Is China Quickly Eroding America's Lead in the Global AI Race?
6 juillet 2025 à 20:26
China "is pouring money into building an AI supply chain with as little reliance on the U.S. as possible," reports the Wall Street Journal.
And now Chinese AI companies "are loosening the U.S.'s global stranglehold on AI," reports the Wall Street Journal, "challenging American superiority and setting the stage for a global arms race in the technology."
In Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, users ranging from multinational banks to public universities are turning to large language models from Chinese companies such as startup DeepSeek and e-commerce giant Alibaba as alternatives to American offerings such as ChatGPT... Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company, recently installed DeepSeek in its main data center. Even major American cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google offer DeepSeek to customers, despite the White House banning use of the company's app on some government devices over data-security concerns.
OpenAI's ChatGPT remains the world's predominant AI consumer chatbot, with 910 million global downloads compared with DeepSeek's 125 million, figures from researcher Sensor Tower show. American AI is widely seen as the industry's gold standard, thanks to advantages in computing semiconductors, cutting-edge research and access to financial capital. But as in many other industries, Chinese companies have started to snatch customers by offering performance that is nearly as good at vastly lower prices. A study of global competitiveness in critical technologies released in early June by researchers at Harvard University found China has advantages in two key building blocks of AI, data and human capital, that are helping it keep pace...
Leading Chinese AI companies — which include Tencent and Baidu — further benefit from releasing their AI models open-source, meaning users are free to tweak them for their own purposes. That encourages developers and companies globally to adopt them. Analysts say it could also pressure U.S. rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic to justify keeping their models private and the premiums they charge for their service... On Latenode, a Cyprus-based platform that helps global businesses build custom AI tools for tasks including creating social-media and marketing content, as many as one in five users globally now opt for DeepSeek's model, according to co-founder Oleg Zankov. "DeepSeek is overall the same quality but 17 times cheaper," Zankov said, which makes it particularly appealing for clients in places such as Chile and Brazil, where money and computing power aren't as plentiful...
The less dominant American AI companies are, the less power the U.S. will have to set global standards for how the technology should be used, industry analysts say. That opens the door for Beijing to use Chinese models as a Trojan horse for disseminating information that reflects its preferred view of the world, some warn.... The U.S. also risks losing insight into China's ambitions and AI innovations, according to Ritwik Gupta, AI policy fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. "If they are dependent on the global ecosystem, then we can govern it," said Gupta. "If not, China is going to do what it is going to do, and we won't have visibility."
The article also warns of other potential issues:
"Further down the line, a breakdown in U.S.-China cooperation on safety and security could cripple the world's capacity to fight future military and societal threats from unrestrained AI."
"The fracturing of global AI is already costing Western makers of computer chips and other hardware billions in lost sales... Adoption of Chinese models globally could also mean lost market share and earnings for AI-related U.S. firms such as Google and Meta."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.