90. Jeffrey Ding - China’s AI ambitions and why they matter

There are a lot of reasons to pay attention to China’s AI initiatives. Some are purely technological: Chinese companies are producing increasingly high-quality AI research, and they’re poised to become even more important players in AI over the next few years. For example, Huawei recently put together their own version of OpenAI’s massive GPT-3 language model — a feat that leveraged massive scale compute that pushed the limits of current systems, calling for deep engineering and technical know-how.

But China’s AI ambitions are also important geopolitically. In order to build powerful AI systems, you need a lot of compute power. And in order to get that, you need a lot of computer chips, which are notoriously hard to manufacture. But most of the world’s computer chips are currently made in democratic Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory. You can see how quickly this kind of thing can lead to international tension.

Still, the story of US-China AI isn’t just one of competition and decoupling, but also of cooperation — or at least, that’s the case made by my guest today, China AI expert and Stanford researcher Jeffrey Ding. In addition to studying Chinese AI ecosystem as part of his day job, Jeff published the very popular China AI newsletter, which offers a series of translations and analyses of Chinese language articles about AI. Jeff acknowledges the competitive dynamics of AI research, but argues that focusing only on controversial applications of AI — like facial recognition and military applications — causes us to ignore or downplay areas where real collaboration can happen, like language translation for example.