Commentary: The US may be running the wrong AI race

THE AI RACE

Published research, though, does not automatically translate into technological capability. Moreover, the location of research expertise does not always map with successful commercialisation of technology – as a long line of frustrated British scientists can attest. 

However, a separate report from the Special Competitive Studies Project in the US earlier this year also highlighted the striking progress that China has made in adopting many frontier technologies.

According to the SCSP’s staff assessment, the US is still leading in semiconductors, synthetic biology and quantum computing while China dominates in advanced batteries, 5G and commercial drones. But the most contested, and arguably most consequential, area is artificial intelligence.

President Donald Trump has said that the US will do “whatever it takes” to lead the world in AI. And the big US tech companies, including OpenAI, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, are making colossal investments to fulfil that ambition. OpenAI alone is planning to invest US$400 billion over the next few years to build out its Stargate data centres across the US.

Last month, the Trump administration launched the Genesis Mission to boost the private AI sector by sharing the public data sets and computing resources of the country’s 17 national laboratories.

“We’re essentially pitting our private capitalists against this nation state of China. The stakeholders here have two very different sets of resources, attributes, strengths and weaknesses,” says David Lin, a senior adviser to the SCSP.