If you look at the names in the list of contributors of GPT-4, you will realize that they come from a diverse background of different races, and likely of different nationalities as well. Even on the hardware side, the most advanced AI GPUs are built by Nvidia, a company founded by a Taiwanese immigrant. That's the key competitive advantage of America which China don't have; the ability to attract and retain talent of different color, culture and language from all over the world (including from China).
China's talent pool catchment may be 1.4bil people, but the US's talent pool catchment is 8bil people.
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Since launching our talent tracker in 2020, artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm. Ostensible breakthroughs in large language models and machine learning methods, as well as staggering improvements in compute capabilities, have made the power and potential of AI demonstrably...
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ChatGPT is also trained by data and users from all over the world, and mainly in English. English is by far the world's most dominant language on the internet, representing 59% of online content. The best and most available content of many academic fields (such as physics, chemistry, biology, computer, math, economics, finance etc) are most likely in English. With the English language, you are also able to access direct news content from Singapore to the US without censorship or filtering.
An AI model trained by reading Reddit and watching YouTube is going to be different from an AI trained by reading Weibo and watching Bilibili. All these with more advanced chips to help the AI learn faster by itself.
I'm not saying it's impossible for China to create its own version of GPT-4, but it's unlikely that they can catch up or surpass the US in this area. It's like the semiconductors where the US still retains its lead despite efforts by China to catch up. But the difference is, AI is very much a winner-takes-all contest. For the rest of the world, we will obviously adopt whichever superior AI available to enhance our productivity, which in turn further reinforces the superior AI's dominant position in data access and learning. A society which adopts the better AI is going to be more productive than a similar society which adopts a subpar AI.