Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

The AI Race:  China vs US

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A few weeks ago, the White House released a long awaited report entitled “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan.”  The represents “a decisive pivot toward deregulation as the key driver for rapid innovation in pursuit of global AI leadership.” 

The reaction on both sides of the aisle has been quite positive and reflects a consensus among “technology executives, national security analysts, and U.S. officials” about the importance of AI.  Which is particularly surprising in 2025, at a time when Republicans and Democrats can’t seem to agree on whether the sky is blue.     

Even the Washington Post published an editorial endorsing the plan.  “The most important question for the United States regarding artificial intelligence right now is not how it will be used, or even how it will affect the economy and culture. It is whether the U.S. will maintain AI dominance. The race to own the technology of the future is a race we must not lose.”  Which is especially interesting given the Post’s anti-Trump bent and the fact that that this plan “noticeably steps back from the Biden administration’s attempts to identify and mitigate potential risks and pitfalls of [AI].”

The fundamental reason why AI is such a hot topic right now is that, as an opinion piece in Forbes put it, “AI has the potential to change the world as dramatically as the groundbreaking technologies that sparked previous industrial revolutions.”  Wait a minute.  As dramatically as the industrial revolution?  Isn’t all “this talk of the fourth industrial revolution just hot air from marketers talking up the share price of hugely powerful global corporations” the Forbes writer went on to ask.  Some of it is, he concluded, but the breakthroughs are real and are coming at a faster and faster pace.  Google CEO Sundar Pichai has repeatedly said that the impact of AI on humanity “will be even more transformational than fire.”

Many people first became aware of AI’s power with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, a “large language model chatbot” that can carry on a conversation, write a thank you note to your grandmother, instantly research and compose a 20 page paper on King Ethelred the Unready, create a short story about how a frog developed its love of eating mosquitos, write computer code, and much more. 

If you haven’t already experimented with ChatGPT or one of its many competitors, you should give it a try, right now.  Put aside this blog for a few minutes, download the free version and prepare to be at first amazed and then a little scared at what the program can do.  And each new version keeps getting better.  (ChatGPT5 was released last Thursday, August 7.)

When I first wrote about ChatGPT and the risks of AI in this blog in July 2023, I asked the question “Should you worry about AI?” and answered myself “Unless your job is threatened, my answer is not at all.”  That was then, this is now.  You should worry.  In the last two years AI has become so much cheaper and more powerful that even the Pope is worried. 

And China is already having a major impact on how AI develops and how it is used.  The country’s “Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” was announced in 2017 with the same goal as Trump’s plan: to dominate worldwide AI.  One way they are trying to do that is by competing on price, as the Chinese company DeepSeek did in January when it announced a new product that was so cheap it rattled the stock market.  In fact, the Deep Seek announcement “triggered a $1 trillion sell-off in U.S. and European technology stocks in a single day… [because its cost and popularity] have raised concerns about the future market share of established tech giants, leading to substantial declines in their stock valuations.” 

Since then, “Chinese companies have flooded the market with 1,509 large language models… often using open-source strategies to undercut Western competitors.”  The most dramatic so far was two weeks ago (July 28), the release of GLM-4.5, by the Chinese startup Z.ai.  It makes “DeepSeek look expensive [with]… an 87% discount on … long conversations with AI.” 

One of the most frightening things about all these new Chinese products is that since 2022, the US has been trying to slow Chinese progress by restricting the sale of advanced AI chips to China.  But the onslaught of new products shows that “export controls clearly aren’t slowing Chinese AI development. A blacklisted company [Z.ai] just delivered competitive performance while operating under restrictions designed to cripple such capabilities.”

Does this mean China is winning the AI race?  Foreign Affairs recently published several articles addressing this question in a far more nuanced way than the title of this post or any newspaper headline.  In “The Real AI Race” Rand experts Colin H. Kahl and Jim Mitre take the discussion back to basics by reminding readers that “determining who is ahead depends on what it means to win.”  They note that these days most experts define the race based on when AGI (artificial general intelligence) programs prove to be at least as smart as human experts. 

