The AI China Report #7 🇨🇳
Your executive summary on the geopolitics of AI - Issue #7
Welcome back to The AI China Report. This week we’re looking at the response from Biden’s AI Executive Order, key takeaways from the UK’s AI Safety Summit, and X’s new AI chatbot.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“One of the challenges in the future will be, how do we find meaning in life if you have a magic genie that can do everything you want?"
- Elon Musk on AI making modern day employment a thing of the past at the UK AI Safety Summit
ONE BIG STORY: BIDEN’S AI EXECUTIVE ORDER
Last Monday Biden invoked the Korean War-era Defense Production Act to push through the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, which requires AI companies to notify the government when developing technology or systems that pose “serious risk to national security, national economic security or national public health and safety,”
The order announced eight guiding principles and priorities for AI:
Artificial Intelligence must be safe and secure.
Responsible innovation, competition, and collaboration will allow the United States to lead in AI and unlock the technology’s potential to solve some of society’s most difficult challenges.
The responsible development and use of AI require a commitment to supporting American workers.
Artificial Intelligence policies must be consistent with the Biden Administration’s dedication to advancing equity and civil rights.
The interests of Americans who increasingly use, interact with, or purchase AI and AI-enabled products in their daily lives must be protected.
Americans’ privacy and civil liberties must be protected as AI continues advancing.
It is important to manage the risks from the Federal Government’s own use of AI and increase its internal capacity to regulate, govern, and support responsible use of AI to deliver better results for Americans.
The Federal Government should lead the way to global societal, economic, and technological progress, as the United States has in previous eras of disruptive innovation and change.
The order also requires US AI firms to notify the government within 90 days if a foreign company uses their platforms to train extensive AI systems - which is mainly aimed at foreign adversaries like China and Russia who may use US tech to create disinformation campaigns with deepfakes and develop military technologies.
Straight out of the movie Minority Report, the order included the following language:
“within 365 days of the date of this order, submit to the President a report that addresses the use of AI in the criminal justice system, including any use in: crime forecasting and predictive policing, including the ingestion of historical crime data into AI systems to predict high-density ‘hot spots’.”
The White House called the order “the most significant actions ever taken by any government to advance the field of AI safety.” The order was released just before the UK AI Safety Summit, which was attended by the US and China - likely to make a statement that the US is leading the way in AI regulation and set a standard for other countries to follow.
There has been some push back to the order. Prominent ventures capitalists, including Marc Andreessen, submitted a letter to President Biden calling the new guidelines too restricting on open-source AI software - which they see as pivotal to a free and safe world in the age of AI.
MIT Professor Max Tegmark addressed Congress last week about the existential threats posed by superintelligent AI, emphasizing the need for swift regulatory action. While he applauded the order, he said it wasn’t enough, emphasizing the need for Congress to pass actual laws, while highlighting concerns about both China’s AI ambitions and the threat of creating ‘superintelligence’ in the US that would ‘make humans completely obsolete’.
But AI companies appear to be falling in line. To close out the UK’s AI Safety Summit last Thursday, companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta signed a (non-legally binding) letter agreeing to allow governments including the US, UK, and Singapore to test their models for national security and safety risks. China and Chinese tech companies notably did not sign the letter.
NEWS ROUNDUP
The UK AI Safety Summit concluded on Thursday. During the summit 28 countries in attendance (including the US and China) signed a agreement called the “Bletchley Declaration”, which recognized the global need for countries to collaborate in identifying AI safety risks and promote a shared responsibility for building risk-based policies across all countries to ensure AI safety. (UK Gov)
The UK is implementing measures, including new laws and a National Security Unit for Procurement, to counter potential infiltration by foreign states like China, prompting public AI companies to use a technology procurement process that ensures national security won’t be compromised. This spans to government agencies as well, including the removal of Chinese-made security cameras and other technology used at sensitive government buildings. (Telegraph)
New chip just dropped. AI computer vision processing chip, ACCEL, which was developed by China’s Tsinghua University, claims to outperform Nvidia’s A100 chip (one of their top-of-the-line chips) by a rate of 3.7x at image classification tasks. We’ll most likely see China continue to develop specialized chips that handle specific use cases, like computer vision, rather than chips with more broad applications. The chip is expected to be used in China to help develop more advanced facial recognition and autonomous driving technologies. (Tom’s Hardware)
Elon Musk and X are formally stepping into the ring, launching a new AI chatbot ‘Grok’. Grok’s competitive advantage is that it’s trained on and leverages real-time data from X. Grok also appears to be willing to answer ‘spicier’ questions that ChatGPT and other AI chatbots refuse to answer. (X)
Kai-Fu Lee, renowned for his book "AI Superpowers" and AI investments in China, launched a company named 01.AI with an aim to create a leading large language model for the Chinese market to rival OpenAI. The company raised an undisclosed sum from Sinovation Ventures and Alibaba Cloud at a $1B valuation. Lee's vision is for 01.AI to be an ecosystem where developers can easily create applications. (TechCrunch)
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