By Laurie Chen
BEIJING, Jan 10 (Reuters) – China could narrow its technology gap with the United States driven by growing risk-taking and innovation, although a lack of advanced chip-making tools is hampering the sector, the country’s top artificial intelligence researchers said on Saturday.
China’s so-called ‘AI tiger’ startups MiniMax and Zhipu AI had strong debuts on the Hong Kong stock market this week, reflecting growing confidence in the sector as Beijing rushes AI and chip listings to bolster domestic alternatives to advanced US technology.
Yao Shunyu, a former senior researcher at ChatGPT maker OpenAI who was named chief AI scientist of tech giant Tencent in December, said there was a high probability that a Chinese firm would become the world’s leading AI company in the next three to five years but said the lack of advanced chip-making machines was the main enabler.
“Currently, we have a significant advantage in electricity and infrastructure. The main bottlenecks are production capacity, including lithography machines, and the software ecosystem,” Yao said at an AI conference in Beijing.
China has completed a working prototype of an extreme ultraviolet lithography machine potentially capable of producing advanced semiconductor chips to rival those of the West, Reuters reported last month. However, the machine has not yet produced working chips and may not until 2030, people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
IN THEIR MIND THE VALUE OF INVESTMENT
Yao and other Chinese industry leaders at the Beijing conference on Saturday also acknowledged that the United States maintains an advantage in computing power because of its large investments in infrastructure.
“The computer infrastructure of the United States is probably one or two orders of magnitude larger than ours. But I see that whether it is OpenAI or other platforms, they are investing a lot in next-generation research,” said Lin Junyang, technical lead for Alibaba’s Qwen language core model.
“We, on the other hand, are relatively strapped for cash; delivery alone is likely to consume the majority of our computing infrastructure,” Lin said during a panel discussion at the AGI-Next Frontier Summit hosted by the Beijing Key Laboratory of Foundational Models at Tsinghua University.
Lin said China’s limited resources have spurred its researchers to be innovative, particularly through algorithm-hardware co-design, which allows AI firms to run large models on smaller, cheaper hardware.
Tang Jie, founder of Zhipu AI which raised HK$4.35 billion in its IPO, also highlighted the willingness of younger Chinese AI entrepreneurs to embrace high-risk ventures – a trait traditionally associated with Silicon Valley – as a positive development.
“I think if we can improve this environment, we allow more time for these smart, risk-taking individuals to engage in innovative endeavors … this is something that our government and the country can help improve,” Tang said.
(Reporting by Laurie Chen; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)