Just how good can China get at generative AI?

IF YOU LISTEN to the bombast in Beijing and Washington, America and China are engaged in an all-out contest for technological supremacy. “Fundamentally, we believe that a select few technologies are set to play an outsized importance over the coming decade,” declared Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, last September. In February Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader, echoed the sentiment, stating that “we urgently need to strengthen basic research and solve key technology problems” in order to “cope with international science and technology competition, achieve a high level of self-reliance and self-improvement”.

No technology seems to obsess policymakers on both sides of the Pacific more right now than artificial intelligence (AI). The rapid improvements in the abilities of “generative” AIs like ChatGPT, which analyse the web’s worth of human text, images or sounds and can then create increasingly passable simulacrums, have only strengthened the obsession. If generative AI proves as transformational as its boosters claim, the technology could give those who wield it an economic and military edge in the 21st century’s chief geopolitical contest. Western and Chinese strategists already talk of an AI arms race. Can China win it?