NGL the progress of the A.I industry and China's response to it has left me jaded and realize that there's definitely an issue with Chinese innovation. Like China is still behind America in many areas, space, semiconductors, engines etc etc. But that's fine, China is catching up, there's no way such a poor nation could complete with America, it's already been amazing the progress China has made in this mature fields when 30 years ago the country was struggling to feed itself, those are the usual excuses.
But A.I? China was supposed to be neck and neck with America in that area. Even western institutions and mainstream media admits that, china is equal or even surpassing America in A.I. There's so many important A.I research papers with chinese authors, so many money poured into computing/data centers, tech companies and A.I labs. So why is it that every important A.I model released in the last 5 years has been American? Aplhafold, GTP series and it's LLM clones by google/microsoft, video generation models, deepfakes, stable diffusion and other A.I art models etc etc. Sure china catches up within a matter of months, and sometimes releases better versions, but why can't they be first and capture the market? It's not helping their image when they're always on the backfoot, it very much looks like copying. They clearly have the talent, expertise and manpower, LLM were greatly improved with some chinese developed transformer architecture and ChatGTP's development involved some chinese scientists.
Just look at the response to ChatGTP. The entire chinese A.I industry was clearly caught off guard by the success and power of it. Dozens of companies and research labs have announced that they are starting programs to create their own ChatGTP version in the last 5 months. Companies that have already worked on LLMs like Baidu with ERNIE are rushing to improve it and integrate it with their digital ecosystem. But why? LLMs aren't new and GTP-3 was already making big waves back in 2020.
Even an average joe like me could see that GTP-3 was a game-changer that had big potential. You would think that the chinese tech and A.I companies on the forefront of A.I research and development would have seen the potential of GTP-3 and started R&D of similar LLM years ago. But nope, it's clear that most of the companies trying to develop a LLM only just started development only after the success of ChatGTP. The room was already on fire since GTP-3, but they had to wait until they themselves caught fire with ChatGTP and now GTP-4 before running for the fire extinguisher . Even companies that were working LLMs before ChatGTP came out like Baidu admitted that their LLMs are nowhere close to ChatGTP or GTP-4, but even then, why did Baidu not even think of integrating even an average LLM into their digital ecosystem? Why wait until the open AI and microsoft deal to integrate chatGTP into Bing and other microsoft services before Baidu suddenly had the same idea?
It's honestly pathetic to see. What are all those chinese tech companies and A.I labs doing? Were they in some alternate universe when GTP-3 was released back in 2020? Did they not think that GTP-3 wasn't going to be a big deal, or that GTP-4 wasn't going to be a major improvement? Judging by their development speed, it wouldn't take long to catch up, but it's clear that if some aspects of the A.I industry and development were different, China wouldn't have to play catch up at all and would be the ones driving the industry forwards instead of the other way around. It's so frustrating, they clearly have the money, talent, computing power and technical knowledge but something is clearly holding them back. I don't know if it's leadership issues, culture, management issues or censorship.
And like I said, it's not just LLMs. Does China have an answer to AlphaFold? Dalle-2 kickstarted the wave of A.I we're all seeing.
It this always going to be the trend? America releases some brand new novel A.I development, like a self driving A.I that can drive better than any human, or a new A.I architecture that needs a hundred times less data and computing power to train while China always scrambles to play catch up and always be a few months to a year behind?
I hope that the success of ChatGTP and GTP-4 makes the chinese A.I sector take a good hard look at itself and what changes it can make to innovate better. Or actually release their products instead of letting it rot inside of a sever farm.