AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

What does all this have to do with AI? I am confident that AI will soon enter the elite club of universally recognized GPTs, spurring a revolution in economic production and even social organization. The AI revolution will be on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, but probably larger and definitely faster. Consulting firm PwC predicts that AI w

Of course, no one knows the endgame for this global AI chess match. American companies could suddenly boost their localization efforts, leverage their existing products, and end up dominating all countries except China. Or a new generation of tenacious entrepreneurs in the developing world could use Chinese backing to create local empires impenetra

First, I want to examine three of the most popular policy suggestions for adapting to the AI economy, many of them emanating from Silicon Valley. These three are largely “technical fixes,” tweaks to policy and business models that seek to smooth the transition but do not actually shift the culture. After examining the uses and weaknesses of these t

As a venture-capital investor, I see a particularly strong role for a new kind of impact investing. I foresee a venture ecosystem emerging that views the creation of humanistic service-sector jobs as a good in and of itself. It will steer money into human-focused service projects that can scale up and hire large numbers of people: lactation consult

Meituan merged with rival Dianping in late 2015, keeping Wang in charge of the new company. By 2017 the hybrid juggernaut was fielding 20 million different orders a day from a pool of 280 million monthly active users. Most customers had long forgotten that Meituan began as a group-buying site. They knew it for what it had become: a sprawling consum

In the span of less than two years, China’s bike-sharing revolution has reshaped the country’s urban landscape and deeply enriched its data-scape. This shift forms a dramatic visual illustration of what China’s alternate internet universe does best: solving practical problems by blurring the lines between the online and offline worlds. It takes the

But the copycat era taught Chinese technology entrepreneurs more than just dirty tricks and insane schedules. The high financial stakes, propensity for imitation, and market-driven mentality also ended up incubating companies that embodied the “lean startup” methodology.

Overall, Chinese and American companies are on about equal footing in internet AI, with around 50–50 odds of leadership based on current technology. I predict that in five years’ time, Chinese technology companies will have a slight advantage (60–40) when it comes to leading the world…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limi

Taken one step further, deep learning will power self-driving cars by helping them to “see” the world around them—recognize patterns in the camera’s pixels (red octagons), figure out what they correlate to (stop signs), and use that information to make decisions (apply pressure to the brake to slowly stop) that optimize for your desired outcome (de