AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

Not long ago, China lagged years, if not decades, behind the United States in artificial intelligence. But over the past three years China has caught AI fever, experiencing a surge of excitement about the field that dwarfs even what we see in the rest of the world. Enthusiasm about AI has spilled over from the technology and business communities in

I believe this impression is misleading. Many of these new milestones are, rather, merely the application of the past decade’s breakthroughs—primarily deep learning but also complementary technologies like…

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The AI world order will combine winner-take-all economics with an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few companies in China and the United States. This, I believe, is the real underlying threat posed by artificial intelligence: tremendous social disorder and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and gaping in

I believe that the skillful application of AI will be China’s greatest opportunity to catch up with—and possibly surpass—the United States. But more important, this shift will create an opportunity for all people to rediscover what it is that makes us human.

Both of the transitions described on the previous pages—from discovery to implementation, and from expertise to data—now tilt the playing field toward China. They do this by minimizing…

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These internet juggernauts had given the United States a dominance of the digital world that matched its military and economic power in the real world. With AlphaGo—a product of the British AI startup DeepMind, which had been acquired by Google in 2014—the West appeared…

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What you saw in this match depended on where you watched it from. To some observers in the United States, AlphaGo’s victories signaled not just the triumph of machine over man but also of…

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Silicon Valley looks downright sluggish compared to its competitor…

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This new AI world order will be particularly jolting to Americans who have grown accustomed to a near-total dominance of the technological sphere. For as far back as many of us can remember, it was American technology companies that were pushing their products and their values on users around the globe. As a result, American companies, citizens, an

In creating his early clones of Facebook and Twitter, Wang was in fact relying entirely on the Silicon Valley playbook. This first phase of the copycat era—Chinese startups cloning Silicon Valley websites—helped build up baseline engineering and digital entrepreneurship skills that were totally absent in China at the time. But it was a second phase