it needs to build increasingly powerful technologies. But that has not yet prevented Chinese companies from building powerful new technologies that can compete with US systems. NYTIMES