While the United States and the European nations possibly are shifting focus on exhibiting their military might by getting involved in war in foreign nations, the world is gradually witnessing tremendous progress in science and technology where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to become a dominant force that possibly will ultimately become the most important factor to everyone on the earth. Although we currently are getting acquainted with AI mostly because of several recent innovations such as chatbots or AI-driven techs, within the next ten years, Artificial Intelligence will become an inevitable factor in different spheres of our life. Understanding this reality, China is putting huge focus on this sector, whereas by now a large number of educational institutions in mainland China and Hong Kong SAR have already captured Top-10 positions in the world.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years has brought about a new era of innovation, with applications in diverse sectors, ranging from healthcare to finance, entertainment, and more.
Although presently the US is known as the leader in AI development, with many of the world’s leading AI companies based in Silicon Valley. However, China is rapidly catching up, with significant investment in AI research and development, and a growing number of AI startups. In fact, China has announced plans to become the world leader in AI by 2030.
One of the areas where the competition between China and the United States is most apparent in the development and deployment of AI chatbots that utilize natural language processing technologies like ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot that can engage in human-like conversations with users, based on a machine learning algorithm that uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand and respond to user input. Developed by OpenAI, a research organization based in San Francisco, ChatGPT has quickly become one of the most popular and widely used AI chatbots, with applications ranging from customer service to entertainment.
Artificial intelligence is a broad field that has multiple sectors and it is hard to make a statement about one country dominating it. For example, China has excelled in facial recognition technology more than other countries, using it as a form of control and local surveillance.
China continued to make significant strides in the development of AI chatbots and succeeded at a domestic level. Companies like Alibaba and Tencent invest heavily in the development of chatbots that have the capacity to engage in natural and meaningful conversations with users. A good example is Alibaba’s chatbot, AliMe, which has been deployed in a wide range of applications, from customer service to hotel bookings and beyond.
The US tech giants are continuously looking over their shoulders at China while the US government has expressed concerns about China’s growing influence in the AI industry.
Overall, China tends to focus more on the rapid deployment of new technologies rather than using applied research methods. On the other hand, the US is more focused on fundamental research and algorithm development. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, and both countries are pushing forward aggressively to win the competition for AI dominance.
The development of natural language processing technologies is just one example of the ways in which this competition is playing out between the two countries. While the US is currently dominant in the NLP sector, China is catching up quickly and aspires to dominate the industry by 2030. By then, the AI industry is expected to contribute up to US$15.7 trillion to the global economy.
The race for AI dominance is not only reflected in the economic sector, but extends to shaping politics, education, and society as a whole through AI-based distribution mechanisms of information such as chatbots. This explains why China and the US continue to invest in AI technologies aggressively and keep track of each other while taking extreme measures to ensure winning the competition for AI supremacy.
According to media reports, while Tsinghua University located in northwest Beijing, China, a public institution that traces its roots back to 1911 tops the list of best universities for Artificial Intelligence, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) located in Shatin, Hong Kong holds the third position in the entire world. Amongst the Top-10 best universities for Artificial Intelligence, there are six from China and Hong Kong, and two each from Australia and Singapore. Other Chinese universities amongst the Top-10 for Artificial Intelligence are: Harbin Institute of Technology, University of Electronic Science & Technology of China, Peking University, and University of Chinese Academy of Science.
Among the 2,000 schools from more than 90 countries ranked by US News & World Report in 2022, 338 Chinese universities made the list, compared to 280 American universities. It’s the first time China outnumbered the US and according to experts the number of Chinese educational institutions ranking above those in the United States shall continue to grow in the coming years.
International student enrollment at US colleges and universities continues to decline since the 2017 academic year and has been falling, while the number of international students in college and universities in mainland China and Hong Kong SAR are on a rapid rise.
Meanwhile, according to Caroline Wagner, Milton & Roslyn Wolf Chair in International Affairs, the Ohio State University in the United States, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science, whereas her research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country.
In an article in The Conversation, Caroline Wagner wrote: China is not the only nation to drastically improve its science capacity in recent years, but China’s rise has been particularly dramatic. This has left US policy experts and government officials worried about how China’s scientific supremacy will shift the global balance of power. China’s recent ascendancy results from years of governmental policy aiming to be tops in science and technology. The country has taken explicit steps to get where it is today, and the US now has a choice to make about how to respond to a scientifically competitive China.
In 1977, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the Four Modernizations, one of which was strengthening China’s science sector and technological progress. As recently as 2000, the US produced many times the number of scientific papers as China annually. However, over the past three decades or so, China has invested funds to grow domestic research capabilities, to send students and researchers abroad to study, and to encourage Chinese businesses to shift to manufacturing high-tech products.
Since 2000, China has sent an estimated 5.2 million students and scholars to study abroad. The majority of them studied science or engineering. Many of these students remained where they studied, but an increasing number return to China to work in well-resourced laboratories and high-tech companies.
Today, China is second only to the US in how much it spends on science and technology. Chinese universities now produce the largest number of engineering Ph.D.s in the world, and the quality of Chinese universities has dramatically improved in recent years.
China emerges as unbeatable dominant force in AI
Artificial intelligence is among the few fields that both the US and China regard as strategic national priorities. The Biden administration signed the National AI Initiative Act of 2020 into law in 2021, aiming to advance US leadership in the field.
“The world’s leading powers are racing to develop and deploy new technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing that could shape everything about our lives — from where we get energy NG00, -3.19%, to how we do our jobs, to how wars are fought”, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in 2021.
“We want America to maintain our scientific and technological edge, because it’s critical to us thriving in the 21st century economy”, Blinken said in a speech at a technology summit.
Despite such determination of the key policymakers in the United States, it is gradually becoming evidently clear that China is already on the pace of becoming a global leader in Artificial Intelligence with a rapid growth in the number of students and research-scholars in various colleges and universities.
Harvard Economics Professor David Yang spoke to the outsized success of China’s AI sector at a recent dean’s symposium on insights gleaned from the social sciences about the ascendant global power. As evidence, he cited a US government ranking of companies producing the most accurate facial recognition technology. The top five were all Chinese companies.
Yang’s research shows China exporting huge amounts of AI technology, dwarfing its contributions in other frontier technology sectors.
In my opinion, within the next decade where sophisticated technologies will be substantially dependent on Artificial Intelligence, top tech companies shall have to look for such technology and experts from China, whereas, within the next 30 years, China will have its own ‘Silicon Valley’ – much larger and stronger than that of the United States. Meaning, the next destination of this trillion-dollar industry will be China, and not any of those nations in the West, including the United States.
