China is rapidly catching up with the US in AI with the help of open source technologies

In recent weeks, Chinese technology companies have unveiled AI technologies that can compete with American systems, and they are already publicly available to consumers and software developers, The New York Times writes.

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At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai this month, Kuaishou startup founder Qu Dongqi showed off a video generated using Kuaishou’s Kling AI technology, similar to US startup OpenAI’s Sora AI video generator. But unlike Sora, Kling’s technology, announced just over a month ago, is already available to the general public.

Shortly before this, the startup 01.AI released a large language model for creating chatbots, Yi-Large Global SOTA LLM, which scored almost the same as its American counterparts, such as GPT-4o and Llama-3, in general benchmark tests , evaluating the performance of chatbots.

The AI ​​boom began in the United States with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. However, Chinese companies are quickly closing the gap with American companies by using open source AI code, which allows them to jointly develop and improve existing AI technologies. Chinese developers see open-source AI as an opportunity for the country to take a leading position in this market.

While US export restrictions have made it difficult for Chinese companies to gain access to Nvidia’s advanced AI accelerators, they are well on their way to catching up with American competitors in software. A group of US lawmakers has drafted a bill that would provide controls on the export of AI software created in the United States. Others are trying to limit the use of open source technologies, but this could do more harm than good for the United States.

Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, a firm that has made its AI projects open source, said: “Open source AI is the foundation of AI development,” implying that collaboration between researchers and companies in the US has enabled the country to become a world leader in AI, “and it looks like China could do the same.”