It is true that they are not responsible for ChatGPT and that many of the advances they have made cannot be compared with those made by companies like Google, Microsoft or Meta. But the reality is that Not only does China lead the way in more than half of AI fields, it is also a leader in one worrying one.
China and the United States have been clashing for a decade in scientific and technological terms: from microchips to autonomous vehicles or the space race. It was only a matter of time until AI became another contested terrain. Obviously, most of their advances have nothing to do with large language models, like ChatGPT: they are not interested/paying to think in Chinese and program in English. That is why they have focused on other areas of AI.
According to a study conducted by the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies (CSET) at Georgetown University, China leads in more than half of research fields most important AI today. Of course there are important details.
Zachary Arnold, lead author of the study, points out that while the five leading institutions for AI publications are Chinese, “the quality of them was not that high and research in the country largely came from the application of fundamental advances made by researchers in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.”
According to the CSET study, published articles have more than doubled globally between 2017 and 2022. But not the entire field is oregano: almost a third focused In artificial vision, robotics increased its research by 54%, as did securitywhich had an increase that was multiplied by three.
“The fact that research is growing so rapidly, in so many directions, underscores the need for federal investment in evaluating basic measures of the scientific techniques we need to ensure that AI deployed in the real world is safeprotected and understandable,” concludes Arnold.
Thus, China has focused, more than on massive language models, on artificial vision, autonomous vehicles and one of the fields in which They are pioneers: surveillance and facial recognition. And it is not strange, since it is part of the country’s political strategy and allows not only to control its population, but also to create identification strategies that can be used in fields as different as conservation or medicine.