China’s AI balancing act — beating the U.S. but keeping the tech from threatening Beijing’s rule
China is looking to challenge the U.S. in artificial intelligence. China’s tech giants have launched their own AI models.
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China’s race to develop smarter-than-human artificial intelligence may put it ahead of the U.S., but such ground-breaking technology could also risk lessening the stronghold that the ruling Communist Party has over the world’s second-largest economy.
That’s the view of prominent AI scientist Max Tegmark, who told CNBC artificial general intelligence (AGI) is closer than we think and the narrative of a geopolitical battle between the U.S. and China racing to build the smartest AI is a “suicide race.”
While there is no singular definition of AGI, it is broadly taken to refer to AI that can outsmart humans.
Applications like ChatGPT — that allow users to prompt a chatbot for answers — have exploded in popularity. But many AI companies are racing to develop the next level, with AI that has human-level intelligence.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said that AGI could be achieved by 2025. While there are other major names in the tech sector who also think AGI is close, many others think true AGI is still very far away.
As well as competition between technology companies, there is also the geopolitical battle taking place between the U.S. and China for dominance in realms from AI to chips. While this is often portrayed as a race to be first to the latest technology, Tegmark said this is not the right framing.
“I think of this battle, this geopolitical battle to build AGI first as a ‘hopium war’,” Tegmark told CNBC in an interview last month. ” I call it the ‘hopium war’ because it’s fueled by … delusional hope that we can control AGI.”
Tegmark is the president of the Future of Life Institute, a thinktank which penned a letter last year calling for AI labs to pause the development of advanced AI systems. The letter was signed by major tech names including Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Tegmark’s concern is that AI is advancing rapidly with very few guardrails in place, and no way to control it should it begin to outsmart humans.
“We are much closer to building AGI than figuring out how to control it. And that means that the AGI race is not an arms race, it’s a suicide race,” Tegmark said.
Is China worried about AGI?
China has little incentive to build AGI, according to Tegmark. The AI scientist recalled a story in which Elon Musk told him about a “high level meeting” the Tesla boss had with Chinese government officials in early 2023. Musk said to the Chinese government that if AGI is built, China “will not be controlled by the Communist Party, but by the super intelligence,” Tegmark said.
“[Musk] got a very strong reaction. Some of them, really hadn’t thought about that, and with less than a month from that, China came out with their first AI regulations,” Tegmark said, referencing new regulation governing generative AI.
China’s ministry of foreign affairs was not immediately available for comment on the anecdote. CNBC also contacted Tesla for a response from Musk.
“The U.S. doesn’t need to convince China to not build AGI. Even if the U.S. didn’t exist, the Chinese government would have an incentive to not build it because they want to be in control,” Tegmark said.
“[The] last thing they want is to lose that control.”
China’s approach to AI
AI is a strategic priority for the Chinese government. The country’s biggest firms such as Alibaba, Huawei and Tencent have been developing their own AI models. The capabilities of those models are also advancing.
China was also among the first countries in the world to bring in regulation around various aspects of AI. The country’s internet is heavily censored and any information that appears to go against Beijing’s ideology is blocked. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is banned and it is well-noted that chatbots in China won’t answer questions related to politics and topics deemed sensitive by the Communist Party.
The country’s approach to AI is therefore an attempt to push innovation while also balancing its own interests. When it comes to AGI, China is likely to pursue a similar approach, according to analysts.
“I would not count on China to limit its own AI capabilities due to fears that such technologies would threaten Party rule. Similar predictions were made about the internet, they all proved to be false,” Kendra Schaefer, a partner at consultancy Trivium China,” told CNBC.
“China will attempt to dominate AGI while creating a techno-regulatory apparatus that limits what AGI is permitted to do domestically.”
U.S.-China AI battle
Despite Tegmark’s view that the the race to build AGI is a “hopium war,” geopoltiics remains front and center between the U.S. and China when it comes to development of the technology.
“Right now, China is viewing AI through a dual-lens: geopolitical power and domestic growth,” said Abishur Prakash, founder and geopolitical strategist at Toronto-based strategy advisory firm, The Geopolitical Business.
“With AI, China hopes to shift the balance of power around the globe, like creating a new export model. And, in parallel, China wants to power its economy in new ways, from government efficiency to business applications,” Prakash told CNBC.
The U.S. has pursued a policy of attempting to restrict China’s access to key technologies, mainly semiconductors like those designed by Nvidia, that are required to train more advanced AI models. China has responded by attempting to build its homegrown chip industry.
Will the U.S. and China partner on AI rules?
Technologists have warned of some of the risks and dangers when AGI does finally arrive. One theory is that without guardrails, AI will be able to improve itself and design new systems independently.