Unfortunately, however, “there is no standard, shared definition of AGI or consensus on whether, when, or how [AGI] might emerge.”  Nevertheless, most experts have long been bullish on how quickly it will appear.  When I first wrote about AI in this blog in 2022, I quoted AI pioneer Herbert A. Simon’s 1965 prediction that that “machines will be capable… of doing any work a man can do… within twenty years.”  He was wrong.

In 2023, when the consulting firm AIMultiple reviewed 15 surveys completed by a total of 8,590 AI experts about when they think AGI will actually exist, the most frequent answer was remarkably similar to Simon’s –  about 20 years.   More specifically, they found that 50% of AI experts predicted “that AGI will probably… emerge between 2040 and 2050 and is very likely (90% chance) to appear by 2075.”  That leaves 10% who think AGI emergence will take more than 50 years, if it ever occurs at all. 

You can put me in with the skeptical 10%.  Perhaps I was scarred by my own brief experience in AI in the early 80s, when I worked for a consulting firm on an ill-advised AI project for the US Army.  Or my skepticism could be grounded in my firm belief that we simply don’t know enough about the human brain to expect to improve on it.  When I earned a Ph.D. in Psychology, I spent countless hours reading about the major breakthroughs in neuroscience that were just around the corner.  Today, 50 years later, as far as I can tell they are still around the corner.  Some have described the brain as the most complex structure in the universe, with over 80 billion neurons, many connected to thousands of others at 100 trillion synapses.  It’s a miracle we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Not only is the race to AGI uncertain to ever end, but it oversimplifies the problem.  As Kahl and Mitre concluded “The notion of a singular AI race between the United States and China fails to capture the true complexity of the rivalry unfolding today. The challenge is to win not one definitive contest but a multifront competition whose outcome will shape the international balance of power.”  Their article reviews multiple AI races, some of which may be won by the US and others by China. “Militaries and intelligence agencies must harness AI’s transformative potential and mitigate its disruptive effects. Similarly, countries stand to gain a competitive edge if they can adopt AI at scale across the economy and society. Governments are also battling to create and own the standards, supply chains, and infrastructure that will undergird the global technological ecosystem.”

Trump’s plan for American AI dominance is based on the US tech industry’s approach of developing proprietary AI models.  This is certainly the road to being able to charge the highest prices.  For example, Apple’s proprietary approach to iPhones and other products has enabled them to charge premium prices and become extraordinarily profitable.  But there also huge risks to the proprietary approach.  If you are old enough to remember the 1970s fight over standards in videotapes, you may have owned a Betamax recorder, which was Sony’s attempt to establish standards for this fledgling marketplace.  While it was widely regarded as technically superior to the competing VHS videotape format, Betamax lost out for several reasons including its higher cost. 

Given multiple AI races, does it make sense to try to choose a single winner?  Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, thinks so: “The number one factor that will define whether the United States or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world.”  Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, agrees and goes on to argue that “Chinese AI firms have expanded their influence by freely distributing their models for the public to use, download and modify, which makes them more accessible to researchers and developers around the world.”  And, Schmidt says, China “has developed a real edge in how it disseminates, commercializes and manufactures tech. History has shown us that those who adopt and diffuse a technology the fastest win.”

Trying to win the AI race by addicting the world to proprietary standards defined by US firms, the way Trump’s plan does, may be aiming in the wrong direction.  According to still another Foreign Affairs article published recently, “America should aim for victory but prepare to finish second… Washington cannot and should not expect its lead to last forever… Washington needs to plan for a possible future in which the United States loses the AI competition to China—or, at the very least, one in which Chinese AI models are as popular globally… Finishing second is not a death knell for American AI, but refusing to adapt to compete would be.”

The Robotics Race:  China vs US

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According to the 2024 World Robotics report, over 4 million robots are currently operating in factories and warehouses around the world to increase the efficiency of tasks ranging from assembling cars to building more robots. 

Predictions for the future vary.  The OECD – an international organization with 38 member countries – “expects global growth [of the robotics market] to stabilize” at about 5% per year.  However, others foresee a dramatically higher growth curve.  Elon Musk has predicted that by 2040 there will be at least 10 billion humanoid robots on the planet. He also has claimed that the Optimus robot that Tesla is currently developing “will be the biggest product of all time by far… Nothing will even be close.”

