Inside China's AI Ecosystem: A View From Beijing

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

In this episode, we explore the Chinese AI ecosystem with 'L-squared,' an anonymous tech worker based in Beijing. We discuss major players, model quality, public engagement, regulation, and the US 'chip ban.' Discover the similarities and differences between US and Chinese AI landscapes, and gain a nuanced perspective on the current state of AI in China.

USEFUL RESOURCES:

Testing Chinese models: Yi-34B-Chat (made by Kai-Fu Lee's team 01.AI) can be tried out via Replicate (https://replicate.com/01-ai/yi-34b-chat) or Hugging Face. You can also use the ChatGLM playground (https://open.bigmodel.cn/trialcenter) and Baidu's ERNIE (https://yiyan.baidu.com/) without a Chinese SIM card.

Benchmarking models: SuperCLUE is one of the most prominent benchmarks - the latest results are on GitHub (https://github.com/CLUEbenchmark/SuperCLUE) and the paper explaining the methodology is here (https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15020).

Regulation: Explainer (https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/07/10/china-s-ai-regulations-and-how-they-get-made-pub-90117) from Matt Sheehan; piece (https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-tight-ai-regs-hurt-chinese-firms) on how genAI regs are affecting Chinese companies.

US-China competition: Jeff Ding's work (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2023.2173633) on the diffusion deficit in S&T; Bloomberg piece (https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-china-huawei-semiconductor/) on Huawei's semiconductor development efforts.

Staying up to date: Sign up to alerts from CSET's Scout tool (https://scout.eto.tech/); subscribe to Concordia AI's AI safety (https://aisafetychina.substack.com/) in China newsletter (disclaimer: I used to work at Concordia!)

A 2016 profile (https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-37-happy-20th-anniversary) on Microsoft Research Asia by Wang Jingjing, covered in Jeff Ding's ChinAI newsletter

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Introduction

(07:24) China's AI Ecosystem

(13:40) Public AI Engagement

(17:33) Sponsors : OCI / Omneky

(18:50) AI Tools Comparison

(35:37) Sponsors : Brave / Squad / Plumb

(39:14) AI Regulatory Maze

(51:02) AI Performance, Censorship

(55:28) Chinese AI Regulations

(01:04:37) Tech, Research Role

(01:12:11) Global AI Ecosystem

(01:23:22) Cultural AI Perspectives

(01:29:14) AI Safety, Cooperation