Tegmark believes that any such risks will be realized by both the U.S. and China, which will force both countries’ governments to individually come up with rules around AI safety.
“So my optimistic path forward is the U.S. and China unilaterally impose national safety standards to prevent their own companies from doing harm and building uncontrollable AGI, not to appease the rivals superpowers, but just to protect themselves,” Tegmark said.
“After that happens though, there’s this really interesting stage where the U.S. and China will be like, wait, how can we guarantee that North Korea doesn’t build AGI or someone else? And then the U.S. and China have an incentive now to push the rest of the world to join them into an AGI moratorium.”
Indeed, governments are already trying to work together to figure out how to create regulations and frameworks around AI. Last year, the U.K. hosted an AI safety summit, which the U.S. and China were both in attendance, to discuss potential guardrails around the technology.
But regulation and rules around AI are currently fragmented. This year, the European Union enacted the AI Act, the first major law globally governing the technology. China has its own set of rules, while many other countries have not yet moved to create any regulation.
Tegmark’s hope of co-ordination around AI safety is echoed by others.
“When the dangers of competition are greater than the rewards, nations will ideally be motivated to come together and mutually self-regulate,” Trivium China’s Schaefer said.
“Indeed, some Chinese policymakers have advocated for getting out ahead of that potential issue and establishing an international governance body under the UN – similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency – so there is desire on Beijing’s side to establish a global governance body,” she said.
Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers remarks at the start of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 10, 2024 in Cupertino, California. Apple will announce plans to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into Apple software and hardware. (
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Apple has temporarily disabled Apple Intelligence summaries for news apps for users of its beta software in a sign of the challenges the company is dealing with in its AI technology.
The decision to pause AI summaries comes weeks after the BBC highlighted that Apple’s AI system had twisted its news notifications to display inaccurate facts. The pause only affects people using Apple’s beta software, not those using the company’s main operating systems.
News and entertainment apps, such as The New York Times, began showing a short message inside the iPhone settings app on Thursday noting that AI-powered summaries were “temporarily unavailable.”
The pause on one of Apple Intelligence’s core features highlights the challenge Apple faces in the roll out of its artificial intelligence technology, which has been scrutinized by many users on social media.
“With the latest beta software releases of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Notification summaries for the News & Entertainment category will be temporarily unavailable,” an Apple representative told CNBC in a statement.
The spokesperson noted that Apple is working on improvements to the software that are coming in a future software update. The company did not say when it will roll out its iOS 18.3 software to users of the main version of the iPhone operating system, but it could take weeks, based on Apple’s previous software release patterns.
The decision to temporarily pause the AI summaries comes on the same day that Apple saw its stock close down 4%, marking its worst day of trading since Aug. 5. A reason for the drop was due to notable Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo writing on Monday that the Apple Intelligence suite of features does not appear to be boosting iPhone sales.
Apple Intelligence struggles since launch
The company launched Apple Intelligence in October as the signature feature in its latest line of iPhone models and its answer to Silicon Valley’s AI arms race that kicked off with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.
Apple has used the AI features as the key selling point in its advertisements and marketing for its latest hardware products, but the software has been riddled with issues.
The company says that the entire Apple Intelligence system is in beta, and the update on Thursday added language to say that the AI software can produce unexpected results.
Apple Intelligence includes several features, including image generators, but the one that’s received the most attention is how it can summarize entire stacks of notifications into concise sentences — useful, according to Apple’s marketing materials, for getting through hundreds of group chat notifications without scrolling through the whole discussion.
With the Thursday update, Apple said it will show any AI-summarized notification in italics to distinguish them from other notifications.
In testing, Apple Intelligence summaries weren’t perfect, but the errors were mostly funny and obvious. Problems cropped up when the technology began being used to summarize news, and it displayed false information.
The most egregious well-documented error happened in December, when 22 separate BBC news notifications were combined into a three-part headline that started with “Luigi Mangione shoots himself.” The alleged Brian Thompson assassin has not done that.
The feature also combined headlines from The New York Times into a November notification that falsely said that Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested, according to a ProPublica reporter’s post on social media.
Another Apple Intelligence notification on Jan. 3 said that darts player Luke Littler had won a world championship, which had yet to take place, according to the BBC. The technology also conflated notifications from BBC’s sports app to say that “Brazilian tennis player, Rafael Nadal, comes out as gay.” Nadal is Spanish and is married to Maria Francisca Perello.
Apple on Thursday also rolled out a new feature that lets users turn off AI summaries for any app by swiping left on the notification from the phone’s lock screen. Users previously could only turn off AI summaries through the settings app.