The first time I read this quote, I saw Musk’s comments as a PT Barnum-type effort to increase the price of Tesla stock, so that the richest man on the planet could become even richer. (Wouldn’t you think $389 billion would be enough?)

But the more I learned about the ongoing robotics revolution, the more I came to believe that it is actually possible that humanoid robots COULD soon change the balance of industrial and military power.  But I wouldn’t bet on Musk or Optimus, because China is developing robots far more quickly and cheaply than the US.  

The exact line between industrial robots and other machines can be hard to define, but generally robots are more intelligent and autonomous than other machines and“often handle dirty, repetitive, or dangerous tasks to improve human safety and productivity.”  The line will be easier to see as the number grows of humanoid robots designed to resemble humans and interact with them.    

While the US is widely perceived as the world leader in robotics innovation, China has dramatic advantages in manufacturing and production.  And, according to the Special Competitive Studies Project, history has repeatedly shown that “even when original breakthroughs take place domestically, production determines market leadership.”

According to a recent think tank report with the ominous title America is missing the new labor economy – Robotics “China’s industrial economy is one of the most formidable players in the world, setting it up perfectly to reap the next evolutions of robotics and automation.” If a video is worth a thousand words, this will give you some sense of China’s current capabilities:   

This demonstration of 16 Unitree G1 robots performing a traditional Chinese folk dance alongside human dancers was televised during China’s 2025 Spring Festival Gala and viewed by over a billion people.

The robot shown in the video can perform a wide variety of functions, while walking at nearly five miles per hour and carrying seven pounds.  It was one of more than 25 humanoid robots that provided live demonstrations at Beijing’s 2024 World Robot conference.  At the same conference “the Tesla Optimus [which is scheduled to be released soon] remained motionless in a clear box.”

A humanoid robot has thousands of parts, with brains constructed from semiconductors, vision software and generative AI models, and bodies which include actuators, motors, drives to generate motion and much more.  Most of these parts are currently made in China, not in the US.  Indeed, “about 56% of the world’s humanoid supply chain companies are based in China.” 

According to the SemiAnalysis report “In the world of Robotics, manufacturing dominance is key. To build a complete and functional robot means recreating the robot countless times and fine-tuning each minor mistake until [it becomes] a solid, scalable, and cost-effective product… With a share of GDP three times higher than that of the US, China’s industrial base outcompetes that of America’s in every possible way.”  One result: “the only viable humanoid robot on the market, the Unitree G1, is now entirely decoupled from American components.”  In contrast, the report continues, “In the US, the ‘Made in America’ label is misleading at best, and downright harmful at worst. [It] allows for significant processing of foreign materials [which]… means a product can be labeled ‘Made in USA’ even if its core components originated in China, obfuscating the true extent of foreign dependence.”

Put these factors together, and China’s supply chain gives it enormous advantages in speed and cost. An article that came out a few weeks ago entitled “America is losing the robot wars“ noted that the Unitree G1 is available now for purchase starting at $16,000.  The Optimus is scheduled to go on sale next year, at an estimated cost of $20,000 to $30,000.  US general purpose robots may be the most technically advanced, but “one estimate suggests that [while] China’s general-purpose robots are roughly 80% as capable as industry leaders, [they] are also 30% cheaper.”

One reason behind this development is government support.  China’s “latest Five-Year Plan explicitly prioritizes humanoid development and automated manufacturing, backed by massive state investment and coordinated industrial policy. This isn’t just about economic efficiency – it’s a calculated bid to secure technological independence.”  While “exact numbers are hard to pinpoint… it is clear that the broad industrial landscape is benefiting from at least tens of billions of dollars every year.”  This support is proving critical not just for current costs, but also for future technological developments.  According to a Morgan Stanley report, in the past five years “China has secured 22% more [humanoid] robotics patents than the world’s 19 next most productive countries combined.”

Put all this together, and it is clear that the US has fallen behind China in the robotics race.  How much does that matter?  Much more than I thought before I started researching this post.  If the SemiAnalysis report is correct, it represents “an existential threat to the US” in both industrial and military terms.

