March 03, 2023
China’s Censors Are Afraid of What Chatbots Might Say
ChatGPT has made quite the stir in China: virtually every major tech company is keen on developing its own artificial intelligence chatbot. Baidu has announced plans to release its own strain sometime next month. This newfound obsession is in line with paramount Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s strategic prioritization of AI development—dating back to at least 2017—in China’s race to become the world’s dominant AI player and ultimately a “science and technology superpower.” And while the development of large language model (LLM) bots such as ChatGPT is just one facet of the future of AI, LLMs will, as one leading AI scientist recently put it, “define artificial intelligence.” Indeed, the sudden popularity of ChatGPT has at Google “upended the work of numerous groups inside the company to respond to the threat that ChatGPT poses”—a clarion indicator of the arguably outsized importance of LLMs.
Xi would have to make a hard choice between staying competitive in the tech race and mitigating short-term unrest.
Yet, China’s aspirations to become a world-leading AI superpower are fast approaching a head-on collision with none other than its own censorship regime. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) prioritizes controlling the information space over innovation and creativity, human or otherwise. That may dramatically hinder the development and rollout of LLMs, leaving China to find itself a pace behind the West in the AI race.
Read the full article from Foreign Policy.
More from CNAS
-
As Trump Reshapes AI Policy, Here’s How He Could Protect America’s AI Advantage
Commentary
The nation that solidifies its AI advantage will shape the trajectory of the most transformative technology of our era....
By Janet Egan, Paul Scharre & Vivek Chilukuri
-
Ukraine Symposium – The Continuing Autonomous Arms Race
Commentary
This war-powered technology race does not appear to be losing steam, and what happens on the battlefields of Ukraine can potentially define how belligerents use military auton...
By Samuel Bendett
-
Beyond DeepSeek: How China’s AI Ecosystem Fuels Breakthroughs
Commentary
While the United States should not mimic China’s state-backed funding model, it also can’t leave AI’s future to the market alone....
By Ruby Scanlon
-
Averting AI Armageddon
Reports
In recent years, the previous bipolar nuclear order led by the United States and Russia has given way to a more volatile tripolar one, as China has quantitatively and qualitat...
By Jacob Stokes, Colin H. Kahl, Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Nicholas Lokker
