The question of where the U.S.–China artificial intelligence arms race is heading weighs heavily on the future of both countries, as mastery of AI may determine the world’s economic and military leadership, experts say.
To assess the state of the U.S.–China AI competition, The Epoch Times consulted 10 experts across the defense and cybersecurity sectors. Most agreed that the United States maintains a lead in frontier AI models as well as in the scale of computational power—called “compute”—and the quality of microchips.
China, however, has proven adept at producing AI models that rival top Western competitors at a fraction of the cost and computational load. This efficiency is driven in part by “distillation”—a technique enabling Chinese AI models to mimic the output of American ones. China also holds an advantage in its massive manufacturing capacity, which would allow it to rapidly deploy and iterate AI-powered products….