China's Technological Innovation and Sino-US Competition

Everyone, I recently chatted with Zhou Hengxing, the author of "The Altman Biography," about Silicon Valley and the U.S.-China tech competition. It was quite interesting. First, a change. Peter Thiel began supporting Trump as early as 2016, when the entire Silicon Valley was uniformly behind the Democratic Party—almost only he stood with the Republicans. But this time he didn't charge ahead as he did in the past, even though Vance was originally someone he had identified. Today's Silicon Valley has completely split; roughly a third of Silicon Valley's big names are supporting Trump. In various interviews and speeches, Thiel has repeatedly made a very clear point: the United States should return to a tech arms race, engage in a direct arms race with China, and must defeat and surpass China. He is extremely firm on this idea. But I don't think this is a consensus in Silicon Valley—after all, Silicon Valley is in the internet tech camp, quite far from the military-industrial complex, and claiming everyone thinks this way probably doesn't hold up. So if Musk enters the Trump administration, will he push the U.S. one step further toward a tech arms race with China? I think most of these Silicon Valley CEOs are still businessmen, and businessmen look at the interests behind things—and the United States is to a large extent a country built by businessmen. Just look at their remarks and you'll understand: as long as they have interests in China, they are basically quite pro-China. Even someone like Zuckerberg was very eager to enter the Chinese market in his early years—look at what he said then, praising China to the skies and even learning Chinese. So they don't have very strong ideology; they make judgments more from a business standpoint. As long as Musk still has factories in China and such a large auto market there, it's unlikely he would proactively attack China. But in the Trump administration he will probably be in a dilemma—Trump will have very strong policies of competition with China, and Trump is not someone particularly easy to persuade; during his first term he fell out with many people. Given how strong both men's personalities are, I guess it will be hard for them to work together for long, and it's quite possible that one day they too will break. Another point many people like to make: whenever Chinese innovation is mentioned, some bring up national character, saying Americans are lone wolves who innovate on their own, while China, because it respects authority, has lost the motivation and passion for innovation. I don't really like using national character to explain this kind of thing. Looking back at history, the U.S. indeed has more originality and tends to lead first, with China following behind—I don't deny that. But if we go back to the era before geopolitics—during my years in Silicon Valley, roughly 2014 to 2017, before the trade war—China and the U.S. actually cooperated very well. On the one hand, China's manufacturing capacity is extremely strong and it can make things—iPhones and Model 3s were all made there—which the U.S. cannot do; on the other hand, there is enough talent, and many of the very core engineers in Silicon Valley's big companies now came from China. American programmers may be better at pioneering work, but when it comes to basic development and implementation, Chinese engineers' discipline, work intensity, and passion for work are far higher than those of American engineers—to put it bluntly, they are willing to work overtime and Americans are not, relatively speaking. So if China and the U.S. could still cooperate as before, that would actually be the best situation; unfortunately, that's no longer likely. But even if the two sides become completely opposed, China is not entirely without opportunities; the key is to maximize the game it is good at. Many people say China is strong at the application layer—that is, taking an idea and turning it into a commercial application and bringing it to mass adoption; China does this step quite well. I feel this is actually somewhat similar to what is called AI's "brute force produces miracles": algorithms are of course important, but they are only one part; first, China is not bad at computing power, and second, the data fed in is abundant enough. China's experience in applications is indeed rich, especially in the mobile internet era—the population base is large enough, and traditional business sectors are relatively weak, so they are easily disrupted by the internet. Americans value making the product itself more, believing that if you make a good product, people will naturally use it; China values operations more, relying on promotion, marketing, and even the kind of offline ground promotion from back in the day to get things done—Americans can't learn this approach. In the AI field I haven't yet seen particularly good applications appear, but once they do, I think China's opportunities are great. Finally, let's talk about AI ethics. In the U.S., academics are very worried about AI's ethical safety and social impact, and voices on this are loud. So-called accelerationism is essentially about liberating the means of production, liberating AI, algorithms, and computing power, and what it serves is technology, not people. China indeed does not have as many considerations in this regard as the U.S. The reason is probably that AI in China is more about solving practical problems, driven by capital and involving big companies, while the involvement of academics and universities is not as deep as in the U.S., and the degree of interdisciplinarity is not as high; plus our education is inherently less free than America's and more subordinate to the overall educational values, so there is less discussion at the ethical level. But what exactly is the relationship between this kind of ethical discussion and development? I don't think it is necessarily a promoting relationship. When it comes to AI safety, in China the government may need to take the lead, and I do see some academic moves. As for the public, what everyone pays more attention to is whether AI will replace their jobs, rather than discussing it from an ethical perspective—but replacing livelihoods is itself a very important social ethic. Look at the news about those robotaxis in Wuhan; the comments were full of "What are we going to do?" Yet in the eyes of the tech big shots, what a wonderful thing this is—so efficient; capitalists of course love it.