An Edge of Automation white paper put it this way:  “The prospect of robots substituting [for] human labor transcends mere technological advancement – it threatens to shatter one of civilization’s oldest constraints: the scarcity of physical labor….”  For China this could address one of its greatest economic challenges:  an aging and shrinking workforce, caused largely by the country’s ill-advised “One Child Policy.”

That future is almost here.  For example, Chinese companies are experimenting with dark factories – fully automated facilities operated by robots without human workers or traditional lighting.  One dark factory operated by Xiaomi already “operates round-the-clock producing one smartphone per second – with zero humans employed.”

An even more pressing challenge for both countries is the potential for robotics to shift the balance of military power.  According to Edge of Automation “The Russia-Ukraine War has definitively proven that autonomous systems, particularly drones, represent a fundamental shift in military doctrine. Small, inexpensive drones have repeatedly outperformed traditional platforms costing hundreds of times more… [meanwhile] China’s aggressive adoption of military robotics… [such as the use of] Lynx [robot dogs] for ground operations… has accelerated this trend, creating a powerful feedback loop between defense needs and industrial capability…The result is an unprecedented acceleration of robotics technology, driven not by market forces but by the existential imperative of maintaining technological supremacy.”

The military applications of DEEP Robotics Lynx include reconnaissance, surveillance, logistical support, and search and rescue operations.   Some of its capabilities appear in this video:  

In the US, “The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence has explicitly warned that falling behind in robotics threatens America’s strategic position.”  This in turn has “unleashed unprecedented resources, from direct funding of research to export controls targeting critical components.”

But it is almost too late.  Think tank researcher William Matthews says that “China has positioned itself quite effectively… to dominate the robotics sector and the robotics supply chain… what you’re looking at potentially is an Industrial Revolution-like shift in the balance of power.” 

As one recent review summed it up “For now, the war over robots is China’s to lose.”

The risks of Artificial Intelligence:  China vs US

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“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”  This alarming warning is a direct quote of a statement released six weeks ago by leaders in the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI). 

This was preceded by a longer statement in March, which had been signed by an even larger group of AI experts.  It recommended a “six-month pause” in research on the most powerful AI systems to provide time to study their risks.

When I wrote in this blog about China’s race to become the world leader in AI technology last year, the topic felt a bit esoteric.  But since then, public interest in AI has skyrocketed, largely as a result of the success of two new releases of an experimental program called ChatGPT (version 3.5) or GPT-4 (for version 4.0) which answers any question users ask. 

For example, a college student can type in a request like “Write a ten page term paper on the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739),” and the program will.  GPT-4 is free, and it quickly became “the fastest-growing consumer software application in history.”  This led to a stream of white papers and op-eds written by both experts and amateurs who began clutching their pearls about the risks of AI.

For example, according to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, as many as 300 million jobs could be threatened by AI.  The two categories of jobs most at risk are “office and administrative support jobs” (46% of tasks can be automated) and legal work (44% automatable).  The risk to lawyers may not be surprising since GPT-4 “recently passed a simulated law school bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers.”  AI has even become an issue in the ongoing strike of Hollywood writers, who are afraid of its ability to generate new content, and fear that technology is “coming for their jobs.”  

If you haven’t played with GPT-4 yet, you really should.  Anyone can sign up for the free program and start getting answers in less than five minutes.  I guarantee that if you try this experiment: 

  1. You will be absolutely amazed and maybe even a bit frightened
  2. You will spend far more than five minutes playing with the program. 

My favorite description of the current state of ChatGPT came from my brother: “It’s like talking to a brilliant person who has memorized the entire internet.  Only sometimes she’s really drunk.”  But the program is constantly learning from its errors, and gradually sounding more sober.

Many of the people who have been breathlessly writing about AI risks focus on programs that aim to be at least as intelligent as you and me, called AGI – artificial general intelligence.  As I explained in last year’s AI post, there’s just one problem with AGI – it doesn’t exist.  Many experts believe it never will.

