Why China Isn’t Panicking About AI Armageddon

Ryan Knutson (0:05)

Here in the United States, over the past week, there's been a lot of panic about how quickly AI is advancing and whether it could bring about the end of humanity. But in China, there doesn't seem to be the same level of concern. They've actually responded with Umbridge, but not for the reason you would think. Our colleague Stu Woo covers business and tech in Asia, and he says that in China, worrying about the AI apocalypse is sort of like a problem of privilege. The way China sees it, this is a problem for tomorrow or years away. When you talk to researchers inside the labs, they think they're behind the great American models like Adentropic and OpenAI. And they're thinking, well, this is not a big deal for us yet. We don't think our models are going to end the world anytime soon. What we got to do right now is make sure that our products are competitive with the American products because we're not there yet. And if Beijing isn't willing to get on board with an AI slowdown, it's unlikely Washington DC will either.

Stu says this standoff reminds a lot of people of one of the defining moments of the last century. Think about the original nuclear arms race. They think the US has invented the first atomic weapon, and then the US said, whoa, whoa, whoa, this thing we invented is actually super dangerous and everybody should slow down research on their own nukes. And China is thinking, wait a minute, that's not fair. We definitely don't feel safer if America is the only one that has nukes. So they're saying, we're going to keep on working on our stuff, full steam ahead.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Wednesday, September 16th.

Coming up on the show, why is it so hard to de-escalate the AI arms race?

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Ryan Knutson (3:43)

Chinese president Xi Jinping has made AI development one of the country's top priorities. Urging vast investment in the new technology and dedicating a huge amount of China's resources to building it.

And China is concerned about the risks of AI. But their approach so far has been very different from the US. In general, and I think a lot of people would be surprised by this, China takes AI safety really seriously. They've been thinking about this for 10 years. But what they consider AI safety is a lot different than what the American labs talk about. So let's rewind.

So 10 years ago, it started with the company that would go on to invent TikTok. That's ByteDance. Their first big product was this news app. And the special thing about it was that human editors didn't decide what its users read. They used an algorithm. Basically, a machine decided based on what you previously read, what article you would see next. And the founder would brag about this in Chinese media. And that caught the attention of the leaders of the Chinese government. They're thinking, no, no, no, no. You know, for 80 years or so, the Chinese government has had all control over media, over bookstores, newspapers, and the Internet in China. So the Chinese government got very involved in regulating algorithms and AI.