Will China Surpass the US in 2025?

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Will China Surpass the US in 2025?

This year could be the year that China surpasses the US in AI.

Worse, prominent figures in the space are convinced that this will happen soon. For instance, Clement Delangue, the CEO of HuggingFace, the leading open-source AI company, has predicted the inevitable ‘sorpasso’.

The panic is so real that recent US Government reports suggest a Manhattan Project-type effort to develop AGI before China, signaling that AI is viewed as a matter equal to losing the race to build nuclear weapons, adding a new dimension to the growing Cold War between the two superpowers.

But is this just based on vibes or real data?

Today, we're delving into the AI Cold War between the US and China to see whether the predictions are based on facts, not fearmongering. We will study the war from all crucial angles (data, compute, and technology), unveil the historical precedent (not really good-looking for the US), and reveal China’s AI strategy through key strategic levers designed to make this precise vision a reality.

How Each Superpower Stands on Each Pillar

As you probably know by now, AI has three pillars: data, compute, and technology (the algorithms). However, if we view AI as a matter of strategic importance to any country, we must also include government readiness.

And how strong or weak are both superpowers in each category?

The Data & Government Readiness Pillar

Without data, there’s no AI. And with garbage data, the resulting AI will be garbage, too, so high-quality data is the most important asset.

Western think tanks like Oxford Analytics show that the US is ahead of China in data availability, according to their annual AI government readiness report.

The researchers examine the availability of high-quality and representative data, which is crucial for avoiding bias and error.

On the one hand, the report portrays the US as a country with enviable access to high-quality data and the clear overrepresentation of English as the most commonly used language in data as a key advantage.

On the other hand, China is shown as a country that, due to its obvious lack of freedom of press and speech, has less access to its people's thoughts.

The amount of text in Chinese available is indeed considerably small to that of the US, representing just over 5% of the data in CommonCrawl, the largest public dataset of Internet data and one of the most common datasets used to train AIs, while English data represents around 46%, which gives light to this stark contrast.

However, in my opinion, the report is heavily ‘Western-biased,’ not because it’s biased toward giving higher scores to Western countries, but because it focuses too much on things like data privacy, which, although very important, are of little relevancy when arguing which country can take the lead in the AI Cold War (the end justifies the means).

If we are talking about raw access to data to achieve the best possible outcomes, things…

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