Contrary to what tech leaders like Jensen Huang and Eric Schmidt, some Chinese tech leaders are now saying China is unlikely to eclipse the US in the AI race. According to a report by Bloomberg, Justin Lin, head of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Qwen series of open-source models has said that currently there are less than 20% chances of any Chinese company surpassing US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Speaking at a panel at the AGI-Next summit in Beijing, lin said “A massive amount of OpenAI’s compute is dedicated to next-generation research, whereas we are stretched thin — just meeting delivery demands consumes most of our resources.” “It’s an age-old question: does innovation happen in the hands of the rich, or the poor?,” he stated.Lin’s concern was shared by leaders at Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Zhipu AI who were also present at the event. The report quotes Tang Jie, Zhipu’s founder and chief AI scientist, and Yao Shunyu, who recently joined Tencent from OpenAI to lead the AI push for China’s most valuable company. “We just released some open-source models, and some might feel excited, thinking Chinese models have surpassed the US. But the real answer is that the gap may actually be widening,” Tang said as quoted in the Bloomberg report. Core restrictionsChinese leaders cited limited resources and US export controls on chips and lithography equipment as major restrictions that could limit China’s AI growth. Tencent’s Yao Shunyu urged his industry peers to focus on the bottlenecks of next-generation models — such as long-term memory and self-learning. Yang, on the other hand, referred to artificial general intelligence (AGI) stating: “We should represent China to push AGI further for the world”, adding “Meaningless internal competition serves no purpose”. During the summit, the tech leaders also explained where they plan to focus their efforts in the coming year. Yao said he is helping Tencent use AI to create more value for its large user base, such as by connecting the company’s Yuanbao assistant with users’ WeChat chat history.Lin, on the other hand, highlighted Alibaba’s bet on multimodality and real-world agents.
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