China Spotlight

President Xi Jinping wants China to become the dominant AI force by 2030. China is an undisputed global leader in artificial intelligence. Under President Xi Jinping, the country has made tremendous strides in many fields, but especially in AI. Businesses and the government have collaborated on a sweeping plan to make China the world’s primary AI innovation center by 2030, and it’s already making serious progress toward that goal. That plan is unlikely to be repealed by a new government; China abolished Xi’s term limits and will effectively allow him to remain in power for life. Within the next decade, China plans to meet two crucial milestones: By 2027, its People’s Liberation Army will have a modern-ready force, and by 2030 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) expects to have outpaced the U.S. in AI and become the singular dominant force. China is producing what it calls “intelligentized” technologies to bolster both its economy and military. Last year it took major steps into shaping the future of AI by releasing its own pretrained models. China is forging ahead on its own natural language processing models, which makes sense: The most popular models in use now are trained on English text. Researchers from Tsinghua University and Alibaba are developing Chinese datasets and pretrained large transformers to compete against the likes of GPT-3. In 2021, two models developed specifically for the Chinese language went live: Wu Dao 2.0 and M6. The country’s enormous population of 1.4 billion offers researchers and startups there a command of what may be the most valuable natural resource in the future—human data—without the privacy and security restrictions common in much of the rest of the world. If data is the new oil, then China is the new OPEC. The kind of rich data the Chinese are mining can be used to train