Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrow. This is The Daily News. President Trump is preparing to make a crucial trip to China this week to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. A key question hanging over that meeting is artificial intelligence and whether the global race in AI may be spinning out of control.
Today, my colleague Vivian Wong explains how China's approaching artificial intelligence differently from the United States and what that means about who's winning the global competition for AI dominance. It's Monday, May 11th. Vivian, we've come to you because you've been reporting on China for six years. Is that right? Yes. Okay. And your beat has essentially been AI of late.
And I think there is one main question that everyone is asking when it comes to the global AI race. And that is, is China beating us?
I think that's a really hard question to answer because China and the United States are actually running very different races with different goals and different metrics of success. And I think China is very confident that along its chosen path, it is doing very well.
Okay. So what is that chosen path? Talk to me about that.
From the beginning, China's strategy when it comes to AI has been putting it in people's hands, putting it in factories, putting it everywhere throughout the economy. It's this focus on real world applications. And that's really different from the way that I think Silicon Valley and a lot of American policymakers talk about AI, which is generally revolving around AGI, right?
This idea that AI is building towards this super powerful, super human intelligence. Right. Whereas China and Chinese policymakers have always kind of talked about AI as this way towards making the economy run better. So if you just walk around on the street in China, you are going to encounter different manifestations of AI everywhere. There are driverless cars in a ton of Chinese cities.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of President Trump's trip to China regarding AI?
Yeah, it really looks like the mask that Bane wears in the Batman movies.
Mommy, hold your neck.
And the way it works is that she would speak into it in Chinese, and then what would come out was a version of her voice but speaking English.
I like you. Mommy, I love you too.
Wow. And so she would just wear it around the house to talk to her kids.
What are you eating? I'm eating pomegranate. Is it tasty? Yes, it's delicious.
You have to really love AI to like put on a Bane mask to talk to your kid. I mean, I just can't totally imagine it, but that's commitment.
Yeah, I think that what's been really striking to me about observing just the way that people in China are talking about and thinking about AI is people are really excited about it. You know, in America, when people talk about AI, there's this whole Doomer conversation. A lot of people are really nervous about it, you know, either taking their job or taking over the entire world.
And that conversation is just a lot quieter in China.
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Chapter 3: How does China’s AI strategy differ from that of the United States?
Okay, so when you say that China feels like it's doing pretty well given the path that it's taken on AI, what you mean by that is making people kind of fall in love a little bit with AI, it sounds like, and also making it so that AI is everywhere.
Yeah, China is really focused on how AI can be useful to them now. And that comes in part because China has a lot of really deep structural issues that without AI, I think they really don't have a way to solve. So for example, the population and the workforce are aging really quickly. And how do you solve that if young people don't want to have children?
Well, maybe using AI to make your factories more efficient. Another problem is huge inequities between access to health care in rural and urban areas. If you don't have enough doctors, how do you solve that? Maybe AI doctors are the answer.
So it sounds like, in a sense, there may be quite a bit riding on AI from the Chinese government's perspective if it's being seen as a potential solution to all these really important problems.
I think so, yeah. The Chinese government historically has always been quite optimistic about technology. I mean, if you look at the past few decades, technology has been a big part of what has powered China's amazing economic rise.
And so I think they see AI as basically the latest iteration of some kind of technology that is going to help them on this global ascent and is going to solve these problems that they have.
Got it. So when does that relationship between the Chinese government and AI actually begin? What's that story?
So the key moment is in 2014.
It was early in Xi Jinping's tenure as leader of China, and he was giving a speech to a gathering of some of China's top engineers and scientists. And he had gotten a bunch of reports from the scientists ahead of time, kind of giving him suggestions on what they thought China's next direction in science should be.
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Chapter 4: What real-world applications of AI are prevalent in China?
And it kind of scares the Chinese government because generative AI is— You know, it's this thing that is looking at all of the information on the Internet. It's coming up with answers that are sort of unpredictable. And the Chinese government becomes really nervous that this is going to be a threat to their information controls, their censorship regime.
You know, they don't want Chinese people plugging questions about politically sensitive events into a chatbot and getting answers that they don't want the people to be getting.
Yeah.
So they're looking at this as a potential threat to their political model.
Exactly. I think that they had been thinking about AI as this really powerful tool for the economy and in some ways to solidify their grip on political control. But here is proof that it also could be a problem. And so you see them react. ChatGPT is banned in China. The Chinese government starts putting out new regulations also on Chinese AI companies that might be working on generative AI.
For example, they quickly roll out a rule that says if any Chinese AI company is building a model that can, quote unquote, mobilize society, it has to first pass a series of checks and clearances with the Chinese government before it can be released to the public. What are those checks and clearances? So basically, you have to do safety testing.
But I think when we think about safety testing in the West, right, it's making sure that the chatbot is not feeding its users answers that might push them to self-harm or, you know, feeding hate speech.
In China, there is that element, but there is also the element of making sure that it doesn't provide answers about politically sensitive questions like the June 4th massacre in Tiananmen Square or about China's top leaders that the government might not want Chinese people asking.
It sounds like there's this tension for the Chinese government between wanting to dominate in AI, which now includes this world of generative AI, but also from an authoritarian perspective, wanting to maintain as much control as they can over information, which is so key to powering these models.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does China face in its AI development?
It was unclear how many Democrats would support such a drastic solution. And passengers and crew from the cruise ship that was hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak were evacuated on Sunday. The ship anchored off the Canary Islands in Spain, where health officials checked the passengers' temperatures and symptoms. The Spanish health minister said everyone on board was asymptomatic.
Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lin and Ricky Nowetzki. It was edited by Lisa Chow and contains music by Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitcherle. See you tomorrow.