The AI programs that do exist like GPT-4 fall into a completely different category:  they are designed to do just one single thing, like play chess, recognize faces, or evaluate mortgage applications.  However, even today’s limited applications come with some risk.

In China, the biggest risk of AI is that it will work too well.  According to NBC News, “A lack of privacy protections and strict party control over the legal system have resulted in near-blanket use of facial, voice and even walking-gait recognition technology to identify and detain those seen as threatening, particularly political dissenters and religious minorities.” 

AI is the technology behind China’s emerging social credit system, which rewards “well-behaved citizens” with a wide range of benefits including discounts on heating bills, skipping hospital waiting rooms, and even getting more matches on dating sites.

This public display of “untrustworthy people.” is an example of China’s AI-powered social credit system.

Due to generous government support, China “produces more top-tier AI engineers than any other country—around 45 percent more than the United States… It has also overtaken the United States in publishing high-quality AI research, accounting for nearly 30 percent of citations in AI journals globally in 2021, compared with 15 percent for the United States.”

Meanwhile, the government is using cell phone data to track users’ location at every minute, not to mention everything they type into their phones. 

Of course, programs that invaded privacy like this would be strictly forbidden in the US.  But that doesn’t seem to bother Chinese citizens.  According to a survey conducted by Ipsos last year “China [is]… the most optimistic country in the world when it comes to AI, with nearly four out of five Chinese nationals professing faith in its benefits over its risks.”  In contrast, according to the same survey “only 35 percent of Americans” agree.

The US’ list of risks is quite different from China’s.  When the US Senate held hearings on AI risks in May, Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin, identified the top AI risks as “weaponized disinformation, housing discrimination, harassment of women, impersonation fraud, voice cloning… [and] workforce displacement.”  Similarly, when Sam Altman, president of the company that created ChatGPT, appeared before a House committee, he said one of his areas of greatest concern was “the potential for AI to be used to manipulate voters and target disinformation… especially because ‘we’re going to face an election next year and these models are getting better.’”

In my opinion, the greatest risk by far is an accidental war started by an error in a military AI application.  “An accident involving AI could be particularly risky [since] it could be difficult to determine whether an incident was deliberate or not.”

According to a white paper published by the Center for AI Safety,  AI has been the subject of many military experiments including a program that “outperformed experienced F-16 pilots in a series of virtual dogfights… [with] aggressive and precise maneuvers the human pilot couldn’t outmatch. (p. 13)”  According to the same paper, the firstknown use of AI in battle came in Libya in 2020 when “retreating forces were hunted down and remotely engaged by a drone operating without human oversight.”  Such applications are likely to multiply in an AI arms race as “ubiquitous sensors and advanced technology on the battlefield… [provide a tremendous amount of] information. AIs help make sense of this information, spotting important patterns and relationships that humans might miss.” (p. 14)

If you wanted to maximize the risks of a military accident getting out of hand, you would start with an authoritarian society where people are afraid to criticize their bosses, and the government refuses to acknowledge mistakes.  Oh look.  I just described China’s approach to AI.

A few weeks ago, Foreign Affairs published an article entitled “China is flirting with AI catastrophe” which argued that “from Chernobyl to COVID, history shows that the most acute risks of catastrophe stem from authoritarian states, which are far more prone to systemic missteps that exacerbate an initial mistake or accident.” 

AI does indeed involve risks, but many are simply based on human aversion to change.  In the 18th and early 19th century, groups of workers in UK cotton and wool mills known as Luddites destroyed industrial machines that threatened their jobs.  It didn’t work; they still lost their jobs.  To add insult to injury, the word Luddite has become a perjorative term that describes anyone opposed to technological advances.   

So what’s the bottom line?  How much should you worry about AI?

Unless your job is threatened, my answer is not at all.  Most people have already got enough problems to worry about, including health, money, relationships, and whether the Red Sox will still be in last place when the baseball season ends.  If you’ve still got the bandwidth to worry about more than just personal challenges, I’d put climate change first, then accidental war, then the growing gap between rich and poor, and the next pandemic, in that order. 

So in my opinion, whether you are in the US, China, or somewhere else, when it comes to AI risks, I would follow the advice from the old song:  Don’t worry, be happy.