"By comparison, at least, the way the Chinese government speaks about AI is more modest.

[remixtures@tldr.nettime.org]

"By comparison, at least, the way the Chinese government speaks about AI is more modest. Yes, China’s economic leadership views AI as a priority and has boldly claimed it seeks to lead the world by 2030. Yet the rhetoric lacks the eschatological tone common in Silicon Valley. Chinese economic planners appear more interested in AI as a tool for industrial processes than as a means of creating a superintelligence that will reach the singularity. The State Council’s 2025 “AI+” initiative is focused entirely on efficiency-enhancing applications rather than intelligence explosions.

There is another important difference. China is banking far more heavily on simpler, lower-cost open-source AI models. In the US, most of the leading “frontier” AI models are secret and proprietary, in part as a business model and in part due to the apocryphal fears that the wrong actors could trigger human extinction. The smaller, lower-cost Chinese models may be seeking, in that sense, to be the more nimble 1970s Toyota rivals to the giant American cars produced by General Motors.

More importantly, China is hedging its bets by investing heavily in a wide range of other technologies that might reasonably be described as “the future”. In 2024, the country invested an estimated $940bn in clean-energy capex, broadly defined as renewables, electricity grids and energy storage (batteries), dwarfing its AI investments. In these sectors, AI is meant to be a complement — the glue rather than the structure.

While China’s overall economy remains weaker than it was in the 2010s, elements of this broader strategy seem to be bearing fruit."

https://www.ft.com/content/12581344-6e37-45a0-a9d5-e3d6a9f8d9ba

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