China leads the US in one key AI metric: talent
When it comes to the artificial intelligence that powers chatbots like ChatGPT, China lags behind the United States. But when it comes to producing the scientists behind a new generation of humanoid technologies, China is leading the way.
New research shows that China has in some ways eclipsed the United States as the largest producer of AI talent, with the country producing nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers. In contrast, about 18 percent come from American undergraduate institutions, according to the studyfrom MacroPolo, a think tank led by the Paulson Institute, which promotes constructive ties between the United States and China.
The findings show a jump for China, which three years earlier produced about a third of the world’s top talent. The United States, on the other hand, remained largely the same. The research draws on the backgrounds of researchers whose papers were published at the 2022 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. NeurIPS, as it is known, focuses on advances in neural networks, which are driving recent developments in the field of generative AI have anchored
The talent imbalance has been growing for more than a decade. For much of the 2010s, the United States benefited as large numbers of top Chinese executives moved to American universities to pursue doctorates. A majority of them remained in the United States. But the research shows that the trend is also starting to reverse: a growing number of Chinese researchers are staying in China.
What happens in the coming years could be crucial as China and the United States battle for primacy in AI – a technology that can potentially boost productivity, strengthen industries and spur innovation – giving researchers a of the world’s geopolitically important groups. .
Generative AI has taken over the technology industries in Silicon Valley and China, creating a financing and investment frenzy. The boom was led by US tech giants like Google and start-ups like OpenAI. That could attract Chinese researchers, although rising tensions between Beijing and Washington could also deter some, experts say.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
China has nurtured so much AI talent, in part because it has invested heavily in AI education. Since 2018, the country has added more than 2,000 undergraduate AI programs, including more than 300 at the most elite universities, said Damien Ma, MacroPolo’s managing director, although he noted that the programs were not heavily focused on the technology that led to breakthroughs. by chatbots such as ChatGPT.
“A lot of the programs are about AI applications in industry and manufacturing, not so much about the generative AI stuff that is currently coming to dominate the U.S. AI industry,” he said.
While the United States has pioneered AI breakthroughs, most recently with the uncannily human-like capabilities of chatbots, a significant portion of that work has been done by Chinese-trained researchers.
Researchers originally from China now make up 38 percent of the top AI researchers working in the United States, while Americans make up 37 percent, the study shows. Three years earlier, top Chinese talent made up 27 percent of the top talent working in the United States, compared to 31 percent from the United States.
“The data shows how crucial Chinese-born researchers are to the United States in terms of AI competitiveness,” said Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies Chinese AI.
He added that the data appeared to show that the United States is still attractive. “We are the global leader in AI as we continue to attract and retain talent from around the world, but especially from China,” he said.
Pieter Abbeel, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of Covariant, an AI and robotics start-up, said that working with large numbers of Chinese researchers within leading US companies and universities was taken for granted.
“It’s just a natural course of events,” he said.
In the past, U.S. defense officials were not as concerned about flows of AI talent from China, partly because many of the largest AI projects did not deal with classified data and partly because they reasoned that it was better to have the best minds. The fact that so much of the leading research in AI is openly published has also held back concerns.
Despite bans introduced by the Trump administration banning entry into the United States of students from a number of military-linked universities in China and a relative slowdown in the flow of Chinese students entering the country during Covid-19, the study showed large numbers of the most promising AI. spirits continued to come to the United States to study.
But this month, a Chinese national who was an engineer at Google was accused of trying to transfer AI technology — including critical microchip architecture — to a Beijing-based company that secretly paid him, according to a federal indictment.
The significant numbers of Chinese AI researchers working in the United States now pose a conundrum for policymakers who want to counter Chinese espionage without discouraging the continued flow of top Chinese computer engineers to the United States, according to experts focused on American competitiveness.
“Chinese scientists are almost at the forefront of AI,” said Subbarao Kambhampati, professor and researcher of AI at Arizona State University. If policymakers try to bar Chinese nationals from research in the United States, he said, they are “shooting themselves in the foot.”
The track record of US policymakers is mixed. A Trump administration policy aimed at curbing Chinese industrial espionage and intellectual property theft has since been criticized for wrongfully prosecuting a number of professors. Such programs, Chinese immigrants said, have encouraged some to stay in China.
The survey shows that most Chinese who completed their PhDs in the United States will stay in the country for the time being, making the country the global center of the AI world. Still, the U.S. lead is starting to decline, home to about 42 percent of the world’s top talent, down from about 59 percent three years ago, the study found.