Earlier this week, Clément Delangue, the CEO of startup Hugging Face — which was recently on the receiving end of a rogue cyber attack by OpenAI’s models — made the somewhat controversial claim that China was winning the AI race.

″[China is] clearly dominating on open models right now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they start dominating at the frontier either by the end of this year or next year at the rate of progress.” — Read More

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said Monday that China is dominating open-weight AI models and could overtake U.S. frontier labs before the end of the year.

… Delangue pointed to China’s culture of openness and knowledge-sharing as the engine behind its gains, warning that American developers risk losing ground because they operate in isolation. U.S. model makers, by contrast, are “building in silos” and risk falling behind, he said. — Read More

Several AI companies, including Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, and Nvidia, have signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models. The letter comes as Washington debates how the U.S. should respond to allegations that Chinese AI labs are stealing intellectual property from their American counterparts, and growing in capability. — Read More

#china-vs-us

Chinese artificial-intelligence systems have matched the performance of Anthropic’s powerful model Mythos in some cybersecurity scenarios, a development poised to reset the global tech race and pressure the White House in its overhaul of U.S. AI policy.

Security researchers said that a new AI model, released this month by China’s Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, can match the latest U.S. models when it comes to finding security bugs, although it still lags behind Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s products in other tasks. — Read More

Welcome back! This is an article I’ve wanted to write for a while now, exclusively focused on clearing up some of the most prevalent myths in this space, especially regarding China.

With the world suddenly realizing that AI is expensive, the “battle” between the US and China for AI supremacy is hotter than ever. If the tide turns in favor of Chinese open models, the trillions of dollars at stake could be at clear risk.

But as always, the picture is much more nuanced, and several of your beliefs right now that you have been told are simply blatantly false. — Read More

This earnings season, the cost of AI started showing up in the numbers. Meta, Shopify, Spotify, and Pinterest all flagged rising AI and inference costs as a drag on margins. Shopify said economies of scale were “partially offset by increased LLM costs.”

This is the bill coming due for the pricing model that underpins OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s expected IPO valuations, both projected north of $800 billion. Those numbers assume OpenAI and Anthropic will hold their market share and pricing power — that competitors can’t easily catch up, and that enterprise customers will keep paying a premium because there’s no real alternative.

But increasingly the data is pointing the other way. Cutting-edge AI is becoming abundant and cheap. Chinese labs are charging a fraction of what American labs do for comparable work, while a wave of Western challengers — Nvidia, Cohere, Reflection, Mistral — are building cheaper, smaller, more efficient alternatives for enterprises that won’t touch a Chinese model. By the time OpenAI and Anthropic file their prospectuses, with OpenAI’s confidential filing coming as soon as this week, the central premise of their valuations may already be gone. — Read More

It’s essential that the US and its allies stay ahead of authoritarian governments like the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. AI will soon become powerful enough to be used to repress citizens at unprecedented scale, and even to alter the balance of power among nations. And since AI is advancing more quickly by the day, we have only a limited period of time to set the conditions of the competition—and determine whether and how those threats materialize. It’s with this in mind that we outline what’s required to ensure America stays ahead.

The most important ingredient for developing AI is access to the computer chips on which the models are trained (or “compute”). Since the most capable chips are developed by American companies, the US government currently limits China’s supply by enforcing tight export controls on them. Recent history suggests these controls have been incredibly successful. In fact, AI labs in China have only built models close in intelligence to America’s because of their talent, their knack for exploiting loopholes around these export controls, and their large-scale distillation attacks that illicitly extract the innovations of American companies.

In this post, we present two scenarios for what the world might look like in 2028, when we expect transformative AI systems to have arrived. — Read More

Since 2023, every model at the frontier of AI capabilities, as measured by the Epoch Capabilities Index, has been developed in the United States. Over that same period, Chinese models have trailed US capabilities by an average of seven months, with a minimum gap of four months and a maximum gap of 14. — Read More

#china-vs-us

For the last half-decade, the prevailing narrative in Silicon Valley has been one of absolute, unassailable dominance. The United States possesses the GPUs, the capital, and the talent. Everyone else is merely playing catch-up, drafting behind the aerodynamic wake of OpenAI and Google. That narrative just hit a wall.

A rigorous new study by researchers at MIT, Hugging Face, and others has analyzed the complete history of model downloads—2.2 billion of them—to trace where the actual power lies in the ecosystem. The results are not just surprising. They represent a fundamental inversion of the status quo.

According to the data, China has officially overtaken the United States in the global market share of open model downloads. In the last year alone, Chinese organizations captured 17.1% of the download market, surpassing the US share of 15.8%. — Read More