A Duolingo logo is seen on a smartphone.
Pavlo Gonchar | LightRocket | Getty Images
Duolingo shares rose nearly 7% on Thursday following a large spike in users signing up to learn Mandarin in conjunction with soaring usage of Chinese social media app RedNote, a TikTok rival.
The company confirmed to CNBC that there’s been a 216% increase in Mandarin learners using the app compared to a year earlier. For context, Spanish, one of the most popular languages on the app, has seen a 40% increase over the same period, Duolingo said.
RedNote, or Xiaohongshu, as it’s known in China, has rocketed to become the No. 1 free app on the Apple app store, a position it’s held for most of this week. Rounding out the top five are TikTok’s Lemon8 app, U.S. social media upstart Clapper, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Threads.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case involving the future of TikTok in the U.S., and a law that could effectively ban the popular app. The justices appeared to favor upholding the law, and a decision could come as soon as Friday. TikTok is reportedly preparing for a U.S. shutdown on Sunday.
RedNote has so far been the top beneficiary of the American user exodus, seeing its U.S. app downloads increase by 20 times over the last week, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. A Duolingo spokesperson told CNBC that the company’s marketing team is “forward-thinking and already has an active presence on Red, managed by our team in China.”
Duolingo offers online and mobile courses across 42 languages. According to its website, Duolingo has 48.8 million Spanish learners. French is the second most popular language on the app at 27.3 million users, while Chinese is eighth at 10.7 million.
Duolingo shares climbed 43% last year, topping the Nasdaq’s 29% gain.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, joins CNBC ‘Power Lunch’ on September 17, 2024.
CNBC
Snap shares closed down 5% on Thursday after the Federal Trade Commission said it would refer a complaint against the company to the Department of Justice.
The FTC’s non-public complaint involves allegations that Snapchat’s My AI chatbot poses “risks and harms to young users,” the commission said in a statement. The complaint stems from the FTC’s compliance reviews with Snap following a 2014 settlement regarding allegations of public deception pertaining to data collection by the company.
As part of the FTC’s compliance reviews of Snap, the agency said it had uncovered the possibility that the company “is violating or is about to violate the law.”
“A proceeding is in the public interest,” the FTC said in its statement.
The FTC did not specify what about the My AI chatbot its complaint was focused on, but the chatbot has previously drawn scrutiny.
A Snap spokesperson pushed back against the FTC’s claims in a statement to CNBC.
“Unfortunately, on the last day of this Administration, a divided FTC decided to vote out a proposed complaint that does not consider any of these efforts, is based on inaccuracies, and lacks concrete evidence,” the Snap spokesperson said. “It also fails to identify any tangible harm and is subject to serious First Amendment concerns.”
The spokesperson added that while the company shares the FTC’s “focus on ensuring the thoughtful development of generative AI,” Snap believes that the “complaint would stifle innovation and competition in a critical and growing sector of the economy.”
Jonathan Raa | AP
Snap debuted the My AI chatbot in 2023. It is powered by the large language models of OpenAI and Google, giving it the ability to answer user questions and provide tips and suggestions similar to ChatGPT and other AI-powered chatting tools.
The chatbot has been noted for providing problematic responses. In one instance while speaking with a reporter who was pretending to be a teenager, the chatbot answered explained how to hide the smell of alcohol and marijuana, The Washington Post reported in 2023. At the time of the chatbot’s initial release, Snap said that My AI, like other AI-powered chatbots, is “prone to hallucination and can be tricked into saying just about anything. Please be aware of its many deficiencies and sorry in advance!”
In Oct. 2023, the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office issued a preliminary enforcement notice against Snap, alleging that the company’s My AI-related risk assessment “did not adequately assess the data protection risks posed by the generative AI technology, particularly to children.”
Although the FTC said that it voted during a closed meeting to issue a public statement about it’s case against Snap and its ensuing referral to the DOJ, it noted that FTC commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew Ferguson were absent.
The FTC also pointed to a dissenting statement by Ferguson, who President-elect Donald Trump named in December to replace Lina Khan as the next FTC chair.
Ferguson noted that these kinds of referrals “are not disclosed unless and until the complaint is filed in court by the Department or the Commission.”
“I did not participate in the farcical closed meeting at which this matter was approved,” he wrote.
Ferguson added that he opposes the FTC’s complaint against Snap, but that he can’t “release a detailed analysis of its many problems,” because the case is not public. Ferguson wrote that the complaint’s interpretations of an FTC law is “wrong” and that it is “in direct conflict with the guarantees of the First Amendment.”
If the DOJ files the complaint, Ferguson said he will “release a more detailed statement about this affront to the Constitution and the rule of law.”
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