Experts confident nation can close Sino-U.S. AI gap

AI "anxiety" swept across netizens and industries in China last month, when OpenAI, the United States company that developed the artificial intelligence-powered language model ChatGPT, launched Sora — a text-to-video model that allows users to create photorealistic videos based on prompts they've written.

Why weren't groundbreaking technologies such as Sora and ChatGPT created in China? How long will it be before China's equivalent of Sora comes out? Is the AI gap between China and the U.S. widening? These were typical of some of the questions being asked across the nation.

While some people in China are concerned about falling behind the U.S. in frontier AI technologies, leading company executives and experts believe that China's AI large modela type of AI algorithm that uses deep learning and data sets to understand, summarize, generate and predict new content — has developed quicker than expected and has unique advantages over its U.S. counterpart.

They did concede, however, that more joint efforts are needed to develop underlying AI technologies such as GPT-4 as well as computing power to close the gap with the U.S.

"There is no need to be overly anxious about the launch of Sora," said Liu Qingfeng, chairman of Chinese AI company iFlytek Co Ltd. "Sora is just a successful implementation of basic capabilities of GPT-4 in the video sector, in other words, the underlying competitiveness of such tech still lies in GPT-4."

Liu, who is also a deputy to the 14th National People's Congress, the nation's top legislature, said that the main focus of the current AI competition between the U.S. and China is still over the capability of the base of the AI large model. "In terms of such a foundation, Chinese companies have the confidence to develop it quite well. It is impossible for the country to be left with a huge gap to the U.S. in AI development," he said.

Zhou Chengxiong, a researcher from the Institutes of Science and Development of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said while most of the current breakthroughs in AI technology are emerging from U.S. companies, latecomers also have advantages. For instance, they have fewer risks and uncertainties during the progress in development.

"In addition, Chinese companies have developed AI large models and related technologies in a profitable way over the past year and have already accumulated basic infrastructure and technologies needed to develop the equivalent of Sora and ChatGPT," Zhou said.

He added that, "China still has a huge opportunity to be at the forefront of the world in the application of AI technologies in the future."