Three Dollar Bill
Yesterday we noted points concerning the recently released “Winning the Race – America’s AI Action Plan”. While the document has its positives and negatives, along with the accompanying three EOs that mandate certain changes, today we compare it to the also recently released Chinese Global AI Governance Action Plan. Before we go further, we point out the fact that both are political documents, written to further the standing of both entities in the global eye. They are filled with all sorts of carefully written platitudes that are positioned to aggrandize a particula position. That said, there are some very obvious differences between the ‘attitude’ in the documents, and that is what we are looking at here. Much of the rest of the world will likely be more interested in what they can get out of the two largest technology suppliers by playing them off each other.
Core Philosophy
The Chinese attitude is as phony as a $3 bill borne out by years of government rules and oppression so we grudgingly give credit to the current administration for being nothing if not honest about its AI intensions. But when it comes down to how secondary and tertiary countries will view the intentions of both, we expect China will have the psychological advantage of being slightly more believable than the somewhat volatile current US administration. While China is certainly in the AI race to win it, they have a level of trust (maybe trust is the wrong word) that Trump does not, despite the fact that both are pretty much untrustworthy. China can point to the fact that Alibaba’s (BABA) Qwen family has the world’s largest open source community, beating out Meta’s (FB) Llama community, and has surpassed the US in open source models, despite the initial US lead in 2023. When it comes to AI and global plans from leading developer countries, its the lesser of two evils.
Core Philosophy
- China – Sees AI generally as a new part of human development and an international ‘public good’ that should benefit humanity. The emphasis is on safety, reliability, and controllability, and a desire to align with the United Nations Pact for the Future & Global Digital Compact, with a goal of establishing a framework for global AI development.
- US – Framed as a “race to achieve global dominance in AI”, with an emphasis on national security, economic competitiveness, and American innovation. The direct aim is for ”unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance” to usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security, with the goal of winning the AI race and securing American global leadership in AI, primarily through accelerating private-sector-led innovation and building robust domestic infrastructure.
- China – Looking for an innovation friendly policy balanced within a framework of safety and risk control, balancing progress with social ethics. Promotes ‘bold experimentation’
- US – Prioritizing removing government red tape and onerous regulation to the extent of limiting federal aid to those states with ‘burdensome AI regulation’.
- China – Focus on exploring a global platform for data sharing and creating high-quality datasets, while safeguarding personal privacy and supporting the building of ‘cross-border open source communities’.
- US – Focus on building world-class scientific datasets and providing open source models for start-ups and academic research, along with providing large scale computer power to same, all while creating a ‘healthy financial market for compute’.
- China – Speed up the construction of global clean power networks and data centers to support access to AI infrastructure for less developed nations
- US – Building a ‘vast AI infrastructure particularly streamlining permitting for data centers while restoring the American semiconductor effort.
- China – Focus on ‘global solidarity’ and ‘open cooperation’ for AI capacity building, using the UN as the main way to create an inclusive digital global governance system..
- US – Simply “export American AI to Allies & Partners”
The Chinese attitude is as phony as a $3 bill borne out by years of government rules and oppression so we grudgingly give credit to the current administration for being nothing if not honest about its AI intensions. But when it comes down to how secondary and tertiary countries will view the intentions of both, we expect China will have the psychological advantage of being slightly more believable than the somewhat volatile current US administration. While China is certainly in the AI race to win it, they have a level of trust (maybe trust is the wrong word) that Trump does not, despite the fact that both are pretty much untrustworthy. China can point to the fact that Alibaba’s (BABA) Qwen family has the world’s largest open source community, beating out Meta’s (FB) Llama community, and has surpassed the US in open source models, despite the initial US lead in 2023. When it comes to AI and global plans from leading developer countries, its the lesser of two evils.
RSS Feed