Sixth question on AI. Does AI need to be a zero-sum race between the US and China? Many influential voices in tech as well as the current administration argue that it does. (See, for example, darioamodei.com/post/on-deep…, washingtonpost.com/opinions/…, forourposterity.com/situatio… and this from the White House, whitehouse.gov/wp-content/up…). There are many aspects of these arguments, but I would like to focus on three that have received less attention than they deserve. The first aspect is that this framing typically assumes that there is a single direction of progress for AI, and the US and China are racing along this dimension toward superintelligence or at the very least some sort of powerful AI that will confer huge military and strategic advantages to the winner. If, on the other hand, the US and China are developing these technologies in different directions, there is much more room for coordination and even for each country learning from the other’s best practices. My reading of the evidence is that there are huge differences in the American and Chinese approaches. The US is focused on foundation models, such as frontier large language models. China is also investing – and arguably catching up – in these models, but there is much greater emphasis in China on applications of AI (with the government setting targets for the spread of AI across industries, english.www.gov.cn/policies/…). This reflects several factors, in my assessment. First, Chinese AI investments started with government demands for surveillance technologies and government-supplied data to AI companies (e.g., academic.oup.com/restud/arti…). Second, China is facing a huge demographic transformation, which will create scarcity of labor in the near future. This encourages companies to integrate robotics and AI much more actively into the production process (and China accounts for 59% of all robot installations in the world, ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/n…). Third, applications and integration of these technologies into the production process requires a lot of engineering. China has a large and very well-trained supply of engineers (whereas the US has far fewer engineers and a lot of engineering talent is currently going to Silicon Valley, which hasn’t focused on applications). Fourth, China was relatively late in catching the “artificial general intelligence,” AGI, bug, although now there is more emphasis on this in China as well. Whatever the exact causes, this difference in approach implies that there is plenty for the US to learn from China as well as the other way around. The second aspect is that the zero-sum framing ignores or downplays the crucial need for global coordination. This framing claims that the strategic and military advantage that powerful AI will create is all that matters. But the race to AGI also poses huge risks (and this is true regardless of whether this race is truly advancing toward superintelligence or just producing distorted intelligence, as I argued in my first post in this series). And these risks are global. If the US and China are racing toward AGI with no guardrails and coordination, even the follower (probably China) will have models capable of creating havoc. In this case, racing without any global coordination is a recipe for disaster. The third aspect of the problem is that this framing narrows the scope for any kind of coordination on other global issues between the US and China – including climate change, pandemics, nuclear nonproliferation and world peace. Tellingly, climate cooperation between the US and China has now largely stalled). Let me add that I’m saying all of this not as an admirer of the Chinese system. On the contrary, I have been a vocal critic of both the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese development strategy since Why Nations Fail (penguinrandomhouse.com/books…) and I have argued that the Chinese success has some of its roots in severe labor repression (project-syndicate.org/commen…). Indeed, this argument does not ignore the fact that China has an authoritarian, repressive regime, and it is using AI for surveillance and to stamp out dissent. Global coordination and efforts to set up reasonable rules that apply to all parties do not require the counterparty to be fully democratic or ruled by angels. In fact, sometimes it is more important to set up such a global framework when dealing with dangerous adversaries (as the arms-control treaties that the US and the Soviets signed demonstrate). In sum, my assessment is that it is a colossal mistake to frame the AI race as a zero-sum one between the US and China. It poisons the much-needed dialogue and coordination between the US and China on broader issues; it makes the AI race more reckless; and it discourages the building of reasonable guardrails and regulations. The last point is particularly relevant, and makes me sometimes say: if China did not exist, Silicon Valley would have to invent it.