On May 22, the fourth BEYOND Expo 2024 opened in Macao. When talking about the gap between China and the United States in the AI industry, several founders of technology companies participating in the opening ceremony said that in the short term, there is indeed a gap between China and the United States in AI, but in the long term, the gap between China and the United States will become smaller and smaller.
Zhang Wen, founder, chairman and CEO of Biren Technology, participated in the round table of the opening ceremony.
Zhang Wen, founder, chairman and CEO of Biren Technology, said that eight of the world's top ten semiconductor companies are Chinese CEOs. The flow of talent will eventually gradually reduce the gap between China and the United States, "although it is difficult in the short term". China's advantage lies in its vertical applications, including open source models. In the long run, the gap in AI levels between China and the United States will become smaller and smaller, because with the intensification of competition between China and the United States, it will spur advanced enterprises in the domestic industry to continue to enhance their innovation capabilities.
However, Zhang Wen also said that the input and output of AI industry is relatively low at present. He said, for example, from the perspective of global investment, the global chip investment in 2023 will be about 50 billion dollars, but the actual output will be about 3 billion dollars. "I believe AI will have a great impact on society in the next five to ten years, but compared with the impact of mobile Internet on society in the past 30 years, AI can have limited impact in the short term," Zhang said.
The current development of AI technology has also spawned a new generation of entrepreneurial wave.
Zhang Wen believes that this wave of AI entrepreneurship shows that technology has become less and less dependent on people, and the future will show the form of human-computer symbiosis. As a serial entrepreneur, Zhang Wen believes that the first thing to avoid when starting a business in the AI field is to start a business with a general open source model. "When a new generation of technology, such as GPT-5, is released, many enterprises may be cleared of the technology and industry advantages they had worked hard to polish in the platform scenario." Zhang Wen reminded entrepreneurs to keep up with the pace of technological development. In his view, China does not have its own general base model, which will lead to a very difficult battle between China and the United States in the general AI.
Xu Bing, co-founder of Shangtang Technology, said that there is a gap of more than 10 times between the computing power of China and the United States, but this gap can be bridged. On the one hand, the rapid development of domestic chips is the reason, and on the other hand, the computing power is a commodity with a strong investment attribute. As long as you are willing to invest funds, the gap between China and the United States has a chance to narrow.
In addition, Xu Bing said that from the perspective of data, China has a huge advantage in the AI industry. China has rich data reserves and can use large model technology to carve data more precisely, which will be more accurate than the United States. Recently, the level of China's large-scale models has gradually approached ChatGPT-4 from the original unreachable, and even some models have reached or exceeded the level of GPT-4 in the public evaluation. Xu Bing said that this achievement is largely due to China's unremitting efforts in data. "With the support of more computing power, we have the opportunity to catch up with and surpass GPT-5 and GPT-6."
Xu Bing also said that at present, the best talents in the AI industry are in the United States, because the United States has the greatest computing power, but if China can fill the gap, talents will also flow to the Asian market. In the long run, there will not be a big gap between China and the United States, and there will be hundreds of billions of enterprises in China.
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