The writer is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and author of ‘Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’
Each month brings fresh indications that China is catching up with the US on the development of artificial intelligence.
At the end of 2024, the Chinese start-up DeepSeek decisively demonstrated that Silicon Valley possesses no monopoly on frontier models. It’s large language AI model was shown to achieve a comparable performance using far fewer chips than those of the US. In the wake of DeepSeek, models released by Alibaba, ByteDance, Moonshot AI and other Chinese labs have demonstrated new capabilities. Even China’s beleaguered, sanctioned chip sector has seen the production of AI chips surge.